By Matthew Stangl, Langley Aerospace Research Summer Scholars (LARSS) Intern

As one of the leading climate scientists working at NASA Langley, Bruce Wielicki has been in charge of many significant projects. He considers leading other scientists in these projects to be his greatest accomplishment, while he has been working at NASA. By “being able to herd those scientific cats,” Bruce allowed his projects to prosper under his guidance.

Bruce began his academic career with oceanography at Scripps Institute of Oceanography (SIO). While working in graduate school, Bruce was fortunate to work with one of the earliest climate models. Whenever cloud feedback was added to the model, the model changed drastically. After this incident, Bruce realized that he couldn’t study oceanography any longer. This led to Bruce changing his graduate focus to climate research and transferring to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). He has been “chasing the holy grail of cloud feedback” ever since that moment. Bruce started working at NASA in 1981 for post-doctorate work. He did not originally plan to work at NASA past completion of his post-doctorate.. However, 30 years later he is still working at NASA.

Bruce has spent a large portion of his career, starting in 1988, working on the CERES (Clouds and Earth's Radiant Energy System) mission. He has recently switched his focus to developing a new set of climate instruments called CLARREO (Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory). CLARREO is “about taking the next big step in accuracy of climate data” and will allow for an even better analysis of climate change including cloud feedback. Among all of the projects that Bruce led over his many years at NASA, he considers CERES to be his favorite. Bruce spent the majority of his career working toward the holy grail of climate feedback. Since “Cloud feedback itself is sort of the holy grail for climate sensitivity” this has led to many developments on cloud studies of our climate system.

Using climate information going back hundreds of years, climatologists similar to Bruce are able to analyze and predict past and future climates. Compilation of satellite data started during the 1970s. Prior to that time frame there was data from weather balloons and other methods dating back hundreds of years. Information on climate can even be found farther in the past by “taking deep cores from Antarctica and Greenland” and examining them. This information allows for climate scientists to evaluate better the current climate. But the new satellite data provide the most complete picture of climate ever assembled.

One element that frustrates Bruce is the media’s inability to accurately report on scientific matters. For example, the media produced controversial articles on "climategate" condemning global warming as a scientific conspiracy. “Ninety five percent of climate scientists knew as soon as they read that article that it was inaccurate, but there was no way for us to get that information to the public easily.” He suggests that in order to determine whether scientific climate change data is accurate to rely on, data must be approved by a wide range of climate scientists, never just one or even a few.

You can clearly tell, from talking to Bruce, that he enjoys what he does at NASA. This has allowed him to accomplish some extraordinary projects, while at NASA. His work in leading the CERES project from the ground up has, and will continue to provide important information about the climate. We know his future projects will be successful as well.

See some of Bruce Wielicki's publications on the NTRS: http://go.usa.gov/IlE.

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By Austin Irish, Langley Aerospace Research Summer Scholars (LARSS) Intern

What could a NASA Invention of the Year recipient (and runner up twice), who has 3 R&D (Research and Development) 100’s, 17 commercial licenses, over 30 patents and more than 75 technical publications, consider his biggest achievement? He considers being able to lead and gain the respect of “some very intelligent people” as his biggest accomplishment.  That is what Dr. Robert Bryant, Head of the Advanced Materials and Processing Branch, says, and this speaks not only of his humility, but also of the incredible environment at NASA’s Langley Research Center (LaRC).

Bryant got his start at NASA LaRC (as many do) through participation in the Graduate Students Research Program (GSRP) while attending the University of Akron. His research was closely related to NASA's High-Speed Research (HSR) program, and following the completion of his PhD, he was offered a job at NASA LaRC. This was only the beginning of Bryant’s incredible career. Two of Bryant’s favorite inventions (both R&D 100’s) are the THUNDER (THin Layer UNimorph Ferroelectric DrivER) actuator, a thin piezoelectric ceramic, and the LaRC-SI, a polymer-based resin used for pacemakers. Having been a guest speaker at both the Technion in Israel and Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, Bryant is known around the world for his incredible work. Almost as impressive is his ability to find the time to work with over 30 students, thus providing guidance and inspiration to young scientists and engineers.

According to Bryant, people are his favorite part about working for NASA. “The people are fantastic… It’s a very dynamic environment. The majority of people here love coming to work and they are not afraid to tell you about how much they enjoy the work they are doing. I really think that’s why they are very good at what they do, because they enjoy their work so much.”

