Alfred McEwen, professor of planetary geology at the UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL), has been awarded NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Medal, the highest honor NASA awards to anyone who was not a Government employee when the service was performed.

McEwen accepted the award on June 30 during a ceremony held at the NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

As the principal investigator of the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) McEwen oversees the most ambitious undertaking ever launched to image another planet. HiRISE has yielded stunning photographs in unprecedented detail that have dramatically changed our view of the Red Planet.

Under McEwen’s leadership, the HiRISE mission team has gone out of their way to serve not only the science community but also the general public by making an effort to release the data as quickly as possible after they become available and making them accessible via user-friendly tools. Nicknamed “the people’s camera”, HiRISE has been aimed at imaging targets on Mars chosen by members of the public through a program called HiWish which started last year.

“This award really recognizes the whole HiRISE team,” McEwen said. “It’s a joint effort involving hundreds of people, including those who developed the instrument, especially at Ball Aerospace, to the experts at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who have run the mission, to the people at Lockheed Martin where the spacecraft was built. And then there are those here at the UA of course, who run the camera and collect the scientific data, interpret them and make them available to the scientific community as well as the public.”

According to NASA, the Distinguished Public Service Medal is granted only to individuals whose distinguished accomplishments contributed substantially to the NASA mission. The contribution must be so extraordinary that other forms of recognition would be inadequate.

Read the full UANews release.