Dr. Mark Sykes Director Planetary Science Institute sykes @psi.edu

Research Interests

• Origin and evolution of interplanetary dust
• Asteroid composition
• Space Policy

Dr. Sykes is interested in the origin and evolution of dust in the solar system. He studies cometary dust trails and the collisional production of dust in the asteroid belt, primarily using spacebased infrared telescopes. He is interested in the compositional gradient in the early solar system and the heating and dynamical processes by which that gradient evolved. He is a member of the Dawn Science Team. Dawn will be orbiting two of three surviving terrestrial protoplanets in the main asteroid belt: Vesta and Ceres. He will be studying how the presence or absence of water shaped the early histories of those two bodies.

Asteroid number 4388 is named in honor of Dr. Sykes.

For more information, see Mark Sykes' Home Page.