Dr. Hugh Kieffer is a renowned geophysicist who studies planetary bodies across the solar system through a combination of numerical modeling and remote sensing. He is the creator of KRC, a planetary thermal model of Mars, which has become the gold standard for predicting temperatures on Mars and other planetary bodies (planets, moons, comets. etc.). He also served as the Project Investigator (PI) of the Infrared Thermal Mapper (IRTM) instrument, which flew on the Viking orbiter in the 1970s.

In this conversation, we discuss his remarkable career path in geophysics, why/how KRC and IRTM were created to support Viking, as well as what it was like to develop KRC during the 1970s, when computers had only 4 MB of memory. Co-hosted by Adi Khuller.