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Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Sponsor

Honored by:
Mr. Patrick M. Ryan

Jim Ryan worked for the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from 1963 to 1998. In the early years of his career, he worked on all of the original manned spaceflight missions, Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. He showed particular mathematical expertise in orbit determination and in being able to triangulate back to the location of the ground stations.
After the end of the Apollo program, he leveraged that expertise and moved into space geodesy. As a senior scientist on the Crustal Dynamics Project, he worked to measure continental distances to an accuracy of less than a centimeter. With this data, the program was able to show the movement of the tectonic plates over time with great precision.
During his career, he published many papers and was a frequent presenter at the American Geophysical Union conferences. He received several awards and was honored at the end of his career for his 35 years of service