James R. Arnold
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James R. Arnold (Jim Arnold) is a Cosmochemistry professor, now emeritus, at the University of California, San Diego's California Space Institute (CalSpace).
Jim Arnold is Harold C. Urey Professor of Chemistry (emeritus) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), with a speciality in Cosmochemistry. He received his degrees in chemistry from Princeton University. As a graduate student there, he worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. He began his research career at the University of Chicago, working under Prof. Willard Libby in the development of Carbon-14 dating.
He was brought to UCSD by Dr. Roger Revelle in 1958 as one of the first faculty members for the then-new UCSD campus, to be the founding chairman of the UCSD Department of Chemistry.
His research over the last several decades has been mainly in the area of space and planetary science, including participation in NASA's Apollo missions to the moon, and studies of lunar samples returned by those missions. He was the first director of the University of California's California Space Institute. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received a number of medals and awards, including the E.O. Lawrence Award in Chemistry and the Leonard Medal of the Meteoritical Society, Asteroid #2143 "Jimarnold" is named for him. His participation in the Apollo program of manned exploration of the moon led him, along with Gerard O'Neill, Freeman Dyson, and other space scientists, to think about the future of human exploration and settlement of the moon, Mars, and other solar system objects.
In 1979 he published a paper calling attention to the possible existence of substantial deposits of ice in the lunar polar regions. Experiments in this area continue, and as yet the question remains unsettled.
His current interests are mainly in the area of increasing access to the space frontier, in particular by lowering costs while maintaining or improving reliability. The link between this goal and the education of a new generation of space leaders is very close.
He has also had a long relationship with eucalyptus trees, which are common in the San Diego area, although native to Australia. He has planted dozens of trees in the UCSD area, and set up an experiment to find a species that would be appropriate to use as street trees in southern California cities. Street trees cool down urban areas and so reduce energy use for air conditioning, and also create a more humane space for people.
Jim Arnold was born in 1929, in New York.
