Profile | Nicholas Johnson, NASA’s Chief Scientist for Orbital Debris

From his office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Nicholas Johnson oversees the space agency’s efforts to track the current status of orbital debris and predict the future. That work has attracted far more attention both nationally and internationally since January 2007, when China destroyed one of its own satellites during testing of an anti-satellite (A-Sat) weapon, and the February 2009 collision between a working Iridium telecommunications satellite and the retired Russian Cosmos 2251 spacecraft.