Jeff Morgenthaler, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, likes to think of himself as an experimental physicist whose laboratory opens to the sky. He has used a comet to measure the ionization lifetime of carbon, is using Io’s atmosphere as a probe of conditions in Jupiter’s magnetosphere and has constructed a small-aperture coronagraph to monitor measure Jupiter’s magnetospheric response to a large volcanic eruption on Io.
In April 2018, Dr. Ellen Stofan became the first woman appointed as the John and Adrienne Mars Director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
Dr. Emily Holt is an Environmental Archaeologist and Anthropologist who is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Miami University of Ohio. Emily’s research focuses on human-environment dynamics in the Nuragic Culture of Bronze Age Sardinia. She directs the Pran’e Siddi Landscape Project (PSLP), an archaeological survey in south-central Sardinia, which is examining the long-term changes in settlement patterns, water use, and the socio-cultural interpretation of natural resources.
Emily is also the president of the non-profit organization Public Scholar Outreach whose mission is to support, produce, promote, and disseminate high-quality public scholarship, especially public scholarship that is peer-reviewed and public scholarship with relevance to contemporary issues. PSO’s primary initiative is to establish Dirt & Words: an online, open access channel of peer-reviewed public scholarship about the human past.
Today, Emily and Fraser will be discussing how ancient cultures understood astronomy, a topic she recently discussed with Paul Sutter on his Space Radio broadcast.
If you would like to join the Weekly Space Hangout Crew, visit their site here and sign up. They’re a great team who can help you join our online discussions!
The All Stars Party, featuring Dr. Paul Sutter, Fraser Cain, Dr. Pamela Gay, John Michael Godier and Skylias, will be in Joshua Tree National Park this June – information is here at astrotours.co/allstars.
If you’d like to join Dr. Paul Sutter and Dr. Pamela Gay on their Cosmic Stories in the SouthWest Tour in August 2019, you can find the information at astrotours.co/southwest.
We record the Weekly Space Hangout every Wednesday at 5:00 pm Pacific / 8:00 pm Eastern. You can watch us live on Universe Today, or the Weekly Space Hangout YouTube page – Please subscribe!
The Weekly Space Hangout is a production of CosmoQuest.
Luciano Iess, professor of Aerospace Engineering at Sapienza University of Rome, is a member of the Cassini radio science team that recently determined, after analyzing gravity science data collected during the final orbits of Cassini around Saturn, that its iconic rings are a relatively young feature of the planet. Continue reading “Weekly Space Hangout: Feb 13, 2019 – Luciano Iess of the Cassini Radio Science Team”
Dr. Natalie Hinkel is a Planetary Astrophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute and a co-investigator for the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) research network at Arizona State University. Natalie studies elements in our solar neighborhood (i.e., within 150pc of the Sun,) to learn how element abundances impact the structure and mineralogy of planets.
Tonight we welcome author Rod Pyle who will be discussing his new book, Space 2.0: How Private Spaceflight, a resurgent NASA, and International Partners Are Creating a New Space Age (BenBella Books, February 2019), written in collaboration with the National Space Society.
Marco is a self-declared Asteroid/Comet whisperer. He’s dabbled in citizen science for years, and he most recently flagged many changes on 67P when this was directly requested through the Rosetta Blog:
http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2016/06/03/the-changing-comet-call-for-contributions/ He is currently working on finding evidence for out gassing and stretch at Ultima Thule (similar to 67P), predicting an outburst for RYUGU when an impactor is fired into it in March, and helping with the engineering and physics of a propellant-less thruster based on capacitors called the IMFAB. Marco can be found on twitter at @marcoparigi1.
If you would like to join the Weekly Space Hangout Crew, visit their site here and sign up. They’re a great team who can help you join our online discussions!
The All Stars Party, featuring Dr. Paul Sutter, Fraser Cain, Dr. Pamela Gay, John Michael Godier and Skylias, will be in Joshua Tree National Park this June – information is here at astrotours.co/allstars.
If you’d like to join Dr. Paul Sutter and Dr. Pamela Gay on their Cosmic Stories in the SouthWest Tour in August 2019, you can find the information at astrotours.co/southwest.
We record the Weekly Space Hangout every Wednesday at 5:00 pm Pacific / 8:00 pm Eastern. You can watch us live on Universe Today, or the Weekly Space Hangout YouTube page – Please subscribe!
The Weekly Space Hangout is a production of CosmoQuest.
This week’s guest Paul MacNeal, a mechanical systems engineer at JPL, created the Annual Invention Challenge twenty-one years ago after helping his son with an extra credit assignment. Since then, teams of high school students from around the world compete each year against JPL engineers to see who can design and build the smartest and most efficient machine. The objective of the 2018 Challenge, which took place on Friday, December 14th, was to “to get a 24-inch length of two-inch PVC pipe from a horizontal position to an upright position on a platform using whatever device they could come up with, instructions not included.”
This week’s guest Dr. Lucianne Walkowicz is an Astronomer at the Adler Planetarium. She studies stellar magnetic activity and how stars influence a planet’s suitability as a host for alien life. She is also an artist and works in a variety of media, from oil paint to sound.
Dr. Walkowicz holds a B.S. in Physics from Johns Hopkins University, and a M.S. and Ph. D. from University of Washington. She was the Kepler Fellow at UC Berkeley, and the Henry Norris Russell Fellow at Princeton University, before joining the Astronomy Department at Adler Planetarium in 2014. She is a 2012 TED Senior Fellow, a 2011 National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow, and has been internationally recognized for her advocacy for conservation of dark night skies.
From October 2017 to October 2018, Dr. Walkowicz served as the fifth Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology in the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.
Additionally, you may have seen in numerous episodes of the documentary The Universe, as well as the current National Geographic series, Mars.
If you would like to join the Weekly Space Hangout Crew, visit their site here and sign up. They’re a great team who can help you join our online discussions!
If you’d like to join Dr. Paul Sutter and Dr. Pamela Gay on their Cosmic Stories in the SouthWest Tour in August 2019, you can find the information at astrotours.co/southwest.
We record the Weekly Space Hangout every Wednesday at 5:00 pm Pacific / 8:00 pm Eastern. You can watch us live on Universe Today, or the Weekly Space Hangout YouTube page – Please subscribe!
The Weekly Space Hangout is a production of CosmoQuest.
If you would like to join the Weekly Space Hangout Crew, visit their site here and sign up. They’re a great team who can help you join our online discussions!
If you’d like to join Dr. Paul Sutter and Dr. Pamela Gay on their Cosmic Stories in the SouthWest Tour in August 2019, you can find the information at astrotours.co/southwest.
We record the Weekly Space Hangout every Wednesday at 5:00 pm Pacific / 8:00 pm Eastern. You can watch us live on Universe Today, or the Weekly Space Hangout YouTube page – Please subscribe!
The Weekly Space Hangout is a production of CosmoQuest.
