The GRACE Operations Team was presented with the 2018 Outstanding Achievement Award at The 15th International Conference on Space Operations, which was held in Marseille, France.
Our own Himanshu Save and Ab Davis were two of the ten team members recognized by name, with the other eight being located at the German Space Operations Center (GSOC), NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), and Airbus.
Dr. Save was instrumental in maintaining the integrity of the science data from GRACE, particularly in the most difficult last 18 months of its life. He also recently led the design, processing, and delivery of the Release-06 Earth gravity models from GRACE. Dr. Save is now the Science Operations Manager for the GRACE Follow-On mission.
Dr. Davis, as then a JPL employee, was one of a small group of us that brought the mission together in the pre-proposal days, and was then the Project Manager for GRACE until the Operations phase. Since that time, he has been an employee at CSR, where he continued to participate in the operations until end of mission life.
The award was accepted by Sebastian Löw of GSOC on behalf of the team. The award cites GRACE as “…one of the most successful missions ever…”. The 4100 (and counting) refereed journal articles from GRACE data are believed to be among the highest number for any NASA Earth Science mission; and CSR Earth gravity models are easily the most widely used among these studies.
For more information, see: http://www.spaceops2018.org/index.php?langue=en&onglet=55&acces=&idUser=&emailUser=