By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -NASA has picked a longtime solar scientist who heads its heliophysics division to become the U.S. space agency’s science chief.
Nicola Fox, former top scientist on the Parker Solar Probe mission studying the sun, was named as NASA’s associate administrator for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, making the announcement in an email to agency employees on Monday, lauded Fox’s past work on missions to better understand the sun and how solar wind affects satellites and planets.
“She has been instrumental in making this complex area accessible to the public,” Nelson said. “Her work already spans so many areas of importance to the agency.”
Fox will lead NASA’s science directorate, a unit with an annual budget of roughly $7 billion that oversees some of the agency’s best-known programs from the robotic hunts for past life on Mars to exploring distant galaxies with the James Webb Space Telescope.
She will also oversee a NASA study group formed in 2022 to help the U.S. military detect and characterize UFOs, or so-called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena – mysterious objects that the White House and Pentagon officials see as threats to U.S. airspace.
Fox will succeed Thomas Zurbuchen, a Swiss-American astrophysicist who had led the directorate since 2016 before his retirement in December. Sandra Connelly, formerly Zurbuchen’s deputy, has been leading the directorate in an acting capacity.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Will Dunham)
