Chen and Clancy Selected for Silver Snoopy Awards

Marshall Space Flight Center recently hosted a Silver Snoopy Awards ceremony at the Davidson Center for Space Exploration, naming TBE employees Betty Chen and Jeff Clancy as recipients of the prestigious NASA Silver Snoopy award for their outstanding performance and contributions to flight safety and mission success.

Chen, an International Space Station (ISS) software engineer for almost 18 years, earned the award by exemplifying excellent leadership skills and high standards of performance in working with the ISS training facility and simulations.  As lead software engineer for the Generic Payload Model (GPM), she is responsible for maintaining payload simulators for the Space Station Training Facility, including hardware, software, test, and model coordination.  Chen was described as going “above and beyond” performance expectations in developing and integrating new GPM telemetry quickly and cost effectively through her superior programming skills.  Noted as an individual who is key to the success of ISS missions because of her invaluable software engineering expertise, Chen is considered to be a top 5% performer.

Clancy, a 21-year veteran of the space industry, initially worked on the Spacelab program and then transitioned to Space Station, where he became a valued member of the Materials Science Research Rack (MSRR) Project team.  Now serving as the Payload Integration Lead for the MSRR, he coordinates with personnel at the European Space Agency, Johnson Space Center, and Kennedy Space Center to ensure that all requirements are satisfied for flight and a Certificate of Flight Readiness will be approved.  Clancy has also been instrumental in coordinating MSRR hardware development efforts, using his extensive experience to assist with building flight hardware.  His dedicated efforts and hardware expertise have been major contributors to the development of the MSRR flight hardware and were crucial to the successful Flight Hardware Acceptance Review.

In addition to receiving a pin that depicts Snoopy as an astronaut, awardees also received a framed certificate and a congratulatory letter personally signed by an astronaut.  All of the pins presented to recipients have flown on a previous space shuttle mission.

The Silver Snoopy award is the astronauts’ personal award given to individuals for exemplary work and outstanding effort contributing to the success of manned spaceflight missions.  The award reflects NASA’s and the industry’s sense of responsibility and continuing concern for astronaut flight safety.  Less then one percent of the space program work force receives the award annually.