Harold F. (Hal) Levison (born 1959) is an American
planetary scientist
Planetary science (or more rarely, planetology) is the scientific study of planets (including Earth), celestial bodies (such as moons, asteroids, comets) and planetary systems (in particular those of the Solar System) and the processes of their ...
specializing in planetary dynamics. He currently works at the
Southwest Research Institute
Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, is an independent and nonprofit applied research and development (R&D) organization. Founded in 1947 by oil businessman Tom Slick, it provides contract research and develop ...
,
Boulder, Colorado
Boulder is a home rule city that is the county seat and most populous municipality of Boulder County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 108,250 at the 2020 United States census, making it the 12th most populous city in Color ...
, and studies planetary orbits and their evolution through
Solar System history.
Levison is the Principal Investigator of the
''Lucy'' mission to tour multiple
Jupiter trojan
The Jupiter trojans, commonly called trojan asteroids or simply trojans, are a large group of asteroids that share the planet Jupiter's orbit around the Sun. Relative to Jupiter, each trojan librates around one of Jupiter's stable Lagrange poin ...
s, which was selected as the thirteenth mission in NASA's
Discovery Program in January 2017.
Among other achievements, Levison is the co-author of
SWIFT, a commonly used
symplectic integrator that solves planetary
equations of motion for periods of
billions of years.
Levison argued for a distinction between what are now called
dwarf planets and the other eight
planets based on their inability to "
clear the neighborhood around their orbits", although his proposal suggested the terms "unterplanet" and "überplanet" and used the word "dwarf" to mean something else.
References
Planetary scientists
Living people
1959 births
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