Vishnu Reddy Kanupuru

Vishnu Reddy is a planetary scientist and an infrared spectroscopist interested in connections between asteroids and meteorites to understand Solar System formation. His research also focuses on surveillance and characterization of space objects in cislunar space for the United States Space Force. He received his doctorate from University of North Dakota in Earth System Science and Policy (2009) where his dissertation focused on a mineralogical survey of the near-Earth asteroid population. He was a post-doctoral researcher at Observatório Nacional, Brazil (2010) and Research Assistant Professor at UND (2010-2013) during which he was the science lead for the framing camera team at the Max-Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany on NASA's Dawn mission to asteroid (4) Vesta. He subsequently worked at the Planetary Science Institute (2013-2016) before moving to the University of Arizona (2016-present) where he is a Professor in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. At UA, he serves as the director of the Space4 Center and the Biosphere 2 Space Domain Awareness Observatory Complex responsible for all ground-based optical/infrared and passive radio frequency space surveillance assets. He served as the investigation team lead (2015-2020) on NASA Near-Earth Object Surveyor Mission to discover 90% of near-Earth objects (NEOs) larger than 140 meters to fulfill the George E. Brown Congressional mandate. Asteroid 1981 EQ28 has been named (8068) vishnureddy by the International Astronomical Union in recognition of his contribution to planetary defense.