Fran Bagenal

Frances "Fran" Bagenal (born 4 November 1954) is a Professor Emerita of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and a Senior Research Scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in the fields of space plasmas and planetary magnetospheres.

Frances Bagenal
Bagenal in 2019
Born	(1954-11-04) 4 November 1954 (age 70) Dorchester, Dorset, England
Alma mater	Lancaster University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Known for	Work on NASA planetary exploration missions as a plasma scientist
Scientific career
Fields	Planetary science
Institutions	NASA

Early life

Bagenal is from Dorchester, England, and grew up near Cambridge.^[1]

Career

Bagenal has worked on a number of planetary science missions including the Voyager Plasma Science (PLS) experiment, Galileo, Deep Space 1, New Horizons mission to Pluto, and the Juno mission to Jupiter.^[2] Usually in her work on different missions, she is a member of the science team as a plasma scientist.^[1] Bagenal chaired NASA's Outer Planet Assessment Group that provides input from the scientific community on exploration of the outer Solar System.^[3] She appeared in The Farthest, a 2017 documentary on the Voyager program, and in multiple television documentaries including the NOVA 2019 miniseries The Planets.^[4]

Honors

• Elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2006.^[5]
• James Van Allen Lecture award of the American Geophysical Union in 2018^[6][7]
• Elected a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society in 2020 ^[8]
• Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021 ^[9]
• The outer main-belt asteroid 10020 Bagenal, discovered by astronomer Schelte J. Bus at Palomar Observatory in 1979, was named in her honor.^[10] The official naming citation was published on 13 April 2017 (M.P.C. 103974).^[11]

Selected publications

• Bagenal, Fran; Dowling, Timothy E.; McKinnon, William B. (2007). Jupiter: The Planet, Satellites and Magnetosphere. Cambridge University Press. p. 732. ISBN 978-0-5218-1808-7.
• Bagenal, Fran; Keiling, Andreas; Donovan, Eric; Karlsson, Tomas (2012). Auroral Phenomenology and Magnetospheric Processes: Earth and Other Planets. American Geophysical Union. p. 443. ISBN 978-0-8759-0487-0.