Prestigious Collier Trophy Awarded to Team that Touched the Sun, Including BWXT’s Justin Kasper

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory announced today that an innovative team of engineers and scientists from NASA, and more than 40 other partner organizations that created the revolutionary Parker Solar Probe has been awarded the 2024 Robert J. Collier Trophy by the National Aeronautic Association.

The Parker Solar Probe is the largest solar science mission NASA has ever done, costing about $1.4 billion. Launched in 2018, the purpose of the probe is to enter the atmosphere of the Sun for the first time. It dives towards the Sun every few months, getting really close for a couple of days, gathering important data, and then looping back out. Over the last seven years it used a series of close encounters of Venus to bend the probe’s orbit closer and closer to the Sun.

On Christmas Eve 2024, the probe had its closest approach to the Sun, just 4% of the distance from the Sun to Earth. The mission will continue but it will never get closer than on that day.

“This was the perfect time to nominate the Parker mission for the Collier Trophy,” said Justin Kasper , chief of technology for BWXT Advanced Technologies.

On March 20, Kasper led the presentation to the award committee, joined by two engineers and a program manager from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The four represented about 500 scientists and engineers who worked on the successful project, from dozens of organizations and universities, located from California to New Hampshire.

Why Parker

In May 2024, a series of violent solar flares rocked the Sun. These solar storms caused billions of dollars in damage to American interests, disrupting satellites, diverting plane flights, and ruining more than a billion dollars’ worth of corn in the Midwest.  A severe storm could cause trillions of dollars of damage.

The purpose of Parker is to fly into the solar atmosphere for the first time to understand how solar wind is produced. The spacecraft needed to approach within four million miles, less than 5% of the distance from the Sun to Earth. What the team discovered fundamentally changed our understanding of the solar winds and the Sun. Just like better measurements of weather improve hurricane warnings, Parker significantly improved the performance of space weather forecasts, aiding in the efficiency of aircraft and space vehicle operations, and the safety of astronauts in deep space.

The probe itself is named for physicist Eugene Parker, who first proposed in 1958 that stars

produce solar winds. People at first were skeptical, believing space was a near perfect vacuum. Early satellites confirmed he was right, but the winds were more powerful than anyone could explain. 

“Before NASA existed, a solar probe was identified as a high priority mission. Unfortunately, study after study concluded it couldn’t be done,” said Kasper. “Sixty years of innovation were needed to take this mission from impossible, to unaffordable, to the cost-effective Parker mission and its achievements in 2024.”

The Team 

Kasper served as principal investigator, or lead of the science team on Parker, responsible for the science payload on the spacecraft that measures the atmosphere of the Sun.  

“The mission is really challenging, because the temperatures, light, and radiation experienced by the spacecraft in the Sun’s atmosphere are incredibly extreme,” Kasper said. “The Sun is about 475 times brighter than at Earth, exposed surfaces are heated to thousands of degrees, and the spacecraft is moving at 430,000 mph. We had to create unique sensors that could collect samples of the Sun while we flew through its atmosphere without melting.”

Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory manages the Parker Solar Probe project for NASA, and BWXT has a contract with APL to support the mission, including for Kasper’s service as principal investigator.

Kasper says the mission has direct relevance to BWXT.

“The Parker Solar Probe is NASA’s largest solar mission, and I'm proud that the team completed this flagship mission under budget and on time,” Kasper explained. “I love being able to take the tools I developed working on Parker and apply them to cost-effectively developing innovative nuclear technology at BWXT. Our Pele microreactor and DRACO nuclear rocket are examples of BWXT technologies with similar challenges, but nuclear innovation broadly can benefit from advanced aerospace technology development practices.”

And Kasper isn’t the only BWXT team member to have contributed to the project. Chief Development Officer Jonathan Cirtain, while at Marshall Space Flight Center, coordinated materials testing and calibration for the instruments. Tony Case , an Advanced Technologies research scientist, was the lead scientist for one of the sensors in the payload.

The Prize

The Robert J. Collier Trophy is awarded annually "for the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America, with respect to improving the performance, efficiency, and safety of air or space vehicles, the value of which has been thoroughly demonstrated by actual use during the preceding year." 

The Collier Trophy is administered by the National Aeronautic Association, the oldest national aviation organization in the United States.

“The Collier Trophy is a recognition like no other in the world,” said NAA President and CEO Amy Spowart in a news release. “As the oldest national aviation organization in the U.S., the NAA's Collier Trophy remains the most prestigious and sought-after in the industry.”

If you’re wondering how prestigious it is, previous winners have included Orville Wright (1913), Chuck Yeager (1947), and the Apollo 11 crew (1969).

The Collier Trophy is housed in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.