Samuel Courville

I study a wide range of planetary geophysics topics from where to find buried water ice on Mars to the thermal evolution of asteroids. As a PhD student, I am studying how planets fromed by showing that as planetesimals heated, they could have been magnetized by the powerful magnetic field in the early solar system. My past research has included mapping the availability of water ice in the shallow subsurface of Mars, determining the composition of layering in Mars' polar ice caps, designing a seismometer for asteroids to probe their interiors, determining the composition of crater peaks on the Moon using gravity data, and designing a mission to rendezvous with the next interstellar object.