New Horizons Pluto Mission Leader Alan Stern Wins Carl Sagan Award

The accolades keep rolling in for NASA's New Horizons mission, which performed history's first-ever flyby of Pluto this past July. The American Astronautical Society (AAS) has given New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern the 2016 Carl Sagan Memorial Award, which recognizes people who have made outstanding contributions to the field of space exploration. "I am honored to receive this," Stern, who's based at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement.