Mark Panning

Mark Panning has had a long focus on determining the interior structure of the Earth and other planetary bodies. After completing his Ph.D. in Geophysics from the University of California, Berkeley with a focus on modeling 3D structure of the Earth’s mantle using seismic tomography, he stayed on at Berkeley to do postdoctoral research extending seismic approaches to modeling how to use potential seismic data from Europa.

After spending several years on the faculty of the University of Florida, dividing his research between terrestrial and planetary seismology interests, he came to JPL in 2017 to focus on planetary applications of seismology. He is currently the Principal Investigator for the Farside Seismic Suite (https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/the-farside-seismic-suite), which will send the first seismic sensors to the farside of the Moon on a commercial lander scheduled for launch in 2026. He was also the Project Scientist and Co-Investigator on the InSight mission which operated on Mars from 2018-2022, and a Co-Investigator on the Dragonfly mission to Titan (http://dragonfly.jhuapl.edu) currently in development and expected to reach the moon of Saturn in the 2030s. He has also worked on modeling possible seismic signals on Europa, Titan, Enceladus and other icy ocean worlds, and is deeply interested in any way to get seismic data back from other planetary bodies.

See http://seismology.space for more information