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James B. Pollack (July 9, 1938 – June 13, 1994) was an American astrophysicist who worked for NASA's Ames Research Center.

Pollack was born on 9 July 1938, and was brought up in Woodmere, Long Island by a Jewish family that was in the women's garment business. He was a high school valedictorian and graduated from Princeton University in 1960. He then received his master's in nuclear physics at University of California, Berkeley in 1962 and his Ph.D from Harvard in 1965, where he was a student of Carl Sagan.[1] He was openly gay. Dorion Sagan told how his father came to the defense of Pollack's lover in a problem with obtaining treatment at the university health service emergency room.[2]

Pollack specialized in atmospheric science,[3] especially the atmospheres of Mars, and Venus and Saturn. He modeled KAO observations to study the composition of Venus clouds, the composition of Mars surface soils and atmosphere, and the size of the grains on Saturn’s ring particles. This led to his investigation of the possibility of terraforming Mars, the extinction of the dinosaurs and the possibility of nuclear winter since the 1980s with Christopher McKay and Sagan.[4] The work of Pollack et al. (1996) on the formation of giant planets ("core accretion paradigm") is seen today as the standard model.[5]

Many of his findings were discovered through Ames’ Kuiper Airborne Observatory. He authored and co-authored almost 300 publications, a body of contributions filling ten bound volumes.

He explored the weather on Mars using data from the Mariner 9 spacecraft and the Viking mission. On this he based ground-breaking computer simulations of winds, storms, and the general climate on that planet. An overview of Pollack's scientific vita is given in the memorial talk "James B. Pollack: A Pioneer in Stardust to Planetesimals Research" [6] held at an Astronomical Society of the Pacific 1996 symposium.

He was one of five scientists, including Dr. Carl Sagan, who introduced the term “nuclear winter”. The article, “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions,” was published by the journal Science in 1983 and led to a variety of scientific disputes, films, plays and books based on the “nuclear winter” hypothesis. He was a recipient of the Gerard P. Kuiper Prize in 1989 for outstanding lifetime achievement in the field of planetary science. Pollack died in 1994 at his home in San Jose, California from a rare form of spinal cancer, at age 55.

A crater on Mars was named in his honor.