ABSTRACT
Paul D. Lowman Jr. is a geologist in the Planetary Geodynamics Laboratory at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The first geologist hired by NASA, in 1959, he has been involved in most major manned flight programs, including Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and the Shuttle. His main research area is comparative planetology as applied to the origin of the Earth’s continental crust. He has worked in lunar sample analysis, orbital photography, and orbital radar. From 1973 to 2004 he shifted to global tectonics, producing a map of global tectonic and volcanic activity of the last one million years. He is author of several books, most recently Exploring Space, Exploring Earth (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
