A senior NASA scientist has been sentenced to 30 days in prison, months after he pleaded guilty to lying about his ties to a program backed by the Chinese regime designed to harvest talents from the West and transfer intellectual property to China. Meyya Meyyappan, 66, of Pacifica, California, was sentenced on Wednesday for making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), NASA’s Office of Inspector General (NASA OIG), and the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York (USAO), the Justice Department announced in a news release. He was also ordered to pay a fine of $100,000. Meyyappan joined NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) in 1996 and was the chief scientist for exploration technology at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley since 2006. Prosecutors said that Meyyappan had participated in China’s state-run Thousand Talents Plan and held positions at universities in China, …