2023 Bronze Medal Award

The group is recognized for performing the best measurements ever of the sunlight reflected by the moon, accurate to better than 1%. They used a novel NIST telescope-spectrometer mounted in the wing of a high-altitude aircraft. The moon at a given phase is the most stable standard for tracking changes of satellite sensors used for Earth climate studies, but until now, typical discrepancies of 10% had prevented community acceptance for absolute calibration. Government agencies and satellite companies will save money and increase performance by using the moon as a calibration standard.