Timothy Livengood

Tim Livengood teaches Solar System astronomy and measures composition, temperature, and wind velocity in planetary atmospheres, using ground- and space-based techniques. He is the Principal Investigator for SSOLVE, the Submillimeter Solar Observation Lunar Volatiles Experiment, an instrument to measure water vapor in the Moon’s extremely tenuous atmosphere from the lunar surface. SSOLVE is part of a proposed mission which you will hear about if it gets selected for flight. He has been a co-investigator on several instruments and instrument-development projects, including the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector (LEND), the Submillimeter Enceladus Life Fundamentals Instrument (SELFI), Venus Wideband Submillimeter Heterodyne Spectrometer (V-WISHES), and Surface and Exosphere Alteration by Landings (SEAL). He was a co-investigator of NASA’s EPOXI mission, for which he was the education and public outreach team leader on the EPOCh component (Extrasolar Planets Observation and Characterization). He has cowritten education modules for the K-12 level to teach science using… modern science, like planetary flight missions and exoplanets and such. Tim has led science education workshops for hundreds of teachers at a time, and Family Science Night programs with audiences totaling about 25,000. He was the lead Principal Investigator for the final observational program of the International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE), for observations of the Jupiter system. In his copious free time, he is a storyteller. He greatly enjoys opportunities to travel the country on behalf of NASA or other organizations to talk about space science and astronomy. If you ask nicely, with plenty of lead time, he might make a model comet for you.