 Matthew P. Golombek |
2015 G.K. Gilbert Award
Presented to Matthew P. Golombek
Citation by Hap McSween
Matt Golombek could arguably be a martian. More than any other earthling, he knows the red planet’s surface – its rocks and regolith, its craters and dunes, its hills and chasms, its dust devils and sunsets – all from rover’s-eye views. Over the past two decades, Matt ‘s signature achievement has been as a leader in rover mission design and operations: as the Project Scientist for Mars Pathfinder, as Science Operations Working Group Chair, Geology Theme Group Lead, and now Project Scientist for the Mars Exploration Rovers, , and most recently as Geology Co-Investigator for InSight. Exploring geologic locales on the ground using rover-mounted instruments is fundamentally different from orbital planetary science, and Matt has been instrumental in guiding the rest of us through this transition.
If that were not enough, his understanding of the geology of potential landing sites on Mars, and of the technological challenges they pose to safe arrivals, qualify as an indispensible NASA resource. He has, in fact, led or been heavily involved in the selection of every successful Mars landing site in the modern era, and is now leading landing site selection for InSight and the Mars 2020 rover.
As an undergraduate geology major at Rutgers and as a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Matt focused on extensional structures and tectonics, working simultaneously on faults in the Rio Grand rift, lunar grabens, deformation around the Tharsis bulge on Mars, and grooves on Ganymede. Following a postdoc appointment at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Matt joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a Research Scientist. There he has continued his research in both terrestrial and planetary tectonics, expanding the geographic scale and wavelengths of observation by using global positioning data in his earth studies and other geophysical tools in his planetary research. His resume boasts 158 papers, more or less evenly divided between the earth and the planets for the first decade of his career, and strongly titled towards Mars during the last twenty-five years. Let’s focus just on planetary geoscience, for which the Gilbert Award is given. A few of Matt’s seminal planetary contributions include:
- Multi-faceted studies of grabens, faults, and joints on Mars, and what they reveal about tectonism on a world without moving plates,
- Quantification of the size-frequency distributions of martian rocks, which are critical data for the assessment of landing site hazards,
- Measurement of erosion rates on Mars, which have implications for long-term climate change.
And when human explorers finally go to Mars, they would be well advised to study Matt’s papers describing the geology of landing sites and his review papers summarizing the planet’s tectonic evolution; although that will likely be far in the future, I surmise that Matt’s insightful publications on martian geology will still be current.
Matt Golombek, the martian explorer, certainly deserves the GSA Planetary Geology Division’s G. K. Gilbert Award, as does Matt Golombek, the planetary geology researcher. NASA’s Mars Exploration Program owes much of its success to Matt’s operational expertise, to his encyclopedic knowledge of the fourth planet from the sun, and to his ability to communicate, often with wit and an infectious giggle, the excitement of planetary exploration and the significance of scientific discoveries to non-scientists. And his published contributions stand as significant advances in our understanding of planetary tectonics and surface geologic processes. I am pleased and honored to join the Planetary Geology Division in recognizing my martian colleague and friend Matt Golombek as the 2015 Gilbert Awardee.
2015 G.K. Gilbert Award — Response by Matthew P. Golombek
I am humbled to receive the G. K. Gilbert award from my planetary geology colleagues and honored to be included in a group of such distinguished scientists. It is particularly meaningful for me to be receiving this planetary award from the Geological Society of America because I started my career as a traditional geologist in geology departments, where the geology of planets wasn’t treated all that differently than any other geology specialty.
It has certainly been my good fortune to be part of our Mars exploration renaissance during the past 20 years. I never would have guessed that I would wind up selecting landing sites on Mars for a living. It started with Mars Pathfinder, which came after a 20-year hiatus in our exploration of Mars. As Project Scientist, I had to figure out how to select a landing site on Mars with no new data since Viking. The highest resolution images we had were 40 m/pixel and the engineers were most concerned about rocks and slopes at 1 m scale.
I got interested in geology, because I wanted to know how mountains and valleys formed and because I like being outdoors. I have always had a fascination with maps and navigating with them. Linking surface characteristics inferred from remote sensing data to what is actually found on the surface comes from this interest and is something that is essential for understanding potential landing sites.
One of the hallmarks of a good scientist is understanding his or her data – how it is obtained, what it reveals and what it does not. Because planetary geologists get their data from spacecraft that carry instruments, they must understand how both work. This requires true collaboration with our engineering friends. Engineers tell you how a spacecraft works, how it lands and what can make the landing fail (for example, rocks, steep slopes, and non-load bearing surfaces). It is the scientist’s job to figure out how to measure these attributes on Mars.
I have been fortunate to have a number of mentors through my career, who have taught me so much. As an undergraduate at Rutgers, Michael J. Carr, the volcanologist, showed me the joy of learning new things through research. As a graduate student at UMass, George McGill taught me to be systematic, Don Wise taught me never to lose site of the big picture, and Laurie Brown taught me to always follow where the data takes you. As a postdoc at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Roger Phillips taught me to always be quantitative and during Pathfinder the late Hank Moore taught me how to relate Viking orbital information to what was seen by the landers on the surface. At JPL, I have been able to work with the best engineers on this planet, who not only design and build amazing spacecraft, but also have a genuine and keen interest in the science they produce. I have also been fortunate to work with a wide diversity of colleagues, post docs and students throughout my career who often taught me more than I taught them. Finally, I lovingly acknowledge my family, Connie my wife and companion, and children Benjamin and Sydney for keeping me grounded here on Earth while I have been on Mars.