On 27 July, former DTM employee Ralph A. Alpher will be awarded the National Medal of Science. This honor is accorded to "individuals for pioneering scientific research in a range of fields, including physical, biological, mathematical, social, behavioral, and engineering sciences, that enhances our understanding of the world and leads to innovations and technologies that give the United States its global economic edge." Congress established this medal in 1959; the award is administered by the National Science Foundation.

Astronomer and former Hubble Fellow Scott Sheppard is the newest member of DTM’s Research Staff. Sheppard’s research focuses on observations of small, primordial bodies in our Solar System and planetary systems around other stars and what those observations imply for theories of planetary system formation. Sheppard completed his Ph.D. at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy in 2004, was a Hubble Fellow at DTM from 2004 to 2007, and joined the Research Staff on 1 July.

Sheppard produced the first large sampling of light curves for Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). A third of the objects he observed exhibited variability at sufficiently short periods to imply that these objects are rubble piles lacking internal strength, a result suggesting that collisions were frequent at some stage of Kuiper Belt history. He discovered the first contact binary KBO, which points to capture and progressive in-spiralling by tidal friction as earlier theory by others had suggested. The discovery also yielded the first measurement of the density of a KBO, with a sufficiently low value (near 1 g/cm³) to indicate a porous structure.