[1] He served as a principal investigator in the U.S. Apollo and the Soviet Luna sample return programs.
Following his graduation from London University, Haggerty worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, D.C.
He later joined the faculty of University of Massachusetts Amherst, initially serving as an assistant professor and later advancing to full professorship.
For ten years, he served as a principal investigator in the U.S. Apollo and the Soviet Luna sample return programs.
[3][4] Haggerty's most noted work is the spectroscopical analysis of carbonado diamonds on the basis of which he developed a hypothesis that those minerals didn't form deep within the Earth's crust as normal diamonds, but were instead brought with meteorites several billion years ago.