Plenary Session

The Moon: A New Destination for Humanity
Grand A Ballroom
8:30 - 9:30 a.m.

Paul D. Spudis
Staff Scientist
Lunar and Planetary Institute

PAUL D. SPUDIS is a Staff Scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas. He was formerly with the Branch of Astrogeology, U. S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He is a geologist who received his education at Arizona State University (B.S., 1976; Ph. D., 1982) and at Brown University (Sc.M., 1977). Since 1982, he has been a Principal Investigator in the Planetary Geology and Geophysics Program of the NASA Office of Space Science, Solar System Exploration Division, specializing in research on the processes of impact and volcanism on the planets. He has served on NASA’s Lunar and Planetary Sample Team (LAPST), which advises allocations of lunar samples for scientific research, the Lunar Exploration Science Working Group (LEXSWG), that devised scientific strategies of lunar exploration, and the Planetary Geology Working Group, which monitors overall directions in the planetary research community. He has been a member of the Committee for Planetary and Lunar Exploration (COMPLEX), an advisory committee of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Synthesis Group, a White House panel that in 1990-1991, analyzed a return to the Moon to establish a base and the first human mission to Mars. He was Deputy Leader of the Science Team for the Department of Defense Clementine mission to the Moon in 1994 and is the Principal Investigator of an imaging radar experiment on the Indian Chandrayaan-1 mission, to be launched to the Moon in 2008. He was a member of the President’s Commission on the Implementation of U. S. Space Exploration Policy, whose report was issued June, 2004 and in September 2004, was presented with the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal for his work on that body. He is the receipient of the 2006 Von Karman Lectureship in Astronautics, awarded by the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is the author or co-author of over 150 scientific papers and three books, including The Once and Future Moon, a book for the general public in the Smithsonian Library of the Solar System series, and (with Ben Bussey) The Clementine Atlas of the Moon, published in 2004 by Cambridge University Press.