Raymond Damadian
Damadian received a National Medal of Technology in 1988 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989. His original MRI full-body scanner was given to the Smithsonian Institution in the 1980s and is now on loan and on display at the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Ohio. In 2001, the Lemelson-MIT Prize Program bestowed its $100,000 Lifetime Achievement Award on Damadian as "the man who invented the MRI scanner."
George H. Rieke
Rieke helped develop the first infrared-optimized telescope and constructed a series of state-of-the-art focal plane instruments. Rieke was involved with the Space Lab 2 infrared telescope, a pioneering infrared space mission. He led the Multiband Imaging Photometer (MIPS) instrument team for Spitzer. The highly sensitive MIPS camera was built at Ball Aerospace under Rieke's leadership. It provided very high performance imaging and efficient surveying at 24, 70, and 160 microns; the detector arrays for the latter two bands were developed and build under direction by Rieke, Frank Low, and Erick Young at Steward Observatory. Also, Rieke is the lead scientist on a team to produce a mid-infrared instrument (MIRI) for the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018. MIRI operates from 5 to 28.5 microns, providing imaging, coronagraphy, and low and medium resolution spectroscopy. Its focal plane and control electronics were developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (detectors from Raytheon Vision Systems), its crycooler at Northrop Grumman collaborating with JPL, and its optical system and instrument testing under Gillian Wright leading a European Consortium of national institutions. See http://ircamera.as.arizona.edu/MIRI.