Meet the Team

My UWO MSL Team. From left to right we are Raymond Francis, Emily McCullough and John Moores. David Choi is not shown, but you can take a look at him below.
Photo credit: Mitch Zimmer.

As of last Wednesday I can say that I am a Participating Scientist on the Mars Science Laboratory Mission. That mission launched successfully last Saturday and we're now on our way to Mars. In the meantime, we have work to do. There are models to test, training for operations to complete and data reducing software to write. I won't pretend that I can get this all done by myself in the next eight months. Luckily, I don't have to. I've got a great team behind me and I wanted to help to shine a spotlight on them and what we hope to accomplish together - they deserve it!

Who am I?

Let me introduce myself. My name is John Moores and I'm a Planetary Scientist currently working in Toronto, Canada. I graduated last fall with a doctorate from the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona where I studied under Peter Smith, Principal Investigator (or P.I. as we call him - watch out for plenty of acronyms on this blog) of the Phoenix Mission. Prior to my time at LPL, I completed a Bachellor's Degree in Engineering Science at the university of Toronto.

I've worked on a bunch of space missions (Phoenix, Huygens) and hope to work on a bunch more, with a little luck. Scientifically speaking, I seem to enjoy studying water particularly in its frozen form. I did my dissertation on different types of water on Mars and am really excited about studying comets, glaciers, clouds and icy satellites. Even ice on the moon, which hopefully we'll know more about soon once the results are in from LCROSS (which successfully launched today - congrats to them and the LRO spacecraft which shared the fairing).

If you "want to know more" (*) feel free to drop by my page over at www.lpl.arizona.edu/~jmoores.

Next post: Actual content (I promise)

(*) That line from "Starship Troopers" has to be useful for something, seared as it is in my brain. Those looking for (good) Heinlein, give "The Moon is a harsh mistress" a try. It even fits in with today's theme.