Dale P. Cruikshank

Dr. Dale P. Cruikshank is an astronomer and planetary scientist in the Astrophysics Branch at NASA Ames Research Center. His research specialties are spectroscopy and radiometry of planets and small bodies in the Solar System. These small bodies include comets, asteroids, planetary satellites, dwarf planets (e.g., Pluto), and objects in the region beyond Neptune (Kuiper belt objects and trans-Neptunian bodies). He uses spectroscopic observations made with ground-based and space-based telescopes, as well as interplanetary spacecraft, to identify and study the ices, minerals, and organic materials that compose the surfaces of planets and small bodies.

Together with several colleagues, Cruikshank has found many kinds of ice on several small planetary bodies. These include frozen CH₄, N₂, CO, CO₂, and H₂O on Neptune's satellite Triton, CH₄, N₂, and CO on Pluto, H₂O on Pluto's satellite Charon, H₂O ice on many of the moons of Saturn and Uranus, H₂O and CH₃OH on the Centaur object 5145 Pholus. In studies with the Cassini spacecraft, he and his colleagues have found hydrocarbons on several of Saturn's satellites.

Cruikshank gained a B.S. in Physics at Iowa State University and finished his graduate studies with a Ph.D. degree at the University of Arizona in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory as a student of Gerard Kuiper in 1968. After a year in the USSR as a National Academy of Sciences exchange scientist, he returned to Arizona for a year, and then moved to the University of Hawaii in mid-1970. As an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy, he helped with the development of Mauna Kea as one of the most important observatory sites in the world, and used the many telescopes there for his observational studies of the bodies in the Solar System. Cruikshank has joined NASA in 1988.

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