Some of NASA’s brightest aeronautical innovators and planetary explorers were honored on March 3 in Washington. D.C. for their trailblazing work by editors of the industry trade magazine Aviation Week.
During the organization’s 59th Annual Laureate Awards held at the National Building Museum, honors were presented to NASA’s Environmentally Responsible Aviation (ERA) project team and the New Horizons mission team.
In the “Technology” category, Aviation Week cited the ERA project “for developing and demonstrating performance-improving technologies that could be used to make the next generation of civil aircraft more efficient, economical and environmentally friendly.”
In the “Space” category, Aviation Week praised the New Horizons team for its exploration of Pluto “revealing a spectacular, bizarre world of water-ice mountains floating in a sea of frozen nitrogen.”
“In honoring our aeronautical researchers and our planetary scientists, Aviation Week’s editors certainly got the story right and we thank them,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “Recognition of these remarkable teams is well deserved.”
From wings with energy efficient advanced shapes to a new process for manufacturing large sections of lightweight composite materials, the ERA project completed eight major integrated technology demonstrations during its six-year mission that ended in 2015.
Together the ERA technologies could cut airline fuel use in half, nitrogen oxide emissions by 75 percent and noise to nearly one-eighth of today’s levels. Computer models show that if adopted by industry, they could realize $255 billion in operational savings between 2025 and 2050.
ERA project results also helped lay the foundation for a proposed 10-year research program announced in February that includes the New Aviation Horizons initiative, an ambitious plan by NASA to design, build and fly several flight demonstration vehicles, or “X-planes.”
ERA was part of NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate. Project research was conducted at the agency’s four aeronautical field centers in California, Ohio and Virginia.
In July 2015, after a three-billion-mile, nine-and-a-half-year voyage, the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft completed its flyby of Pluto and began a year-long “data dump” of images and sensor measurements.
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
New Horizons principal investigator is Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute; SwRI leads the mission, science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
Aviation Week also honored Jet Propulsion Laboratory director Charles Elachi with a Lifetime Achievement Award “for guiding an amazing period of solar system exploration by robotic spacecraft and generating public enthusiasm for space science during his 45-year career.”