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.

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. Usually in her work on different missions, she is a member of the science team as a plasma scientist. Bagenal chaired NASA's Outer Planet Assessment Group that provides input from the scientific community on exploration of the outer Solar System. She appeared in The Farthest, a 2017 documentary on the Voyager program, and in multiple television documentaries including the NOVA 2019 miniseries The Planets.

Honors

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