Michael C. Malin

Highly prestigious awards

Bio image

Bio

Malin is a geologist and a planetary scientist who has made contributions to geomorphology, volcanology, planetary geology, geophysics, computer graphics simulation and image synthesis, and remote sensing. From 1979 to 1991, he was a professor at Arizona State University. He received his MacArthur award in 1987. In 1990, he established Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego to design, develop, and operate instruments that fly on unmanned spacecraft. He is the principal investigator for several camera systems flown on missions to Mars between 1996 and 2004, sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). After completing two cameras for the 2005 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, he worked on three cameras for the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover mission (2009) and on four cameras for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (2008). He continues to analyze images from the Mars Global Surveyor Camera, which has been orbiting Mars since September of 1997. He has published numerous articles in such publications as Science, the Journal of Geophysical Research, and Nature. He received an AB (1971) from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD (1976) from the California Institute of Technology (taken from the MacArthur Foundation website). Malin Space Science Systems, Inc. is one of the team members, the prime subcontractor for instrument development and uplink operations, for ASU's Mastcam-Z on the Mars 2020 rover, a project headed by Professor Jim Bell.