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Jim Bell

James F. Bell (III)
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Jim Bell joined The Planetary Society’s Board of Directors in 2005.  An Associate Professor in the Cornell University Astronomy Department, Bell is the lead scientist for the Pancam color imaging system on the NASA Mars Exploration Rover (Spirit and Opportunity) missions,and is working on a book titled "Postcards from Mars" (Pi Press, 2006) which will be a pictorial history of the rover missions. Bell served as the science team liaison for The Planetary Society's  Red Rover Goes to Mars student program and the sundial experiment on the Mars Exploration Rovers.

Bell received his B.S. from Caltech in 1987 and his Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii in 1992, performing research on Mars surface mineralogy and climate variations using infrared and optical telescopes at Mauna Kea Observatory. He spent 3 years as a National Research Council postdoctoral research fellow at NASA's Ames Research Center in California prior to coming to Cornell in 1995.

His studies primarily focus on the geology, chemistry, and mineralogy of planets, asteroids, and comets using data obtained from telescopes and spacecraft missions. Bell is also a member of the science teams of the NASA Mars Pathfinder, Mars '01 Odyssey Orbiter, Mars '05 Reconnaissance Orbiter, and 2009 Mars Science Laboratory missions.