Mark Boslough
Mark Boslough https://asteroidday.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/mark_boslough_profile-1.jpg 480 270 Asteroid Day https://asteroidday.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/mark_boslough_profile-1.jpgAsteroid Day Affiliation:
Dr. Mark Boslough is the Chair of the Asteroid Day Expert Panel (ADXP).
Dr. Mark Boslough is a physicist and expert in the study of planetary impacts and global catastrophes. His work on airbursts challenged the conventional view of asteroid collision risk and is now widely accepted by the scientific community. A proponent of scientific skepticism, Dr. Boslough is a vocal critic of pseudoscience and anti-science such as climate change denial. He was elected in 2011 as a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
Boslough received his BS in Physics from Colorado State University in 1977 and his PhD in Applied Physics from Caltech 1983. He was a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories from 1983 until his retirement in 2017. At Sandia, he worked on many aspects of planetary impact physics, including Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact models, formation of the Libyan Desert of Egypt, the 1908 Tunguska explosion, the 2008 TC3 airburst over Sudan, and impacts on Jupiter in 2010 and 2012. He now works on planetary defense at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Mark served on the asteroid mitigation panel and coauthored the NRC report “Defending Planet Earth” in 2010. He was the first US scientist to visit the site of the 2013 Chelyabinsk airburst as a participant in a NOVA documentary. His simulation of that event appeared on the covers of Nature in November 2013 and Physics Today in September 2014. He provided information and simulations of airbursts for disaster scenarios for FEMA tabletop exercises in 2013, 2014, and 2016, and helped develop impact scenarios for Planetary Defense Conferences in Flagstaff, Arizona (2013), Frascati, Italy (2015), Tokyo, Japan (2017), and College Park, Maryland (2019). He has appeared in dozens of science documentaries and television shows. In recognition of Boslough’s work in the field of planetary impacts and global catastrophes, Asteroid 73520 Boslough (2003 MB1) was named in his honor.
Follow Mark:
Twitter
Watch Mark’s videos:
2018 Asteroid Day LIVE from Luxembourg – Session 1
2018 Asteroid Day LIVE from Luxembourg – Session 8
2018 Asteroid Day LIVE from Luxembourg – Session 11
2018 Asteroid Day LIVE from Luxembourg – Session 14
2019 Asteroid Day LIVE from Luxembourg – Panel 10: Storytelling Tools for Complex Science
