Welcome to the MIT Planetary Astronomy Laboratory (PAL), part of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences and part of astronomy at MIT. We are located on the fourth floor of Building 54, the Green building.

Our group studies the solar system using a variety of techniques and telescopes. For details we invite you to view our research pages.

We also operate the Wallace Astrophysical Observatory in Westford, MA and utilize telescopes all over the world for our research, including the two 6.5-m Magellan telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile and the IRTF on Mauna Kea. Instrumentation is another of our interests, as it allows us to specifically pursue our research objectives. Active projects include MagIC, a CCD camera currently mounted on one of the Magellan telescopes, a camera for Wallace Astrophysical Observatory (WAOCam), and POETS, a portable, high-speed occultation camera system.

Research by the Planetary Astronomy Lab is supported, in part, by NASA and NSF.