Harold Y. McSween

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Harold "Hap" Y. McSween is a Professor of Planetary Geoscience and Distinguished Professor of Science at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He specializes in meteorites, particularly chondrites, and studies them to understand the formation of the solar system, in the process, publishing hundreds of papers on the cosmochemistry, mineralogy, and petrology of those meteorites. McSween has also published four books on the subject.

McSween has been President of the Meteoritical Society, Chair of the Planetary Division of the Geological Society of America, and a Councilor of the Geological Society of America. He also is a member on several advisory committees for NASA and the National Research Council.

He became involved with the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997 as a member of the science team, then on the team for Mars Global Surveyor. Since then McSween has been a co-investigator on both the Mars Odyssey and Mars Exploration Rovers missions. He will also be a co-investigator for the upcoming Dawn Mission.

Honors include the Leonard Medal from the Meteoritical Society, the Leconte Medal from the South Carolina Science Council, and the Fellow Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

McSween also has an asteroid named for him: 5223 McSween (1981 EX6).