Niedner, Malcolm - Biography

Dr. Malcolm B. Niedner, Jr. is an astrophysicist in the UV/Optical Astronomy Branch of the NASA/GSFC Laboratory for Astronomy and Solar Physics (LASP). Programmatically, he serves as the Deputy Senior Project Scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Project, assisting the Senior Scientist and giving the HST Project Management Office guidance and advice in all science matters concerning Servicing Missions and the near- and long-term disposition of the Observatory. He has served in this capacity since February 1993 and has participated in all four HST servicing missions to-date. Previously, he directed the archiving effort and software development program of the Large-Scale Phenomena (L-SP) Discipline of the International Halley Watch (IHW) (1982-1990), taking on a large share of the duties associated with depositing the total IHW archive onto compact disc (CD-ROM) (1989-1992). The L-SP portion of the archive consisted of over 3,000 wide-field images of Halley's Comet secured at more than 100 observatories in over 40 countries. In 1984- 1985 he served as comet scientific consultant for the International Cometary Explorer (ICE) spacecraft, making theoretical calculations for determining the optimum tail intercept distance at comet P/Giacobini-Zinner. In 1984-March/1986 he served as Chairman of the Astro Halley Science Team (AHST), which was reponsible for developing plans and carrying out observations of Halley's Comet from the Space Shuttle in March, 1986 (mission not launched due to Challenger in January, 1986).

Dr. Niedner began his civil servant career at NASA/GSFC in February, 1980. Before undertaking the project activities just described, he was primarily involved in scientific research addressing the interaction between the solar wind and the large-scale cometary plasma environment, the origin and dynamics of plasma-tail transients, the role of solar wind and solar EUV in ionization of cometary neutrals, and the use of cometary plasma tails as unique 3-D probes of solar wind and interplanetary magnetic fields to high heliospheric latitudes. More recently Dr. Niedner has shifted his research priorities to protoplanetary disk systems around young stars, and clustering and evolution of distant galaxies.

Dr. Niedner received an A.B. degree in Physics from Brown University in 1971, and Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Astronomy from Indiana University in 1976 and 1979.