Pascal Lee

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Pascal Lee is chairman and co-founder of the Mars Institute, a planetary scientist with the SETI Institute, and the Principal Investigator of NASA's Haughton-Mars Project (HMP). In conjunction with his role with HMP, he has travelled to the Arctic to conduct studies using Devon Island as a Martian analog.

Lee has also participated in several planetary flyby missions. As a graduate student, he assisted the imaging teams for the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune and the flybys of asteroids 951 Gaspra and 243 Ida. As a graduate student, he took acted as an associate on the Mars Observer's camera team, and worked with the scientist team for the Mars Polar Lander.

Lee's father is Chinese and his mother is French. Lee spent over a year in Antarctica doing research for his Ph.D. dissertation. He received his PhD in astronomy and space science from Cornell University in 1997.

Lee was involved in the founding of the Mars Society, although he is no longer affiliated with it. Lee is mentioned in two of Robert Zubrin's books: Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization, and Mars On Earth: The Adventures of Space Pioneers in the High Arctic, which chronicles one of HMP's expeditions to Devon Island. Lee is also mentioned in Oliver Morton's book Mapping Mars.