Caltech Physics Professors Earn NASA Medals

James J. (Jamie) Bock, professor of physics at Caltech and a senior research scientist at JPL, and Caltech Professor of Physics Christopher Martin were among those receiving NASA Honor Awards from JPL director Charles Elachi (MS '69, PhD '71) and John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, in a ceremony on Tuesday, September 16.

Bock was awarded NASA's Distinguished Service Medal for "accomplishments in cosmology including development and application of new detector technology leading to advances in our knowledge of the Universe."

Martin, the principal investigator for the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, an Earth-orbiting space telescope that studies the universe in ultraviolet light, was given the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, awarded for efforts resulting in key scientific discoveries or contributions of fundamental importance to the field in question, including, according to the award citation, "the new understanding of galaxy evolution, the identification of new environments for star formation, and an invaluable data archive of UV images of most of the sky."