Tom G. Farr

Instructor

Email: tfarr@pipeline.sbcc.edu

Tom Farr has degrees in geology from CalTech and the University of Washington. After a short time as an engineering geologist, he joined the Radar Sciences Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for a career spanning 1975-2020. At JPL, he helped develop the first geologic applications of imaging radar using aircraft, satellites, and the Space Shuttle. He was a science investigator on European and Japanese satellite programs and has studied the geology of Mars, Venus, and recently Saturn’s moon Titan. He was deputy project scientist for a Shuttle project to map the 3-D topography of the Earth in 2000. For that mission, he also served as the lead payload communicator with the Shuttle astronauts. He participated in or led geological expeditions to Tibet, northwestern China, the Egyptian Sahara, and our local deserts, including geology training of Shuttle astronauts. His latest projects concerned mapping subsidence in the Central Valley of California for the Department of Water Resources and helping develop an integrated observation and modeling effort focused on water resources of the western US. After retiring from JPL, Tom had continued teaching the Planetary Exploration class as well as hiking and running the local trails and sailing the Channel

Courses taught: Planetary Geology of Recent NASA Missions