UNITED STATES: NASA announced on Monday it has picked a seasoned solar scientist who heads its heliophysics division to become the U.S. space agency’s science chief.
The American space agency confirmed that Nicola Fox, the former mission scientist for the Parker Solar Probe mission that studied the sun, will be named this week as the associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
Fox will be in charge of NASA’s Science Directorate, which manages some of the organization’s most well-known projects, such as robotic searches for extraterrestrial life on Mars and James Webb Space Telescope explorations of far-off galaxies. The Directorate has an annual budget of about $7 billion.
She will also be in charge of a NASA study group established in 2022 to aid the American military in the identification and detection of UFOs, also known as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), which are enigmatic objects that the Pentagon and the White House regard as threats to American airspace.
Fox will overtake, astrophysicist Thomas Zurbuchen, a Swiss-American, who served as director until his retirement in December. The Directorate has been overseen in an acting capacity by Sandra Connelly, who was formerly Zurbuchen’s assistant.
Fox has authored numerous scientific papers and articles throughout her career. She has also given presentations on science all over the world.
In 2021, the American Astronautical Society gave her the Carl Sagan Memorial Award for her outstanding leadership in the field of heliophysics and her many years of the project, program, and supervisory experience. She was also given the Distinguished Leadership Medal by NASA in 2020.
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