People

• Mark Cintala

  

  Mark Cintala received his Bachelor of Science degree in physics from the University of Bridgeport in 1974 and his Masters of Science degree in geological sciences from Brown University in 1976. He received his doctorate in Geological Sciences (The Role of Planetary Variables in Impact Cratering Processes) from Brown University in 1980, and remained in the Geological Sciences department under a postdoctoral fellowship until late 1981.

  
  

  He began a National Research Council postdoctoral research fellowship at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) in 1981 and remained in that position until late 1983. He then served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Lunar and Planetary Institute until 1984, when he became a space scientist at JSC. He is the manager of the Experimental Impact Laboratory in the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Directorate.

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• Emily CoBabe-Ammann

  

  Emily CoBabe-Ammann is head of Communication and Outreach at the CU Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) where she is responsible for education and public outreach (E/PO); internal and external communications; and professional development for LASP students and staff.

  
  

  Her current projects include the LASP Space Weather Education Program, Project SPECTRA!, an engineering and science program for Grades 7-10, and Colorado Lights, a science in literacy program for elementary students. She is the E/PO lead for the CU Center for Astrobiology (NAI), the CU Center for Lunar Dust and Atmospheric Studies (CCLDAS), MAVEN, GOLD, the education lead for Juno, and a member of the E/PO teams for TIMED, the New Horizons Student Dust Counter, SDO EVE and MMS.

  
  

  She has served as the E/PO representative to the NAI Executive Council for two years, and recently appeared before the NRC Panel on Meeting the Workforce Needs for the National Vision for Space Exploration. She is currently the chair of the SMD E/PO Management Operations Working Group and is the co-chair of the NASA SMD Program Definition Team on Student Collaborations.

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• Keith Drake

  

  Keith Drake received his M.S. degree in physics from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He currently operates as staff scientist for CCLDAS as well as for several other lunar dust and interstellar dust experiments including dust telescopes and dust impact ionization mass spectrometers.

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• Eberhard Grün

  

  Eberhard Grün is a German national born in 1942. He is married to Ulrike Grün, nee Wiegand. They have two children and two grandchildren. He studied physics at University of Heidelberg and received a doctoral degree in 1970. He was employed as a scientist at the Max-Planck-Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg until his retirement in 2007. He is now emeritus at this institution. He was lecturer in Astronomy and Physics at the University of Heidelberg. He spent sabbaticals at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA's Ames Research Center, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. From 2000 to 2007 he was a researcher at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. In 2007 he became a research associate at University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

  
  

  His fields of interest are planetary physics and astronomy, laboratory study of impact processes, development of space instrumentation for detection and analysis of extraterrestrial particulates, analysis of data from spaceborne experiments and astronomical observations. He is involved in dust measurements on the Helios, Galileo, Ulysses, Cassini, Giotto, Nozomi, the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO), Rosetta, New Horizons and Bepi Colombo missions. He observed comets at ground-based observatories with the ISO, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

  
  

  Grün received several NASA and ESA awards, the asteroid 1981 EY20 was named (4240) "Gruen." He also became Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and Foreign Associate of the Royal Astronomical Society. Since 2001 he received the Kuiper Prize of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society; the David Bates Medal of the European Geophysical Society; and the Space Science Award of COSPAR.

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• Richard Hodges

  
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• Mihály Horányi

  

  Professor Horányi received a Master of Science degree in nuclear physics in 1980, and a doctorate in space physics in 1982, both at the Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest, Hungary. He held research positions at the Central Research Institute for Physics in Budapest from 1982-1984, at the University of Michigan in 1985, at Florida State University from 1985-1989, and at the University of Arizona from 1989 to 1992. He joined the University of Colorado, Boulder Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in 1992, and the Physics department in 1999. His research interests include theoretical and experimental investigations of space and laboratory dusty plasmas, electrodynamic processes and their roles in the origin and evolution of the solar system, and the development of space instrumentation.

  
  

  Professor Horányi is the author of over 170 scientific papers. He is a fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Geophysical Union.

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• Mark Lankton

  

  Mark Lankton has more than 25 years of engineering and management experience, and has led and made technical contributions to many successful space-based instrument programs. He has demonstrated skills in team management and career development of team members.

  
  

  Mark is currently the project manager for the Lunar Dust EXperiment (LDEX) on the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment (LADEE) mission. He was previously the project manager for the Cloud Imaging and Particle Size (CIPS) instrument on the Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) mission, the Cosmic Dust Experiment (CDE) for AIM, the Student Dust Counter (SDC) for New Horizons, the Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer (MASCS) for the MESSENGER mission to Mercury, and the Mechanics of Granular Materials (MGM) Space Shuttle experiment (in 1996, 1998, 2003).

