Dr. Sean C. Solomon standing before the MESSENGER spacecraft just prior to its journey from Goddard Space Flight Center to Kennedy Space Center, March 9, 2004.

Dr. Sean C. Solomon is director of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM). As Principal Investigator for the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) mission, he heads a multi-institutional consortium of scientists and engineers who will launch the small, efficient MESSENGER spacecraft to Mercury in August 2004. MESSENGER will orbit the closest planet to the Sun for one Earth-year beginning in 2011.

Solomon’s research spans a variety of disciplines including planetary geology and geophysics, seismology, marine geophysics, and geodynamics. His experience ranges from oceanographic expeditions on Earth to spacecraft missions to Venus, Mars, and Mercury. To date, the only craft sent to Mercury was Mariner 10 in the 1970s, and it imaged less than half of the planet. With a suite of seven miniaturized instruments, MESSENGER will address questions that are key to understanding terrestrial planet evolution. Solomon’s particular interests are to learn more about Mercury’s bulk composition and what that tells us about planet formation in general; to investigate its volcanic, tectonic, and internal evolution; and to understand how the planet’s magnetic field originated and determine whether there is a liquid outer core. Mariner 10 discovered that Mercury has a weak magnetic field, a phenomenon that is thought to arise from an electromagnetic dynamo created in a liquid metallic outer core. Because the planet is small, scientists had thought that the core had cooled and solidified long ago. MESSENGER will investigate this question as well as the nature of the planet’s thin atmosphere and the composition of the permanently shadowed polar deposits.

Solomon is also Principal Investigator for Carnegie’s research as part of the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI). Astrobiology is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the origin of life on Earth and its potential for existing elsewhere. Scientists from DTM and Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory are working on a range of research problems broadly addressing the evolution of organic compounds from prebiotic molecular synthesis and organization to cellular evolution and diversification. Solomon is also a team member on a variety of other projects including the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) investigation and the Plume-Lithosphere Undersea Mantle Experiment (PLUME). Data from MOLA, an instrument on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, have been used to construct precise topographical maps to understand Martian geology, geophysics, and atmospheric circulation. PLUME is a combined land and ocean-bottom seismic experiment to image the mantle beneath the Hawaiian hotspot. Solomon is leading the land section of this project.

Solomon received a B.S. in geophysics, (with honor) from Caltech in 1966 and a Ph.D. in geophysics from MIT in 1971. Before joining Carnegie, he was Professor of Geophysics at MIT. Solomon is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and was awarded the Arthur L. Day Prize and Lectureship from the Academies in 1999. He was also awarded the G. K. Gilbert Award from the Geological Society of America that year. He was president of the American Geophysical Union from 1996 to 1998 and has served on many editorial boards for publications in the Earth and planetary sciences. For more information see http://www.ciw.edu/solomon/.