Urey and Whipple Prizes for Planetary Science

The UC Santa Cruz site issued a press release about one of their professors, Francis Nimmo, winning the Urey Prize in Planetary Science presented by the American Astronomical Society by younger scientists. Dr. Nimmo has a diverse set of planetary science work covering subjects like heat flow on Mercury, plate tectonics on Venus, magma and crust on Mars, and magnetism in the Earth's core, as well as work on outer planet icy moons like Enceladus and Triton.

Meanwhile the American Geophysical Union, and specifically the Planetary Sciences section of the AGU, has selected the next winner of the Whipple Award for an outstanding contribution in the field of planetary science. The winner will give a lecture at the Fall AGU meeting. This meeting will be held in San Francisco, and is expected to draw 15,000 people. The mass notification I got included the name of the 2007 winner, so it's not exactly a secret, but I couldn't find a single reference to who the 2007 winner is on the the Web, so I'll let them make a public/media announcement at the meeting.