NASA scientist wins top honor NASA scientist wins top honor (July 30, 2004)

Morrison lectures on the planetary sciences

By Julie O'Shea

David Morrison, NASA Ames' very own "asteroid hunter" and a renowned author and scholar on planetary exploration, has been awarded the 2004 Carl Sagan Medal -- one of the science world's most prestigious honors.

The medal is awarded to researchers who display outstanding performance in communicating planetary science to the public. The Division for Planetary Science, the world's largest organization of planetary scientists, will present Morrison with the medal during its annual conference this November in Louisville, Ky.

"I was delighted," Morrison said during a phone interview just days after returning from a 10-day visit to Iceland last week.

Not only is the award a high honor, but Morrison, a 64-year-old senior scientist for the NASA Astrobiology Institute, was Sagan's doctoral student during his years at Harvard University and explained how the leading space scientist and popular author left an indelible mark on his career path.

"A lot of kids want to be astronauts growing up," Morrison said, pointing out that he had turned his dream of studying the cosmos into a reality. Starting off as a science professor at the University of Hawaii, Morrison took a job with NASA in 1988 and has been there ever since.

For two decades, Morrison -- an expert on the sun's orbiters, who was also an investigator for numerous space missions, including Voyager and Galileo -- compiled a widely used series of educational slide-and-information sets, featuring the best planetary images available.

"He is an esteemed scientist," said Bruce Runnegar, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at Ames. "He has an (excellent) way of communicating science to the public. He has a great humanity."

Morrison has given hundreds of lectures and been a noted guest on numerous radio and television shows where he has explained the complexities of planetary science in layman's terms. Additionally, he wrote "The Planetary System" and other books about Voyager's flyby of Jupiter and Saturn and created the impact hazard Web site impact.arc.nasa.gov.

E-mail Julie O'Shea at joshea@mv-voice.com

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