Astrobiologist Wins 2007 Urey Prize

February 13, 2008 / Posted by: Shige Abe

Francis Nimmo, associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the winner of the 2007 Urey Prize, granted by the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences “to recognize and encourage outstanding achievements in planetary science by a young scientist.”

Nimmo is a former member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory team. He gave his Urey Prize lecture, about the geodynamics of icy planetary satellites, on January 18, 2008, at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

Scientists have identified at least 37 objects in our solar system with masses greater than 1020 kilograms, according to Nimmo, “two thirds of which have surfaces made primarily of water ice.” The small number of these icy bodies that spacecraft have been able to observe thus far have displayed “an enormous diversity of bizarre and unanticipated features,” he notes, from geysers on Neptune’s moon Triton and Saturn’s moon Enceladus to the peculiar shape of Iapetus, another moon of Saturn.

Nimmo discussed three aspects of icy body geodynamics in his lecture: using surface observations to constrain the thermal evolution of such bodies, the role of tidal heating on them, and their potential to undergo reorientation.

For more information, see: http://www.ucsc.edu/news_events/press_releases/text.asp?pid=1633