Peter H. Smith is a professor emeritus (he retired in 2013) at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona, where he holds the inaugural Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Chair in Integrative Science.

[1] He is also the principal investigator for the $420 million robotic explorer Phoenix which landed at the north pole of the planet Mars on May 25, 2008.

After his retirement from the Rockefeller Foundation, Hugh H. Smith worked at the University of Arizona and founded the Tucson Society of Tropical Medicine.

Since 1978, he has worked at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, initially as a Research Assistant up the ladder to full professor with tenure.

Smith worked on the Pioneer Venus mission of 1978 and the Pioneer Saturn mission of 1979, mapped the surface of Saturn's largest moon Titan using the Hubble Space Telescope in 1994, and became Project Manager for a descent camera on the Huygens probe that landed on Titan in 2005.