Lunar & Planetary Laboratory

Welcome to the University of Arizona’s Lunar & Planetary Laboratory (LPL). LPL was founded in 1960 by planetary astronomer Gerard P. Kuiper, after whom the Kuiper Belt of icy objects in the outer Solar System and the Kuiper Prize (the top honor of the world’s largest organization of planetary scientists) are named. Most of the original work was based on observations using telescopes, but as the exploration of the planets expanded in scope, so did LPL. In 1973, the Department of Planetary Sciences was formed, to educate succeeding generations of planetary scientists. Our dedicated faculty, research staff, and students come from a variety of backgrounds, including physics, astronomy, geosciences, chemistry, and engineering, but have a common interest in planets. In fact, the interdisciplinary nature of planetary science is one of its appeals for many of us, as we have to learn something of many of those other disciplines just to communicate, not to mention to succeed in understanding what is happening on, in, around, and between planets. Now, with the discovery of thousands of extrasolar planets, LPL is bringing that same interdisciplinary focus to understand whole new classes of worlds.