Top NASA climate scientist pleads guilty to contract fraud

By: Bill Myers
Washington Examiner
Dec. 02, 2009

Former NASA manager Mark Schoeberl, of Silver Spring, pleaded guilty to contract fraud Tuesday. (Courtesy photo)

A former top climate scientist who had become of one the scientific world's most cited authorities on the human effect on Earth's atmosphere was sentenced to probation Tuesday after pleading guilty to steering lucrative no-bid contracts to his wife's company.

In addition to a year's probation, former NASA manager Mark Schoeberl, 60, of Silver Spring, was also fined $10,000 and ordered to put in 50 hours of community service. He admitted in the late summer that he had hid some $50,000 in NASA contracts for a company called Animated Earth, which was run by Schoeberl's wife, Barbara. Prosecutors alleged that Schoeberl tried to help his wife's firm for years. When his colleagues balked at giving no-bid contracts to his wife's firm, Schoeberl pressured them to steer money to his wife through indirect means.

Schoeberl was the chief scientist of the Goddard Space Flight Center's Earth Sciences Division and the head of the Aura Project, a NASA mission to study the Earth's ozone layer, air quality and climate. He has written extensively about the depletion of the ozone level, and the influence of humans on global climate change.

Animated Earth offers plasma-screen kiosks that carry satellite images of the Earth's climate and atmosphere.

"It's an important conviction because it vindicates the principle that federal employees have to act in the public's interest," U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein told The Examiner. "The goal here, really, is ... to promote a fair field for contractors."

As early as 2004, Schoeberl began asking about ways to direct no-bid contracts to Animated Earth, he admitted in his plea agreement.

As the chief scientist at the Earth Sciences Division and leader on the Aura Project, Schoeberl had a lot of clout on the space agency's climate change contracting. He helped his wife draw up invoices for her work and wrote "sole source justification" forms for tens of thousands of dollars in no-bid contracts that went to Animated Earth.

Efforts to reach Schoeberl's wife were unsuccessful.

Prosecutors confined their efforts to Schoeberl's business practices and not his scientific one, but it's been a rough couple of weeks for global warming. Officials at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England -- whose research has made up the backbone of world climate policy -- are still trying to explain e-mails that show staff suppressing evidence against global warming.

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If you can't do for family...

Schoeberl's help to his wife's firm

ť Convinced colleagues to approve $20,000 appropriation in 2004

ť Wrote no-bid justification after $60,000 contract awarded

ť Wife's firm won $190,000 in no-bid contracts between fiscal 2006 and 2008
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