LRO Principal Investigator Arrested on Spying Charges

A Maryland scientist who has been working for years to peer into the darkest parts of the moon now faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life in a dark prison cell.

Stewart David Nozette, principal investigator on the Mini-RF instrument on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and co-investigator for a similar instrument on India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, has been arrested on charges of attempting to pass classified information to Israel:

Nozette allegedly attempted to deliver U.S. defense secrets to an undercover FBI agent posing as an Israeli intelligence officer in exchange for money, the Justice Department said in a statement.

Nozette held security clearances as high as top secret and had access to information related to national defense, according to the Justice Department. He developed a radar experiment that purportedly discovered water on the south pole of the moon and designed “highly advanced” technology at the Energy Department, according to the statement.

Nozette worked at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and did research at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Arlington, Virginia, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, according to the Justice Department.

Read the full story.