Throughout his 30 years at NASA, Stofan held numerous managerial and administrative positions. His technical expertise was bolstered by a healthy dose of "charisma and confidence" that gained him the admiration of the rank and file within the agency and contracting organizations.

Stofan began his career as a research engineer at Lewis Research Center in 1958 and later joined the Propellant Systems Section of the original Centaur Project Office, where he began a steady climb through the tiers of management to become Director of Launch Vehicles in 1974. Much of the Titan-Centaur vehicle's success can be attributed to Stofan's leadership of NASA, the Air Force and aerospace industry teams. By 1978, Stofan was called to Headquarters to serve first as the Deputy Associate Administrator for the Office of Space Science, and then as Associate Administrator.

Stofan returned to Cleveland in 1982 as Lewis' fifth Center Director charged with the task of implementing Lewis' first strategic plan. The center had never had major roles in Manned Space Flight projects, but Stofan saw these big programs as an opportunity to make Lewis more visible within NASA. Stofan aimed for five major projects for the Center: the power system for the space station, the Advanced Turboprop Program, renovations of the Altitude Wind Tunnel (AWT) for expanded icing research, the Advanced Communications Technology Satellite Program and the Shuttle/Centaur Program. Amazingly, he secured funding for all but the AWT renovations. Most of the programs in the first strategic plan are still thriving.

In addition to implementing the center's strategic plan, Stofan instituted a new management style. He advocated participative management over the autocratic management style of the 1970s. His outstanding work managing advanced research and technology programs for NASA earned him the 1985 Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Executives.

Following the Challenger tragedy in January 1986, NASA asked Stofan to return to Headquarters as the Associate Administrator for the Space Station Office where he led the negotiations of the international technical agreements and the U.S. contract to build the space station until his retirement on April 1, 1988. He continued to work in the aerospace industry for the next 10 years.

Stofan and his wife, Barbara have settled into a new lifestyle and home 7200 feet up into the mountains of Steamboat Springs, Colo., where he can daily enjoy one of his favorite past times—downhill skiing. He also enjoys golfing and building furniture. The couple travel extensively, including a recent trip to Maui to celebrate their 75th birthdays; to Ohio three times a year to Hiram College for Board Meetings where he has served as a trustee for the past 25 years; and to Virginia and New York to visit their daughters and five grandchildren. His daughter, Dr. Ellen Stofan, is a planetary geologist known for her work on Venus and Titan. His other daughter, Lynn, is an attorney.

View my blog's last three great articles...

"This is an exploratory project. Nobody has done this before at a wavelength sensitive to the heat from dust circling around so many stars," said John Stauffer, the principal investigator of the research at NASA's Spitzer Science Center, located at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "We are seeing a lot of variation, which may be a result of clumps or warped structures in the planet-forming disks."

The new image was taken after Spitzer ran out of its coolant in May 2009, beginning its extended "warm" mission. The coolant was needed to chill the instruments, but the two shortest-wavelength infrared channels still work normally at the new, warmer temperature of 30 Kelvin (minus 406 Fahrenheit). In this new phase of the mission, Spitzer is able to spend more time on projects that cover a lot of sky and require longer observation times.

One such project is the "Young Stellar Object Variability" program, in which Spitzer looks repeatedly at the same patch of the Orion nebula, monitoring the same set of about 1,500 variable stars over time. It has already taken about 80 pictures of the region over 40 days. A second set of observations will be made in fall 2010. The region's twinkling stars are about one million years old - this might invoke thoughts of wrinkle cream to a movie star, but in the cosmos, it is quite young. Our middle-aged sun is 4.6 billion years old.

Young stars are fickle, with brightness levels that change more than those of adult, sun-like stars. They also spin around faster. One reason for the ups and downs in brightness is the existence of cold spots on their surfaces. Cold spots are the opposite of "age spots" - the younger the star, the more it has. The cold spots come and go as a star whips around, changing the amount of light that reaches our telescopes.

Stellar brightness can also change due to hot spots, which are caused by gas accreting onto a young star from the material out of which it formed.

"In the 1950s and 60s, astronomers knew that younger stars varied, and they postulated this had something to do with the birthing process," said Stauffer. "Later, with improved technology, we could see a lot more and learned a great deal about the stars' spots."

Spitzer is particularly suited to study yet another reason why the stars are changing. The telescope's infrared sight can see the warm, dusty disks orbiting around them. These disks are where planets may eventually clump together and form. When the disks are young, they can have asymmetries, possibly caused by forming planets or gravitational disturbances from formed planets. As the skewed disks circle around a star, they block varying amounts of starlight.

By gathering more and more data on these varying disks, Stauffer and his team hope to learn more about how planets develop -- not exactly tabloid fodder, but an ongoing drama of one large, stellar family.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about Spitzer, visit http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer

View my blog's last three great articles...