When James Young left this world for the next one on October 13, just shy of his 89th birthday, he was not just a loving grandfather, father, and devoted husband; he was also still officially working as a systems engineer and consultant for NASA. At an age when most men would have two decades of retirement under their belts and only dusty memories of their professional glory days, Jim was still working on what he loved, helping humankind explore the far reaches of our cosmos and to better measure the condition of our living planet Earth, even as he was losing his own battle with time and gravity itself.
Jim was awarded the space agency’s highest honor — the NASA Public Service Medal — at Goddard Space Flight Center in 1997, following his contributions to several major projects, namely VIIRS, one of the first meteorological sensors sent into space, and the original Thematic Mapper, a program that would later become Landsat. His last major project culminated in the MODIS program, essentially a calibration lab for space. “You know, we don’t give out too many of these,” they reportedly said when they hung the medal around his neck.
Jim’s major contribution to these programs was in optical design and calibration, turning what would otherwise be just pretty pictures from space into very accurate, precise data, used for everything from short to long-range weather forecasting to understanding the earth’s climate. For example, data gathered by MODIS and VIIRS can be used for fire and air quality monitoring, carbon modeling, flood and sea ice mapping, and to accurately determine the temperature of the oceans from space to within a few degrees. And along the way Jim also received two patents, one being the basis for much of the optical spatial characterization testing being performed today on the VIIRS program.
