Dr. Russell Howard, head of the
Solar Physics
Branch of the Naval Research Laboratory's Space
Science
Division, is the recipient of a Stellar Award from the
Rotary
National Award for Space Achievement (RNASA) Foundation.
Stellar Awards recognize outstanding individuals and teams from
industry and government whose accomplishments hold the greatest
promise for furthering future activities in space. Dr. Howard
was presented the award in early March at a ceremony in Houston,
Texas.
Dr. Howard,
whose principal area
of science is coronal imagery and
solar-terrestrial relations,
was recognized for: contributions to imaging of the solar corona and demonstrating
the relationship of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) to geomagnetic
storms. Dr. Howard has spent more than three decades in this
discipline and has contributed to almost every significant advance
in both hardware and observations.His leadership of the LASCO
program has led directly to the current capability for predicting
geomagnetic storms with 2-3 days warning.
Dr. Herbert Gursky, head of NRL's
Space Science Division, notes that since the 1930s, when instruments
were developed for artificially creating solar eclipses,
ground-based
observations of the corona have become a standard
tool of the
solar physics community. Imagery of the solar
corona was one
of the early objectives of space researchers
since the darkness
of the space sky affords a far better view
of the corona. Dr.
Howard, says Gursky, has been one of the
leaders in achieving
that promise, having been involved with
every NRL space coronagraph,
except for those flown on early
sounding rockets.
After joining NRL in 1969 as
an NRC post-doctoral
fellow, Dr. Howard first worked on the OSO-7
coronagraphs
developed by Richard Tousey, then on the SOLWIND
coronagraphs
for the P78-1 mission flown by DoD. As part of his
work on the
SOLWIND coronagraphs, Dr. Howard, for the first time,
described
the characteristics of earthward directed CMEs and
their
subsequent geomagnetic activity. He demonstrated that the
emergence of CMEs at the sun could be used as a predictor of
geomagnetic activity. Dr. Howard and his colleagues accumulated
and published a massive database of CMEs that has been the principal
source of information about them until the emergence of NRL's
Large Area Solar Coronagraph (LASCO) data.
Dr. Howard started on LASCO as
the
project scientist and since 1998 has been the principal investigator
for the program. LASCO, flown as part of the billion dollar NASA/ESA
Solar and Heliographic Observatory (SOHO), is a $75M instrument
that involved the design, construction and integration of three
separate coronagraphs developed by NRL and its European partners.
In spite of its sophistication and complexity, and the need to
integrate the work of five different institutions, the instrument
was delivered on time and within cost. It has operated flawlessly
since its launch in 1995.
Aside from his work as the project
scientist, Dr.
Howard was responsible for the development of
the
charged-coupled-device (CCD) cameras used in each of the
coronagraph focal planes. The data from LASCO have had an enormous
impact on solar physics. The spectacular images are made possible
by the quality of the CCD cameras and the wide field of view
of
the instrument (30 times the radius of the sun). The images
routinely make the national news and have been the subject of
an IMAX production (SolarMax). Geomagnetic storms directed at
the Earth are now being routinely predicted with 2-3 days advance
warning by NOAA's Solar Environmental Laboratory in Boulder based
on the use of LASCO imagery. Real-time images of the solar corona
as seen be LASCO are available on the web at
http://lasco-www.nrl.navy.mil.
Dr. Howard is currently the principal
investigator
for the Sun Earth Connection Coronal and Heliospheric
Investigation (SECCHI) program that is part of NASA's STEREO
mission. SECCHI is multi-national effort to provide images of
the solar environment from the surface of the Sun all the way
to Earth. Two spacecraft with identical instrumentation will
gradually drift away from Earth, one ahead and the other behind,
in orbits about the Sun. Stereoscopic images of coronal mass
ejections will be obtained from these two positions, greatly
improving the ability to predict geomagnetic storms and yielding
better scientific information regarding these and other coronal
structures. SECCHI is enormously challenging, building on the
success of LASCO, combining both instrumentation and modeling
efforts to provide a much better understanding of the relationship
between solar activity and the subsequent terrestrial
response.
Dr.
Howard graduated from the
University of Maryland, receiving his
PhD in chemical physics
in 1969. Dr. Howard has published more
than 100 papers in the
area of solar physics.
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