Title
Senior Scientist
Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research

Biography

A native of Greece, Thanasis (Tom) Economou has been building instruments for interplanetary spacecraft since the mid-1960s. Currently he is associated with three of NASA’s robotic missions: the Mars Exploration Rovers, the Cassini mission to Saturn, and the now-complete Stardust mission to Comet Wild-2, which has been redirected to a second cometary target. Economou also built the Alpha Proton X-ray Spectrometer that successfully performed the first chemical analysis of martian rocks aboard the Mars Pathfinder rover in 1997. Working in the laboratory of Anthony Turkevich, he contributed to the alpha backscattering experiment of three robotic Surveyor space probes that landed on the moon in 1967-68. With Turkevich during the 1970s and 1980s, he also conducted basic nuclear physics research on the subatomic structure of matter using the most advanced particle accelerators at Los Alamos, Argonne and Fermi National Accelerator laboratories. During the 1990s they performed an important double beta decay experiment of Uranium-238 to Plutonium-238, suggesting for the first time that neutrinos consists of a small quantity of mass.

Research

Mars Exploration Rover Mission:

U of C News, MARS Daily, Science Daily

Cassini Exploration Mission: JPL Cassini

Stardust Next Mission:

JPL Stardust Next, JPL Stardust Next Interview

Orliakas Optical Telescope:

Oddysey News Article, pdf file, Orliakas Observatory Website, Download Orliakas Observatory PDF Document

Education

M.S. 1961 Nuclear Physics Charles University, Prague, Czechoslovakia; Postgraduate Degree 1964 Institute for Plasma Physics, Prague, Czechoslovakia

Curriculum Vitae , Publications 2000-2005

 

tom

Contact Information

Email: tecon@tecon.uchicago.edu

Phone: 773-702-7829

FAX: 773-702-6645

Location: Lasr Room 138