{"id":104541,"date":"2019-11-15T06:25:46","date_gmt":"2019-11-15T11:25:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/?p=104541"},"modified":"2020-02-12T11:11:08","modified_gmt":"2020-02-12T16:11:08","slug":"ucf-professor-part-of-team-awarded-the-sir-arthur-clarke-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/ucf-professor-part-of-team-awarded-the-sir-arthur-clarke-award\/","title":{"rendered":"UCF Professor Part of Team Awarded the Sir Arthur Clarke Award"},"content":{"rendered":"
NASA\u2019s New Horizons Mission Team, which includes UCF physics Professor Dan Britt, Thursday was awarded the 2019 Sir Arthur Clarke Award, one of the most prestigious space-exploration awards in the world. The award recognizes teams and individuals that have made notable or outstanding achievements in space activities in the past year.<\/p>\n
New Horizons was selected for producing never-before-seen images of some of the most distant solar system objects including the spectacular images from the flyby of the Kuiper Belt asteroid 486958 Arrokoth (2014 MU69) that occurred in January. The 20-year-old mission also provided the first stunning images of Pluto and now the mission continues exploring the Kuiper Belt.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is quite an honor to be part of the New Horizons team,\u201d says Britt, who joined the team in 2018. \u201cThese are some of the best people in planetary science, a combination of legendary veterans and rising stars, so I feel honored to be counted among them.\u201d<\/p>\n
New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern — a former director of UCF\u2019s Florida Space Institute and former associate administrator of NASA<\/a>‘s Science Mission Directorate<\/a> \u2013 accepted the award via satellite on behalf of the team Thursday night during the award ceremony at the British Interplanetary Society\u2019s Reinventing Space Conference gala dinner i<\/strong>n Belfast, Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n During his remarks, he shared how much Clarke\u2019s work and writing deeply affected and motivated him as a child. The award was named after the British science fiction writer and futurist.<\/p>\n