Image Credit: Mark Showalter

The best part of Mark’s job is that he can come to work in the morning not knowing what new discovery might be awaiting him in the latest data. He welcomes the opportunity to share this spirit of discovery with interested individuals or small groups.

Watch over his shoulder as he processes the latest data and be among the first to see features that have never before been revealed to human eyes.

However, Mark isn’t just rabid about rings. As an avid scuba diver, amateur naturalist and award-winning photographer, he spends his vacations exploring the diversity of life on Earth in its most distant and exotic and underwater environments. He has dived everywhere from Alaska to Australia, the Galapagos Islands, the Red Sea, and throughout the Caribbean and South Pacific.

As a different kind of journey of discovery, we invite experienced scuba divers on an expedition to a destination of their choice. Work with Mark to understand more about environments and life forms as we prepare for the trip, and then compare notes after each dive. Such a trip would also afford ample “down time” to explore Mark’s other passion, photography, so we can examine the latest images from the heavens above when we’re not focused on the oceans below.

Planetary astronomer Mark Showalter is rabid about rings. While everyone knows about Saturn’s spectacular ring system, it’s often forgotten that Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune are also encircled by fainter and narrower rings. Each of these systems interacts closely with a family of small, inner moons. Showalter works on some of NASA’s highest-profile missions to the outer planets, including Cassini, now orbiting Saturn, and New Horizons, which recently flew past Jupiter en route to its 2015 encounter with Pluto. Known for his persistence in planetary image analysis, Mark’s work on the earlier Voyager mission led to his discovery of Jupiter’s faint, outer “gossamer” rings and Saturn’s tiny ring-moon, Pan.

At the end of 2007, Uranus will experience an equinox, when the Sun crosses from the south side of its equator to the north. This is the first equinox on Uranus since 1965, an event that will give Earth-based astronomers their first opportunity to study the planet’s rings while they are edge-on. This viewing geometry is ideal for finding the faintest rings and smallest moons embedded in the system. Since 2002, Mark has been leading a team of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope to study Uranus, and his work has already led to the discovery of two small moons and two faint rings. During the upcoming equinox, he hopes to espy the as-yet unseen “shepherd” moons that are believed to keep Uranus’s rings in place.

Throughout 2007, he will also be traveling regularly to the ten-meter Keck Telescope in Hawaii for ground-based observations. Using one of the world’s largest telescope dishes and sophisticated new imaging cameras, Keck can often acquire images that rival the quality of the Hubble images.

Rings and the faint moons that interact with them are more than just local anomalies. They serve as dynamic laboratories where we can observe some of the same processes that operate, albeit on much larger scales, in galaxies and during the formation of planetary systems.

For more information on how to adopt this scientist
Please call us toll free at 1-866-616-3617 and ask for Karen Randall.