LENA Group Achievement Award Citation
August 8, 2001


"The LENA Imager development team labored long and hard to
 successfully create a pioneering new instrument for the IMAGE
 mission. LENA as proposed was widely perceived as an idea that, while
 attractive and important,  had too little advanced technology
 development to succeed as a flight instrument on a MIDEX development
 schedule and budget. There were openly expressed doubts that the
 concept would work at all, even if a flight instrument could be
 developed in time.
    Thus the LENA development team faced a situation with too little
 time and too few resources in relation to the job they had taken on.
 Exacerbating this were multiple losses of key personnel from the LENA
 team. With strong support from GSFC and IMAGE management, the LENA
 team persevered through a very difficult three year development
 period, constantly challenged to meet milestones they could only meet
 through great personal dedication and sacrifice, not to mention
 creativity in the solution of problems.
    The team collectively and individually rose to the challenge in
 an exemplary display of grit and determination. Innumerable evenings
 and weekends were stolen from families in pursuit of the goal of
 completing LENA. Many team members travelled for weeks at a time to
 complete calibration and integration tasks at remote locations. The
 LENA Imager was completed and delivered to the spacecraft last of all
 the instruments on IMAGE, but with no adverse impact on the
 spacecraft development schedule and only very minimal impact on the
 development budget reserves. The instrument as delivered was a credit
 to all who were involved and was integrated on the spacecraft with
 minimal difficulty in spite of incredible schedule and budgetary
 pressures. When the spacecraft was fully integrated, a three month
 reserve remained during which the spacecraft was stored prior to a
 (delayed) launch in March 2000.
    Since it has been in orbit on IMAGE, LENA has performed
 flawlessly and has proven its critics wrong by clearly detecting the
 anticipated signals of low energy neutral atoms leaving the Earth
 from regions of ion heating. In addition, it has proven so UV
 light-tight that it is able to stare and the sun and see only the
 weak but telltale fluxes of neutral atoms coming from the solar wind.
 This is something that was designed and hoped-for, but not really
 anticipated, since no prior measurements and little modeling exist
 for solar wind neutral atoms.
    In summary, the LENA Imager development team has accomplished
 something of outstanding significance in NASA: the development of a
 pioneering new instrument that is making pioneering new measurements
 from space. Under the circumstances, this was accomplished only
 through the great personal dedication and creativity that was
 evidenced throughout the LENA development team."