The Joseph Weber Award for 2009 was conferred on Dr. Peter Serlemitsos in late January in recognition of his innovative contributions to X-ray detector and telescope designs that have enabled decades of scientific advances in high energy astrophysics.

The full citation for the Joseph Weber Award gives details of two landmark inventions by Serlemitsos, in detector design and thin-film X-ray optics and mentions many space missions that his advances have benefited.

"The award was given to me for my contributions to two technologies, both relating to the development of instruments for observations in the field of X-ray Astronomy," Serlemitsos said. "My involvement in these spanned almost my entire career (over 45 years) at Goddard."

The Joseph Weber Award for Astronomical Instrumentation is awarded by the American Astronomical Society to an individual for the design, invention or significant improvement of instrumentation leading to advances in astronomy. It is named after physicist Joseph Weber. The awards tend to be for a career of instrument development rather than a single specific device. The award originated in 2002, and Serlemitsos is its eighth recipient.

Serlemitsos said, "I feel very happy and honored to receive this award. The opportunity that NASA presented to me in 1962 when I joined Goddard was immense." He began his career at Goddard while still in graduate school and almost at the same time as the emergence of the new discipline.

After graduating from the University of Maryland in 1966, Serlemitsos has worked as an astrophysicist at the X-ray Astrophysics Laboratory at NASA Goddard, joining Elihu Boldt, the founder of the group.

Peter spent most of his active career in X-ray astrophysics with emphasis in the development of space-borne instrumentation. He has pioneered two types of instruments which have since been used extensively in the field: the large area multi-wire gas proportional counter and lightweight conical foil X-ray mirrors.

In 1966, Serlemitsos began working on improving the first observational tool: the gas proportional counter. There were several balloon and rocket flights with improved detectors based on innovations that he introduced.

An instrument aboard NASA's OSO-8 (Orbiting Solar Observatory) used 3 such detectors to conduct pioneering X-ray spectroscopy during its 3 year (1975-1978) lifetime. The next utilization of these detectors was in NASA's HEAO-1, whose primary aim was the cosmic X-ray background. The RXTE mission also used the largest and most sensitive such counters to study a variety of sources, both galactic and extragalactic.

The second tool that Serlemitsos worked on was an extremely lightweight X-ray mirror for medium resolution imaging and broad band spectroscopy. He began work on that in the late 1970s. Those mirrors were important because they could be used by relatively small satellites with limited budgets and other resources.

The first use in space of these mirrors was onboard the U.S. Space Shuttle Columbia which flew NASA's mission Astro-1 in 1990, with two telescopes, one of which was the Broad Band X-ray Telescope (BBXRT) which contained two of our mirrors.

In 1993, NASA and Japan teamed in a space borne collaborative instrument, ASCA (Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics) used four mirrors. "It is safe to say that an ASCA type mission could not have been done without them," Serlemitsos said.

Suzaku, a second U.S.-Japan collaborative instrument that uses them, is currently in operation orbiting Earth. In NASA's recent competition for small explorers (SMEX), his group was again successful in winning a Mission of Opportunity (MOO), which again involves Japan and is slated to conduct extraordinarily sensitive X-ray spectroscopy of cosmic sources. Its launch is slated for 2013.

His scientific interests include Fe K lines in the spectra of clusters of galaxies, spectra of Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) and the search with ASCA for hard, AGN-like nuclear sources in nearby spiral galaxies. Serlemitsos resides in Bethesda, Md. And originally hails from Greece.

National Academy of Sciences Honors NASA's Neil Gehrels for Science Contributions
Astrophysicist Dr. Neil Gehrels of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., has been awarded the Henry Draper Medal by the National Academy of Sciences, Washington.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) will honor 18 individuals in 2009 with awards recognizing extraordinary scientific achievements in the areas of biology, chemistry, geology, astronomy, social sciences, psychology, and application of science for the public good.

One of those recipients is NASA Goddard's Neil Gehrels who is the recipient of the Henry Draper Medal. Gehrels, chief of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory at the NASA Goddard, is being honored for his pioneering contributions to gamma ray astronomy.

His leadership of the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and the Swift Mission has led to new insights into the extreme physics of active galactic nuclei and gamma ray bursts. The Henry Draper Medal and a prize of $15,000 are awarded for an original investigation in astronomical physics.

"I am thrilled to receive the Draper award. It is a great recognition for the wonderful science from Swift, Fermi and CGRO and the years of hard work from the teams that built these satellites," Gehrels said.

Gehrels serves as principal investigator of NASA's Swift mission, and deputy project scientist of NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope satellite. Since its launch on November 20, 2004, Swift has greatly advanced astronomers' understanding of stupendously powerful stellar explosions known as gamma-ray bursts.

Fermi launched in June 2008, and has already discovered a dozen new pulsars. During the 1990's, Gehrels served as the Project Scientist for the Compton Observatory which was the second of NASA's four Great Observatories and pioneered observations of the gamma-ray sky.

Gehrels earned his Ph.D. in physics from Caltech in 1981, and came to Goddard as a postdoctoral researcher in the same year. Among his many other honors, Gehrels and his Swift Science Team won the 2007 Rossi Prize from the American Astronomical Society's High-Energy Astrophysics Division.

He is also the 2005 recipient of Goddard's John C. Lindsay Memorial Award for Space Science. Gehrels was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and an Adjunct Professor of Astronomy at the University of Maryland and of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State University.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit honorific society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and engineering research, dedicated to the furtherance of science and technology and to their use for the general welfare.

Since 1863, the National Academy of Sciences has served to "investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art" whenever called upon to do so by any department of the government.

The award will be presented at the April 26 awards ceremony, which will take place during the Academy's 146th annual meeting at the academy in Washington. Gehrels resides in Berwyn Heights, Md.

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