Faculty Spotlight: Jeff Moersch
Faculty Spotlight: Jeff Moersch
Professor Jeff Moersch is a planetary scientist who has been a valued EPS faculty member for over 23 years. He was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, and grew up mostly in Southern California. After earning his undergraduate degree in physics from Cornell University working with Professor Carl Sagan as his research advisor, he completed a Master’s degree in geology from Arizona State University under the tutelage of Professor Phil Christensen.
Moersch then returned to Cornell for a second MS and a PhD in astronomy working with Professor Steven Squyres. Prior to coming to UT, Moersch was a resident research associate of the National Research Council at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, working with Jack Farmer. He started at UT as a research assistant professor and transferred to the tenure track a few years later. Moersch is now the longest-serving active member of the department’s planetary group and is director of UT’s Planetary Geoscience Institute, an umbrella organization for all researchers on campus who conduct research in that area.
Moersch’s research interests can be divided into two broad categories related to planetary geology and remote sensing. First, he is interested in using the clues provided by Martian geology to understand Mars’s present and past surface environment and its potential for having once harbored life. He works with infrared spectroscopic and imaging observations of the Martian surface to understand its mineralogic composition, which in turn provides clues about things like the presence or absence of liquid water on the surface in the past.
The second broad category of his research deals with the technical aspects of building new science instruments for use on planetary spacecraft missions and optimization of the science yield from instruments in new operational environments, sometimes known as “exploration science.” Much of this work is carried out at so-called “terrestrial analogs,” which are sites on Earth that share some of the geologic and environmental characteristics of other planets.
Moersch has extensive experience with NASA missions. As a student, Moersch worked on the Voyager 2 mission’s encounters with the planets Uranus and Neptune, the Galileo mission’s Earth-Moon encounters, and the Mars Observer mission.
As a professional, Moersch has served on the science teams for NASA’s Deep Space 2/Mars Microprobe mission, the dual Mars Exploration Rover mission (Spirit and Opportunity) and the Mars Science Laboratory rover mission (Curiosity), as well as the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) experiment on the Mars Odyssey orbiter mission. He and his students have used data from these missions to study a wide variety of science topics, including the composition of rocks and regolith (and what they imply about past conditions), the distribution of subsurface water, and the nature of sedimentary features, such as dunes, alluvial fans, and paleolake basins.
His terrestrial analog research has taken him around the globe to sites such as Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg islands in the High Canadian Arctic, the Atacama Desert and Altiplano of Chile, the Mojave Desert, and most recently, the Icelandic Highlands. In the latter project, Moersch, current PhD advisee Udit Basu, and former advisee Michael Phillips (PhD ’21) helped conduct Mars rover mission simulations with the assistance of a scientifically capable drone to aid the rover as it explored a relatively pristine lava field.
As technologies have advanced, Moersch and his group have become deeply involved in remote sensing from drones. They currently have drones capable of mapping surface mineral compositions using hundreds of wavelengths of reflected light in the visible and near-infrared portion of the spectrum and imaging in the thermal infrared for mapping grain-size distributions, all at a previously unheard-of spatial resolution of a few centimeters per pixel. A second hyperspectral camera, capable of measuring emitted light in hundreds of thermal infrared channels from a drone for mineral composition, is currently being built for the group and will come online by the end of the year. It is anticipated that using these assets at terrestrial analog sites will lay the groundwork for scientifically-advanced drones on future missions, now that the wildly successful Ingenuity Mars helicopter has demonstrated the ability to conduct autonomous drone flights on the surface of the Red Planet. Stayed tuned for the next chapter of exciting planetary investigations.
