Dr. Peter Smith

Dr. Peter Smith, Professor, Mars photography; Planetary atmospheres at the Lunar and Planetary Lab, University of Arizona,Tucson AZ 85721. Dr. Smith is the principal investigator for the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, as well as project manager and a co-investigator for the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This important instrument will scan prospective landing sites able to see objects beach ball sized and larger. In addition, as the principal investigator for the successful Imager for Mars Pathfinder in 1997, he is continuing the scientific analysis of the 16,600 images collected during the 83-day mission. He is a co-investigator on the DISR descent imager that parachuted into the dense atmosphere of Titan in January, 2005. These projects have evolved from his long term interest in optical sciences and radiative transfer in planetary atmospheres. In his spare time, he has been using the Hubble Space Telescope’s camera both to image Titan in the near-IR resolving surface features for the first time and to obtain multi-spectral images of Mars in support of the Pathfinder mission.