Michael A'Hearn

Michael A'Hearn
Michael A'Hearn
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Boston College
Scientific career
Fields	Astronomy
Institutions	University of Maryland

Michael F. A'Hearn (born 1940) is an astronomer and professor at the University of Maryland who is the principal investigator for the NASA EPOXI mission. He was the principal investigator for the NASA Deep Impact mission. He received his bachelors in science at Boston College and his Ph.D. in Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has aided in the development of systems for surveying abundances in comets as well as techniques for determining the sizes of cometary nuclei which uses optical and infrared measurements.

His studies focus on comets as well as asteroids and he also supervises numerous graduate students. He is an elected fellow of the AAAS. He has authored over 100 papers published in journals and is also an avid sailor who has a commercial coast guard license. He received the Kuiper Prize in 2008.

Asteroid 3192 A'Hearn was named after him in 1986 to honor his contributions to cometary science.

External links

• Michael F. A'Hearn's homepage
• Kuiper Prize website of the American Astronomical Society
• Nasa bio on Deep Impact website