  
  

  In addition, Mark served as flight software group manager at LASP from 1977 through 2003. He was software cognizant engineer for the flight microprocessor software for the TIMED/SEE instrument, and software engineer for the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) instrument for the Cassini mission to Saturn.

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• Peter Messmer

  

  Peter Messmer received his master's and doctorate in physics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in 1997 and 2001 respectively. Messmer's research interests are in computational plasma physics and parallel computing. His physics research ranges from basic instabilities in space plasmas to photonic bandgap structures, and novel particle acceleration concepts via laser-plasma interaction.

  
  

  Since joining Tech-X in 2002 he has been working on the parallel plasma simulation framework, VORPAL, both implementing new models and applying it to various physics problems. In addition to work on plasma simulation codes, his research involves investigations of novel computer architectures for accelerating scientific computing.

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• Tobin Munsat

  

  Professor Munsat received his Bachelor of Science in physics from the University of North Carolina in 1994, and his Master of Science and doctorate in Plasma Physics from Princeton University in 1996 and 2001, respectively. Upon graduation, he was awarded the Department of Energy Fusion Energy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. Professor Munsat continued at Princeton as an associate research physicist, and then a staff research physicist. In 2004 he became an assistant professor in the physics department at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he is now the associate director of the Center for Integrated Plasma Studies. In 2005, he won a Department of Energy Plasma Physics Junior Faculty Development Award.

  
  

  Professor Munsat is the author of over 45 scientific papers in the areas of plasma diagnostics, turbulence and transport, radio frequency techniques, and plasma material interactions. He is a member of the American Physical Society.

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• W.K. (Bill) Peterson

  

  Bill Peterson earned his Bachelor of Science, with honors, in 1964 in engineering physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He earned a doctorate in physics from the same university in 1971. He later completed post-doctoral studies at the Deutches Electronen-Synchrotron, in Hamburg, Germany, from 1971 to 1973 and at The Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland from 1973 to 1977.

  
  

  Bill began his career as a research scientist at Lockheed Martin's Space Physics Laboratory in Palo Alto, California where he spent the next 24 years. In 2002 he became a geospace sciences discipline scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. In addition, we acted as principal investigator on the NASA the Toroidal Imaging Mass-Angle Spectrograph instrument on the Polar spacecraft and on the Combined Release and Radiation Effects Satellite program (CRRES). He was co-investigator on several mass spectrometer investigations, including the NASA Dynamics Explorer, the Active Magnetospheric Particle Tracer Explorers (AMPTE), the Fast Auroral Snapshot Explorer (FAST) and the International Solar Terrestrial Physics Polar satellite program. Bill was also the secretary of the Electronic Geophysical Year.

  
  

  Bill's interests include obtaining and using observations from ground and space based instruments to characterize the Earth's plasma environment to test models and theories attempting to describe it. He has written more than 200 publications on the subjects of atmospheric photoelectrons, atomic collision physics, polarized electrons, composition and dynamics of the mid and high altitude magnetospheric and auroral plasma, ion acceleration processes, image processing and data policy.

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• Scott Robertson

  

  Scott Robertson is an experimental plasma physicist and a professor in the physics department at the University of Colorado. Scott's research is in “dusty plasmas” in the laboratory, the ionosphere, and in space. His laboratory experiments have been directed at understanding the physics of dust on the lunar surface, including photoelectric, triboelectric, and plasma charging of dust that is either suspended electrostatically or resting on surfaces.

  
  

  Results of these experiments include measurements of the charge on individual dust particles and images of simulated lunar dust levitated above, and moving on, surfaces. In the ionosphere, the dust is meteoritic smoke particles that can be the nucleation sites for noctilucent clouds that form in the polar summer. Scott has also developed charged dust detectors and mass analyzers that have flown on numerous rockets to find the charge residing on these particles.

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• Alan Stern

  

  Alan Stern received Master of Science degrees in aerospace engineering and planetary atmospheres in 1980 and 1981, respectively, and a doctorate in astrophysics in 1989 from the University of Colorado.

  
  

  He held a research position at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy, at the University of Colorado in 1990, and began the planetary group at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in 1991, rising to the position of executive director by 2003.

  
  

  He has been the principal investigator of eight spectroscopy and imaging instruments and the New Horizons mission. In 2007-2008 he was the Associate Administrator responsible for all of NASA's Earth and space science programs. His research interests include the atmospheres of the moon; comets; planetary satellites; the origin of the solar system, the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, and the development of space instrumentation.

  
  

  Stern is an author of more than 200 scientific papers. He is a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Astronautical Federation.

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• Zoltan Sternovsky

  

  Zoltan's interests are in instrument development for sounding rockets and satellites; experimental research in hypervelocity dust impact plasmas; and laboratory plasma physics. He has extensive laboratory experience studying dust charging processes in the laboratory, dusty plasmas research, plasma diagnostics using Langmuir probes, and designing and building scientific apparatus. He was the instrument scientist on a sounding rocket mission launched in August 2007 that measured the density of nanometer-sized, charged smoke particles in the mesosphere.

