Amy Simon is an American planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, involved in several missions of the Solar System Exploration Program.
Born October 1971 in Union, New Jersey, U.S. Simon is from Union Township, Union County, New Jersey, 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.
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.
Her scientific research involves the study of the composition, dynamics, and cloud structure in jovian planet atmospheres, primarily from spacecraft observations, and as of 2023, she has authored more than 160 peer-reviewed publications.
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.
