Harry McSween
The planetary geologist who helped prove that the SNC meteorites come from Mars and wrote widely read books on meteorites and their parent worlds.
Key facts
- Born
- 1945
- Nationality
- American
- Field
- Planetary geologist
Harry Y. McSween Jr. is a professor of planetary science at the University of Tennessee. His research has centred on igneous meteorites, the rocks that crystallised from molten magma on asteroids and planets.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s he studied the shergottites, nakhlites and chassignites, which were puzzling because they were volcanic rocks far younger than other meteorites. McSween argued that they came from a large planet that was still volcanically active long after asteroids had cooled, and that the best candidate was Mars. The discovery of Martian air in one of them in 1983 confirmed it. He later wrote a review that became the standard summary of the Martian meteorites.
McSween has also worked on space missions. He was a member of the science teams for the Mars Pathfinder and Mars Exploration Rover missions and for NASA's Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres, where he helped compare the asteroid's surface with the howardite, eucrite and diogenite meteorites.
He has written textbooks and popular books on meteorites and planetary geology. He has received the Leonard Medal of the Meteoritical Society, and an asteroid is named after him.
See more
The Shergotty meteoriteThe Nakhla meteoriteThe Chassigny meteoriteThe Zagami meteorite