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For release: 11/21/03
Release #: N03-011
For nearly 20 years, Yazoo City, Miss., native James E. Smith has been waiting for one of the biggest shows in our suburb of the Milky Way Galaxy -- a huge display of violent, erratic explosions on the Sun. This month, his patience paid off. As chief observer at the Solar Vector Magnetograph, a solar observatory at the Marshall Center, Smith had a front-row seat to the most intense solar activity tracked since the 1970s.
Photo: Smith (NASA/MSFC/Dennis Olive)
For nearly 20 years, James E. Smith has been waiting for one of the biggest shows in our suburb of the Milky Way Galaxy — a huge display of violent, erratic explosions on the Sun.
This month, his patience paid off. As chief observer at the Solar Vector Magnetograph, a solar observatory at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville , Ala., Smith had a front-row seat to the most intense solar activity tracked since the observatory began operating in the 1970s.
Although he has witnessed and tracked numerous solar storms during his two decades at the observatory, recent activity has been far from ordinary. In late October and early November, the Sun exhibited one of its most active phases in recent history.
Over 10 days, two active solar regions emitted eight major solar flares in the most intense category known as X-class, capable of producing the energy of a billion megatons of TNT. Accompanying the flares were coronal mass ejections — massive explosions that blast through the Sun's outer atmosphere and send charged particles toward Earth at speeds of thousands of miles per second.
"It's what I've been trying to observe my whole career — one of the major flares in action," Smith says. A self-described jack-of-all-trades, he fulfills many roles to glean data from the Sun.
Whether acting as an engineer or mechanic keeping the observatory operating, as a photographer capturing images of the Sun, or as a scientist analyzing the data, Smith enjoys the variety. "I do it all," he says with enthusiasm. "I look forward to coming to work every day."
One of 11 brothers and sisters growing up in Yazoo City , Miss. , Smith says the odds were against him pursuing a career in science. His parents each had a 10th grade education. His father was a meat cutter in a grocery store, and his mother — now 78 and still getting up at 7 a.m. daily to style hair at a local beauty parlor — graduated from beauty school only after raising her 11 children.
"I grew up one of the poorest children in Mississippi ," he says. "Who'd have ever thought I'd get to college, much less get to NASA?" After graduating in 1969 from N.D. Taylor High School , Smith spent two years helping support his family by working alongside his father as a meat cutter.
Then one day, a high school teacher saw him and questioned why Smith — who had shown such an interest in math and science — wasn't in college.
The teacher responded to Smith's tuition concerns by directing him to a financial aid counselor at Mississippi Valley State University in Itta Bena. Armed only with the counselor's name, a few clothes, and $30, Smith began the path that would lead him to a career in space science. With financial aid and money earned working summers as a meat cutter, Smith pursued the college education that had seemed so unattainable.
In 1973, he joined NASA as a co-op student supporting Skylab, NASA's original space station, and in 1975, he graduated from Mississippi Valley State with a bachelor of science degree in mathematics. He joined NASA full-time upon graduation and has worked with the Marshall Center 's Solar Physics group ever since.
Smith, whose office is located at the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville , spends most of his time at the solar observatory. "I have loved every minute of it," he says. "Every day is different. It all depends on the weather. If it's a sunny day, typically I'm upstairs in the tower running the telescope and taking observations. Somewhere between taking observations, I analyze and post the data set."
Always fascinated with celestial objects, Smith — now the now father of three adult children — says his career path has given him a different perspective than he had as a child. "Who would have thought that a boy who experienced such poverty would grow up to be a member of the team at a NASA observatory," he says.
The NSSTC is a cooperative venture of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Alabama A & M University, Auburn University, Tuskegee University, The University of Alabama, The University of Alabama at Birmingham, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, and The University of South Alabama.
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