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Board of Directors

Jim Bell

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Jim Bell joined The Planetary Society's Board of Directors in 2005. A professor of astronomy at Cornell University, Bell is also the lead scientist for the Pancam color imaging system on the Mars Exploration Rovers and has written two books about his Mars work: Postcards from Mars and Mars 3-D: A Rover's Eye View of the Red Planet. He has also been actively or previously involved as a science team member of the NASA Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, Mars Pathfinder, Mars Odyssey, Comet Nucleus Tour, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and Mars Science Laboratory missions.

Bell has been a Planetary Society Board member since 2005 and served as the science team liaison for The Planetary Society's Red Rover Goes to Mars student program and the MarsDial experiment on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. He is a member of the American Astronomical Society, the International Astronomical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Geophysical Union. His scientific studies primarily focus on the geology, chemistry, and mineralogy of planets, moons, asteroids, and comets using data obtained from telescopes, laboratory studies, and spacecraft missions.

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.