At the time of his death, he was the John D. MacArthur Professor of Geology and Geophysics, emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology.
Wasserburg completed his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1954, with a thesis on the development of K–Ar dating, done under the sponsorship of Harold Urey and Mark Inghram.
[2] Wasserburg was deeply involved in the Apollo Program with the returned Lunar samples, including being a member of the so-called "Four Horsemen", along with Bob Walker, Jim Arnold, and Paul Werner Gast.
He was the co-inventor of the Lunatic Spectrometer (the first fully digital mass spectrometer with computer-controlled magnetic field scanning and rapid switching)[5][6] and founder of the "Lunatic Asylum" research laboratory at Caltech specializing in high precision, high sensitivity isotopic analyses of meteorites, lunar and terrestrial samples.
He and his co-workers were major contributors to establishing a chronology for the Moon and proposed the hypothesis of the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB) of the whole inner Solar System at near 4.0 Gy ago (with F. Tera, D. A. Papanastassiou).