Carter Biographical Sketch Giordano Bruno and history dept I was born and raised in the countryside of Great Britain, amidst green grass and gentle rain. I spent an uneventful childhood in a small village of two thousand souls. During my final year of high school, I decided to continue my education and applied to university. I applied to many universities, but wanted to go to Cambridge University. I had not always been challenged in high school and felt that I would learn best in an academically challenging enviroment. I was also motivated by Cambridge's sense of personal support for its students and superb setting. I was accepted - if my final high school grades were good. I settled down to study, then waited nervously for the results. I was pleasantly surprised to get A's in all my courses, and amazed to hear that my chemistry grade was the best in the country that year. I spent four enjoyable years at Cambridge and will always treasure the friendships that I made there. Without a doubt, the curriculum was challenging enough for me and I found it a productive enviroment. Cambridge's curriculum lies between the American extreme of a very general undergraduate education and the typical British extreme of a very focused undergraduate education in which a physics major will take nothing but physics courses. My courses there ranged across the physical sciences. At the end of my time there, I had received both a bachelor's and a master's degree in physics with grades equivalent to straight A's, and was ready to move on. I spent the summer after my sophomore year working at an astronomical observatory in the Spanish Canary Islands. I then had an epiphany upon my return to Cambridge, when I realised that some American universities taught graduate programs in planetary science. Until then I had thought that that was something that NASA scientists did at Cape Canaveral in Florida or such like. I had neglected to wonder about how and where these NASA scientists were trained. I spent the summer after my junior year working at Caltech, then travelled around the country for a month afterwards visiting the universities that I was considering applying to for graduate school. I rode Greyhound buses from West to East Coast and back again that month, passing through over 30 states and visiting many of America's great sights as well as a few universities. Tucson stood out. Its planetary science department had a much greater breadth than any other, very friendly and welcoming students, faculty, and staff, superb mountain views, and just seemed like a good place to be. I did well on my GREs, scoring in the 97th percentile or higher on all three sections of the general test and in the 92nd percentile in the physics test, and was invited to start graduate school here in Tucson. Unlike many of my contemporaries, I have enjoyed my first two years of classes. They have taught me things that I would not have learnt had I jumped straight into research upon my arrival here. One full summer in Tucson was enough though, and I spent last summer working with a research group at a NASA centre near Washington, DC, where I enjoyed the opportunities to work on a new project with scientists who build and operate spacecraft and to discover how research is performed at government research institutions. I hope to obtain another fruitful research placement for this coming summer. Despite the distractions of classes, my research has been progressing well. I have presented different aspects of it at conferences in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, and Breckenridge and expect my first publications to appear in the professional literature in 2001. One interesting project that I have worked on is testing the hypothesis that a mile-wide object crashed into the Moon in 1178 AD. This hypothesis is based on a provocative passage in a medieval chronicle and the existence of a suspiciously young-looking crater on the Moon. Working with a professor in the History Department, I calculated the meteor storm that the Earth would experience due to the arrival of impact ejecta in the following few days and searched medieval chronicles for records of a dramatic meteor storm at the correct time. The results of this work are about to be published in a professional journal. I have also done some public outreach activities. I have twice presented at the University of Arizona's Student Showcase, winning the graduate student/physical sciences category once. An essay on discovering planets outside our solar system was highly commended in a young science writer's contest. Another short essay beat 17,000 other entries to win a NASA contest naming two spacecraft that should have landed on Mars in December 1999. Unfortunately, the spacecraft, Amundsen and Scott, which should have explored the martian south pole, were unsuccessful. Looking up at the night sky would have been be forever changed, for whenever Mars glowed red above the horizon, I would have thought of those my two small probes lying on its surface.