Douglas Adams 

Douglas Adams (BSAAE ’94, MSAAE ’96, PhDAAE ‘01) has been selected as the Neil Armstrong Award of Excellence winner by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation.

Adams currently serves as the lead Spacecraft Systems Engineer for the proposed Dragonfly mission in the System Engineering Group at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. The Dragonfly proposal is a nuclear-powered octocopter designed to explore the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

Adams will receive the award at the Innovators Gala on Aug. 24 at the Marriott Marquis in Washington, D.C.

The Neil Armstrong Award of Excellence was established in 2016 through a partnership with the Purdue Research Foundation, the Armstrong Family and Jim Hays, a friend of Armstrong’s. It is awarded annually to an Astronaut Scholar alumni — Adams was selected as an Astronaut Scholar in 1993.

Prior to joining APL, Adams worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 12 years, working in the disciplines of structural dynamics, mechanics of materials, fracture mechanics, composite materials, spacecraft attitude dynamics and controls, and systems engineering. He was the lead to the dynamics modeling effort for the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) rotating radar platform mission and was the Ballute Cognizant Engineer for the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator program.

Source: Astronaut Scholarship Foundation