High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Tom Murphy is a Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego. He is the project investigator for the Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation Project. Professor Murphy completed his Ph.D in Astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology after which he completed a postdoc at the University of Washington - Seattle before becoming a professor at the University of California, San Diego. In 2010 his group was responsible for locating the former Soviet Union`s Lunokhod 1 rover.