Bryant has a passion for what he does and who he does it with, which is why he is such an inspiration. Providing advice to young inventors, Bryant stated, “the ability to avoid negative criticism” is imperative for success. Having a large-enough ego to “withstand criticisms whether they are right or wrong and continue to work, without getting bogged down and without giving up” is the key to successful inventing. However, his counsel wasn’t limited to this. At the end of our recent interview, Bryant left us all with a prediction and a piece of advice. The future of materials rests in multifunctionality. “Materials will have to perform multiple functions… for example, they will not only be structural, but also thermally and electrically conductive.” His advice is“…if you want something, go for it. It’s not going to be easy, but if you keep plugging away you will beat all the others.”

Find Robert Bryant’s publications as well as his NASA colleagues at http://go.usa.gov/0rk.

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In January, Lynn Heimerl blogged about the unsung work of NASA’s Joel Levine. This month, we sing up the praises of another NASA career, that of Neil Gehrels.

Gehrels started at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) right out of graduate school in 1981 and has stayed on ever since. “I was hooked right away by all the opportunities here,” says Gehrels. “The early work [I did] was on detector development and studies of supernovae, which are exploding stars.” This work led to mission development and studies of gamma-ray bursts. These are even larger cosmic explosions. “I've always been fascinated with things that go bang!”

The NASA STI Program recently produced a poster highlighting Gehrels work the Swift Explorer mission (right). The mission was proposed in 1998 and was subsequently one of two selected from a field of forty. “Building the satellite was a huge challenge,” says Gehrels, “but it was a wonderful time bringing all the pieces together and then launching the mission.” Gehrels led the team that developed the mission and now oversees the operations and science team. Although, his hands are full right now with the science endeavor of Swift, Gehrels continues to pursue developing instrumentation to observe the most distant objects in the universe.

Gehrels points to two special papers among the hundreds of publications carrying his name The first is "Temperatures of Enhanced Stability in Hot Thin Plasmas" published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. “I wrote a paper with my wife, who is a physicist at University of Maryland. It is not highly referenced, but has some nice, elegant results,” says Gehrels.

The most recognized paper, "A short γ-ray burst apparently associated with an elliptical galaxy at redshift z = 0.225" published in Nature, is one in which Gehrels’ team used Swift data to figure out that short-duration gamma-ray bursts are caused by mergers of binary neutron stars. “That was an exciting discovery,” he says.

Communicating science results for Gehrels does not stop with publishing. “Public presentations are the ultimate thrill,” says Gehrels. “People are really interested in NASA and space astronomy. Sometimes the questions that come up at a public talk or school open up a new way of looking at a problem.”

Find more of Neil Gehrels’ publications as well as his NASA colleagues at http://ntrs.nasa.gov/.

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By Calvin Mackey, STI Computer Engineer

On March 1, 2011, the STI Program Office rolled out an upgraded public interface to its database, the NASA Technical Report Server (http://ntrs.nasa.gov), which is powered by the Endeca Guided Navigation search engine. Menus are automatically driven from the existing metadata without the use of additional taxonomies. A taxonomy is a type of classification system to help aid search. Currently, most search engines rely heavily on taxonomy usage. Users are regularly familiar with requested database content.  Instead of utilizing an empty search box, which offers very little assistance to the user regarding requested database content, NTRS calculates a set of menus from the metadata, integrated with a full-featured search engine. A quick glance at the specified navigation menus enables the user to ask specific questions, thereby narrowing the search.

Users can search within a browse or browse within a search. Its search engine provides automatic, algorithmic spelling corrections and/or suggestions. The NTRS database includes a myriad of technical terms that can easily be misspelled. When the user misspells a word within a search, NTRS searches for words that are similar, versus utilizing the “Did you mean?” message. This upgrade includes full-text search, simple and advanced search screens, citation downloading, and citation sharing via social networking tools. It also includes a Concept Cloud as a visualization and search-refinement feature. 

All NTRS driven navigation and search options are captured in the browser URL. This design enables users to save and share any view of the data by book marking the link or cutting and pasting it into an e-mail message. This particular function is extremely beneficial to professional and lay users alike. Due to the fact that search results are often utilized by teams and organizations, the dissemination of such results decreases search time exponentially and users are able to work smarter.

The NTRS system enables knowledge discovery. Other data sources, for example NIX (http://nix.nasa.gov/) are integrated into this collection. All search results are relevance-ranked based on the field of search term (matches found in titles are ranked above matches found in the description) and frequency of search term occurrence. Results are not simply sorted by date.

In summary, using this application will add new features and give our users a richer search experience. For further details, please contact the NASA Center for AeroSpace Information (CASI) at help@sti.nasa.gov.

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