Amy Simon-Miller

Amy Simon is an American planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, involved in several missions of the Solar System Exploration Program. where she attended Union High School. She earned a bachelor's degree in Space Sciences from the Florida Institute of Technology in 1993 and was inducted into Sigma Pi Sigma. She completed her doctoral studies in astronomy at the New Mexico State University in 1998. Upon graduation, she became a postdoctoral research scientist at Cornell University.

Career Simon is a Senior Scientist in the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, having joined NASA as a civil servant in 2001. She served as the Chief of the Planetary Systems Laboratory from 2008 to 2010 and the Associate Division Director from 2010 to 2013.

Simon's experiences has consisted her of being a part of robotic flight missions and future mission concept development.

Works Her contributions include the first detailed study of the changing shape of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, as well as the discoveries of several types of waves in the atmosphere of Jupiter. Her analysis of Voyager 2, Cassini-Huygens, Hubble Space Telescope and New Horizons images led to the discovery of several new classes of Jupiter atmospheric waves.

Beyond Jupiter, she has studied atmospheric chemistry and dynamics on Saturn, including the north-polar hexagon. She was also part of a team that observed Neptune using the Kepler space telescope, detecting solar oscillations in light reflected off a planet for the first time.

Simon is involved in multiple robotic NASA planetary missions. She was a co-investigator on the Cassini-Huygens Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) and is the deputy instrument scientist for the OSIRIS-REx Visible and IR Spectrometer (OVIRS), as well as for the Landsat 9 Thermal Infrared Sensor-2 instrument and the deputy principal investigator for the Lucy spacecraft L'Ralph instrument.

Since 2014, she has been the principal investigator of the Hubble Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program. Her team discovered a new Great Dark Spot on Neptune with Hubble and has published more than 12 manuscripts from OPAL data.

Explorations Simon also plans future planetary exploration missions. She served on the National Academy of Sciences' Space Studies Board 2013 Planetary Science Decadal Survey. She has co-led several mission studies for NASA including Flagship class missions to Enceladus and to the Ice Giants, Uranus, and Neptune. She was the principal investigator for the proposed New Frontiers class Saturn probe mission, SPRITE.

Simon is a member of the American Geophysical Union, the American Astronomical Society, and the Division for Planetary Sciences.

Honors and awards American Geophysical Union, Union Fellow - 2025 American Astronomical Society, Division for Planetary Sciences Claudia J. Alexander Prize - 2023 Meritorious Senior Professional Presidential Rank Awards - 2022 NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal – 2020 John C. Lindsay Memorial Award for Space Science - 2020 NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal – 2019 NASA Silver Achievement Medal (OVIRS Team) – 2017 NASA Group Achievement Award (OSIRIS-REx Team) – 2017 Robert H. Goddard Science Achievement Award (Hubble OPAL Team) – 2016 Robert H. Goddard Engineering Achievement Award (OVIRS Team) NASA Exceptional Service Medal – 2016 Robert H. Goddard Exceptional Engineering (OVIRS Team) – 2014 NASA Exceptional Service Medal – 2014 Asteroid 84994 Amysimon, discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey in 2003, was named in her honor.