Ursula Bailey Marvin (August 20, 1921 – February 12, 2018)[1][2] was an American planetary geologist and author who worked for the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

[12][13] Her childhood near the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where, as she recalled in 1997, sunsets "shone with a pink-purple afterglow," inspired her with a love of the outdoors, but did not, at first, spark an interest in geology.

[12] After returning to the United States in 1958, she taught mineralogy at Tufts for two years before she was offered a job researching meteorites at Harvard.

[12] She was appointed to a permanent research staff position at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in 1961 and received a Ph.D. in geology from Harvard in 1969.

Her publications include analysis of oxidation products of Sputnik 4 to determine mineralogical alteration over exposure time with applications to iron meteorites.