Robin M. Canup
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Robin M. Canup (born November 20, 1968) is an American planetary scientist. Her main area of research concerns the origins of planets and satellites. In 2003, Canup was awarded the Harold C. Urey Prize. In April, 2022, Canup presented the findings of the Planetary Science Decadal Survey as co-chair of the Survey Steering Committee with Philip R. Christensen.


Biography

She received her B.S. from
Duke University Duke University is a Private university, private research university in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity, North Carolina, Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1 ...
and her PhD from the
University of Colorado at Boulder The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a Public university, public research university in Boulder, Colorado, United States. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a Federated state, state, it is the fla ...
. Canup is known for her research based upon the
giant impact hypothesis The giant-impact hypothesis, sometimes called the Theia Impact, is an astrogeology hypothesis for the formation of the Moon first proposed in 1946 by Canadian geologist Reginald Daly. The hypothesis suggests that the Early Earth collided wi ...
, using intensive modeling to simulate how planetary collisions unfold. In 2012, Canup first published a refinement to the giant impact hypothesis, arguing that the Moon and the Earth formed in a series of steps that started with a massive collision of two planetary bodies, each larger than Mars, which then re-collided to form what we now call Earth. After the re-collision, Earth was surrounded by a disk of material, which combined to form the Moon. She has written a book on the origin of the Earth and Moon. Canup has also published research describing a giant impact origin for
Pluto Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of Trans-Neptunian object, bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object to directly orbit the Su ...
and
Charon In Greek mythology, Charon or Kharon ( ; ) is a psychopomp, the ferryman of the Greek underworld. He carries the souls of those who have been given funeral rites across the rivers Acheron and Styx, which separate the worlds of the living and ...
. Canup is an accomplished ballet dancer and danced the lead role in ''
Coppélia ''Coppélia'' (sometimes subtitled: ''La Fille aux Yeux d'Émail'' (The Girl with the Enamel Eyes)) is a comic ballet from 1870 originally choreographed by Arthur Saint-Léon to the music of Léo Delibes, with libretto by Charles-Louis-Éti ...
'' in the Boulder Ballet one week after finishing her dissertation.


Selected works

* * (member of Space Studies board) * Robin M. Canup, Kevin Righter, Nicolas Dauphas et al.:
Origin of the Moon
'. In: Reviews in Mineralogy and Geochemistry. Vol. 89, No 1. Dec. 2023.


References


External links

* from National Academy of Sciences
Interview with Robin Canup for NOVA series: To the Moon
WGBH Educational Foundation, raw footage, 1998
“NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Robin M. Canup, Astrophysicist,”
1998-00-00, WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. {{DEFAULTSORT:Canup, Robin M. Living people 1968 births Duke University alumni University of Colorado Boulder alumni American women astronomers Place of birth missing (living people) Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences American planetary scientists American women planetary scientists