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Marshall Space Flight Center Scientist Awarded American Astronomical Society Prize for Solar Studies

Dr. Jonathan Cirtain, of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, has been awarded the 2015 Karen Harvey Prize by the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society.

Jonathan Cirtain
Jonathan Cirtain

He was honored for his major contributions to the development of the next generation of solar instrumentation and his studies of the role of magnetic reconnection in the heating of the solar corona. Cirtain will accept the award and present a lecture on his work at the Triennial Earth-Sun Summit in Indianapolis, Indiana, in April.

“Receiving the Karen Harvey Prize is especially gratifying because it is awarded to you by your peers,” Cirtain said. “This is the result of the efforts of a lot of people I’ve worked and partnered with to develop and build instruments to study the sun. I think of this as an award for a group of people that I am honored to represent.”

Cirtain is supervisor of the Marshall Center’s Heliophysics and Planetary Science Office in the Science and Technology Office. He was principal investigator for the High Resolution Coronal Imager, or Hi-C, and the Solar Ultraviolet Magnetograph Investigation, both of which were launched aboard sounding rockets in 2012. The Hi-C suite of instruments captured the first images of solar braiding, advancing understanding of how the sun continuously generates the vast amount of energy needed to heat its atmosphere.

In 2010, he was among four NASA researchers President Barack Obama named as recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Cirtain was recognized for his outstanding research on basic physical processes observed in solar and space plasmas through innovative engineering and instrument designs. In 2011, he received the NASA Medal for Exceptional Achievement for his work developing solar physics instrumentation.

Cirtain, 41, is a native of Memphis, Tennessee. He earned bachelor’s degrees in physics and in mathematics at the University of Memphis in 2001, and received his doctorate in physics from Montana State University in Bozeman in 2005. He began his NASA career in 2007.

The Karen Harvey Prize is awarded in recognition for a significant contribution to the study of the sun early in a scientist’s professional career. Cirtain is the first NASA civil servant to receive the prize since the American Astronomical Society’s Solar Physics Division began presenting it in 2003. Harvey was a solar physicist known, among other things, for her research into solar magnetic fields and for her service to the professional solar physics community. She died in 2002.