NASA Chief Technology Officer for IT Honored by CIO Magazine

Nasa Technology - Chris C. Kemp, NASA’s chief technology officer for Information Technology and ‘super star’ of IT innovation for the agency, has been recognized with CIO Magazine’s “CIO 100” award for his work done while he was chief information officer for NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., in 2009. Every year, CIO Magazine identifies and honors 100 organizations that have distinguished themselves through the effective and innovative use of information technology.

“I am honored to be recognized by CIO Magazine and to be the first honoree from Ames is truly humbling. The work that I did there in 2009 was meaningful to me and makes me extremely proud. I am inspired by NASA’s mission, and it’s been an honor to be a member of the team ” said Kemp.

The combination of Kemps’ enthusiasm for NASA and information technology has made him extremely successful at his job.

"This year's CIO 100 awards draws well-deserved attention to companies that are not only innovating with IT but creating genuine business value as well," said Maryfran Johnson, editor in chief of CIO Magazine. "These winning companies and their IT organizations are an inspiration to businesses everywhere."

Kemp is not afraid to venture into unchartered territory. In 2008, he began the Nebula Cloud Computing project (now a NASA-wide program) which uses open source software components to create a robust cloud environment where scientists can process and share data. Kemp also implemented an agency-wide IT Security Operations Center at Ames.

“The Nebula Platform allows scientists to focus on their research and spend less time and money on IT infrastructure. These researchers are doing amazing things, and it’s rewarding to create a platform that enables this innovation,” said Kemp.

Kemp is NASA’s first chief technology officer for IT, a new position established to lead IT innovation across the agency. "This move will leverage Chris’ creative talents and energies," said NASA Chief Information Officer Linda Cureton.

“I’m extremely excited about my new position. I’m thrilled to be involved in supporting many of the ground-breaking IT innovations happening here” Kemp said.

Kemp joined Ames as a successful entrepreneur, having helped create several companies including the third largest online community, Classmates.com. He also helped create the leading web-based vacation rental platform Escapia, and the first online grocery shopping platform for Kroger, the world’s largest grocery store chain.

Backwards Black Holes Might Make Bigger Jets

Going against the grain may turn out to be a powerful move for black holes. New research suggests supermassive black holes that spin backwards might produce more ferocious jets of gas. The results have broad implications for how galaxies change over time.

"A lot of what happens in an entire galaxy depends on what's going on in the miniscule central region where the black hole lies," said theoretical astrophysicist David Garofalo of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Garofalo is lead author of a new paper that appeared online May 27 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Other authors are Daniel A. Evans of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., and Rita M. Sambruna of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Black holes are immense distortions of space and time with gravity that is so great, even light itself cannot escape. Astronomers have known for more than a decade that all galaxies, including our own Milky Way, are anchored by tremendous, so-called supermassive black holes, containing billions of suns' worth of mass. The black holes are surrounded and nourished by disks of gas and dust, called accretion disks. Powerful jets stream out from below and above the disks like lasers, and fierce winds blow off from the disks themselves.

The black holes can spin either in the same direction as the disks, called prograde black holes, or against the flow - the retrograde black holes. For decades, astronomers thought that the faster the spin of the black hole, the more powerful the jet. But there were problems with this "spin paradigm" model. For example, some prograde black holes had been found with no jets.

Garofalo and his colleagues have been busy flipping the model on its head. In previous papers, they proposed that the backward, or retrograde, black holes spew the most powerful jets, while the prograde black holes have weaker or no jets.

The new study links the researchers' theory with observations of galaxies across time, or at varying distances from Earth. They looked at both "radio-loud" galaxies with jets, and "radio-quiet" ones with weak or no jets. The term "radio" comes from the fact that these particular jets shoot out beams of light mostly in the form of radio waves.

The results showed that more distant radio-loud galaxies are powered by retrograde black holes, while relatively closer radio-quiet objects have prograde black holes. According to the team, the supermassive black holes evolve over time from a retrograde to a prograde state.

"This new model also solves a paradox in the old spin paradigm," said David Meier, a theoretical astrophysicist at JPL not involved in the study. "Everything now fits nicely into place."

The scientists say that the backward black holes shoot more powerful jets because there's more space between the black hole and the inner edge of the orbiting disk. This gap provides more room for the build-up of magnetic fields, which fuel the jets, an idea known as the Reynold's conjecture after the theoretical astrophysicist Chris Reynolds of the University of Maryland, College Park.

"If you picture yourself trying to get closer to a fan, you can imagine that moving in the same rotational direction as the fan would make things easier," said Garofalo. "The same principle applies to these black holes. The material orbiting around them in a disk will get closer to the ones that are spinning in the same direction versus the ones spinning the opposite way."

Jets and winds play key roles in shaping the fate of galaxies. Some research shows that jets can slow and even prevent the formation of stars not just in a host galaxy itself, but also in other nearby galaxies.

"Jets transport huge amounts of energy to the outskirts of galaxies, displace large volumes of the intergalactic gas, and act as feedback agents between the galaxy's very center and the large-scale environment," said Sambruna. "Understanding their origin is of paramount interest in modern astrophysics."