  
  

  Zoltan is currently involved in the development of several in-situ dust instruments, including the Lunar Dust EXperiment (LDEX). The satellite with this instrument will orbit the moon and measure dust lofted from the lunar surface to high altitudes. Zoltan has a long track record studying the near-surface lunar environment including the experimental study of charging lunar dust samples, development of diagnostic techniques for the photoelectron sheath generated by solar UV, and its modeling.

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• Stein Sture

  

  Stein Sture is the Vice Chancellor for Research and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has held the position since August 1, 2007, and he held the position on an interim basis between October 1, 2005 and July 15, 2006. He also holds the Huber and Helen Croft Endowed Professor in the College of Engineering and Applied Science. He has been a faculty member at CU-Boulder since 1980. He has served as Associate Dean for Research in the College of Engineering and Applied Science (2002-2005). He served as department chair in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering for nearly six years (1990-1991; 1994-1998). Between 1976 and 1980 he was on the faculty at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He received his education in public schools in Oslo, Norway, a degree in engineering mechanics at the Schous Institute of Technology, in Oslo, and three degrees at the University of Colorado, Boulder (Ph.D. 1976). His fields of expertise are in the areas of experimental and analytical modeling in solid mechanics, geomechanics, computational geotechnics, and geotechnical engineering. He has advised and graduated 34 doctoral and 45 master's thesis students. He has authored or co-authored over 290 peer-reviewed publications and 65 research reports. Between 1985 and 1986 he was a visiting professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, and the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, where he is a Jenkin Fellow in Engineering Sciences.

  
  

  Professor Sture's contributions are mainly in the areas of constitutive modeling of cementitious composites and geomaterials; nonlinear analysis of soil-structure interaction systems including earthquake-induced soil liquefaction mechanisms; modeling of bifurcation instabilities and localized deformations in single phase as well as fluid saturated porous media; development of explicit and implicit integration techniques for elastic-plastic pressure sensitive materials; large deformation analysis; and, fracture mechanics related to weakly cemented materials. Sture has presented more than 40 plenary or keynote lectures at national and international conferences, and more than 50 invited lectures at universities, government laboratories and industrial institutions. He has served as a consultant to nearly 30 public and private organizations including Lockheed-Martin, Martin-Marietta, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Exxon Production Research Co., Shell Development Co., Federal Aviation Administration, Structural Reliability Technology, Inc., URS Woodward-Clyde Consultants, United Nations Development Program, and Veritas a/s, among others.

  
  

  His service at the University of Colorado at Boulder is extensive and includes serving as Vice Chair, Boulder Faculty Assembly (2003-2005), and Chair of the Budget and Planning Committee (2001-2003). His external service includes editorships of three major journals, and service on editorial boards. He has served as organizer and general chair of seven major national and international scientific and engineering conferences. In terms of professional outreach he has organized 12 national-level workshops and short courses. He served as elected national Director of the American Society of Civil Engineers (2003-2006); Chair of the Engineering Mechanics Division, Governor Engineering Mechanics Institute, ASCE; Board of Governors, of the Geo-Institute of ASCE, and the U.S. National Committee for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (1997 -2005). He is an elected fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics. He has received ASCE's Walter Huber Research Prize (1990), and Richard Torrens Awards (2000), and CU-Boulder College of Engineering and Applied Science's Research Award (1992), and Max Peters Service Award (2002).

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• Xu Wang

  

  Xu Wang received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Electronic Science and Technology in China in 1994, and his Ph.D. degree in engineering physics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2005. In the same year, he joined the Center for Integrated Plasma Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he is now a research associate. His interests include laboratory dusty plasmas, basic plasma physics and plasma diagnostics.

  
  

  He has conducted several experiments on dust charging and transport in plasmas and photoelectron sheath in laboratory in order to understand lunar dust dynamics.

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• Michael A. Weinstein, P.E.

  

  Michael Weinstein has a Bachelor of Science from Colorado State University in mechanical engineering and a Master in Business Administration from the University of Denver.

  
  

  After spending eight years in industrial manufacturing and robotic automation systems, Michael started numerous companies ranging from industrial-scale robotic automation to plasma research and manufacturing. His current company, Zybek Advanced Products, Inc. (ZAP), has a fully-equipped and staffed CNC machine shop to support research and manufacturing. In addition to the engineering and manufacturing, ZAP has a full, industrial-scale, remotely-coupled, transferred arc plasma system that is currently used to manufacture lunar simulant for terrestrial component testing. ZAP currently provides glass and agglutinates (recently patented by ZAP) for lunar simulants.

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