Joshua Cahill
Deputy Director of the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium
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Dr. Joshua Cahill is the Deputy Director of the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium and
a Senior Staff Scientist in the Planetary Exploration Group at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics
Laboratory. He is a multi-disciplinary planetary geologist with experience in the fields of lunar and
terrestrial spectroscopy and radar remote sensing, geochemistry, and petrology. He is a Co-Investigator on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission supporting both the Mini-RF
synthetic aperture radar and the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) instrument payloads.
For these instruments, he has supported various aspects of lunar surface observation targeting,
calibration, mapping, and scientific analysis over the last 10 years. This includes utilizing Mini-RF
observations to create some of the first global mapping perspectives of the Moon in S-band radar.
Recently, Cahill became a Co-Investigator on NASA's Lunar Vertex, the first mission to visit the magnetic anomaly and lunar swirl, Reiner Gamma.
Previously, Dr. Cahill served as a Co-Investigator supporting the NASA Solar System Exploration
Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) node, VORTICES, led by APL and studying volatile detection
and processes on the Moon and other airless bodies. And during the precursor to SSERVI, NASA’s
Lunar Science Institute (NLSI), he supported investigation of lunar polar and non-polar illumination
studies of the Moon for detection of areas permanent shadow and near perpetual illumination.
Dr. Cahill has participated in, or led, a number of instrument developments focused upon spectroscopy and radar over the last 15 years. Most recently, responding to NASA’s PRISM call to explore
the floor of Schrödinger Impact Basin, he acted as Principal Investigator for a highly capable team
that developed the Farside GLASS mission concept. Farside GLASS would be NASA’s first domestically led lander and rover mission to explore the far side of the Moon.