CSC/SETI Institute Colloquium Series
07/08/2009
The impact and recovery of asteroid 2008 TC3Peter Jenniskens, SETI Institute For the first time, astronomers tracked an asteroid in space, observed its size, reflection properties and how it tumbled, then saw it crash in Earth's atmosphere over Sudan on October 7, 2008. At first, no pieces were expected to survive because the entry resulted in a massive explosion at 37 km altitude that left most of the asteroid in dust.
SETI Institute astronomer Dr. Peter Jenniskens tells how he established contacts with Dr. Muawia Shaddad of the University of Khartoum and, in the company of 45 students and staff, traveled to the impact site in the middle of the Nubian Desert in early December, two months after the fall.
The recovered meteorites are the first from a known asteroid, and link rare ureilite meteorites to F-class asteroids.
Project Website: http://asima.seti.org. Dr. Jenniskens website: http://airborne.seti.org  poster
07/15/2009
How to speak to your computer - Spoken Dialogue Systems on the ISS and beyondDr. Beth Ann Hockey, Adjunct Associate Professor of Linguistics & Senior Research Scientist, UC Santa Cruz Science fiction is clear that our future includes conversations with our machines; think of HAL or the Star Trek computer. In 2005, the Clarissa Procedure Assistant made a step toward that future, when its use on the ISS made it the first spoken dialogue system in space. Dr. Beth Ann Hockey, project lead for Clarissa, will describe the science and technology behind that system, and examine uses of this technology in space and on earth, interacting with robots, wheelchairs, cars and software. Dr. Hockey has been project lead and developer on dialogue systems such as Clarissa and the UCSC experimental in-car system for Ford Motors, a core developer of the Open Source Regulus tookit used to build these systems, as well as doing research on targeted help systems, language modeling, parsing and grammar development, prosody, turn taking and focus.
07/22/2009
The Surface of Mars: Mineralogy as an Indicator of Water and Environmental ConditionsJanice Bishop, SETI Institute PThe surface mineralogy of Mars provides clues to its geologic history, including aqueous processes. Phyllosilicates and sulfates are key indicators of water on Mars and appear to have occurred in the Noachian and Hesperian, respectively. Dr. Bishop will discuss what we know about Martian mineralogy from orbital and landed missions, meteorites, and terrestrial analog studies.
07/29/2009
How do You Qualify Heat Shields on Earth? Plasma Reentry Wind Tunnel Research at NASA AmesJohn Balboni, NASA Ames Thermal Protection Test Facility Protecting spacecraft from severe heating during hypersonic flight is a challenging task that leaves no room for error. Likewise it is difficult to simulate on the ground the effects of flying at Mach numbers greater than 20. But that is what the NASA Ames arc jet facility does for designers of human spacecraft and robotic probes. It requires directing multi-megawatts of electrical power inside a tube less than 3 inches diameter containing hundreds of water cooled parts. All of that to perform a test on piece of heat shield material that you can hold in your hand. Come and hear how this capability developed, and how it is used every day. John Balboni has worked as a research engineer at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field for 25 years in the thermal protection test facility. His work lately has influenced the heat shield designs of the Mars Science Laboratory mission and the crewed Orion capsules.
08/19/2009
Mars: The water story and prospects for lifeMichael Carr, USGS Menlo Park abstract coming soon
09/09/2009
Fermi-LAT Observing the Universe with high-energy gamma-ray eyesDr. Stefan Funk, Associate Professor, Department of Physics, Stanford University he Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, formerly called GLAST, is a satellite
mission designed to measure gamma-rays in the energy range 20 MeV to >300
GeV, with supporting measurements for gamma-ray bursts from 8 keV to 30 MeV.
In addition to breakthrough capabilities in energy coverage and
localization, the very large field of view enables observations of 20% of
the sky at any instant, and the entire sky on a timescale of a few hours.
With its recent launch on 11 June 2008, Fermi now opens a new and important
window on a wide variety of phenomena, including pulsars, black holes and
active galactic nuclei, gamma-ray bursts, the origin of cosmic rays and
supernova remnants, and searches for hypothetical new phenomena such as
supersymmetric dark matter annihilations. Dr. Funk will discuss early results and
science opportunities of investigations of the Universe with high-energy
eyes.
09/16/2009
HST Imaging of Fomalhaut:
Direct detection of an exosolar planet and Kuiper Belt around a nearby starPaul Kalas, SETI Institute and University of California, Berkeley
Advances in high-contrast imaging have produced a new sample of spatially resolved debris disks with morphologies attributed to the dynamical effects of planets. I will briefly review several cases, including our recent non-detection of Beta Pictoris b using Keck adaptive optics at L-prime. Then I will focus on the case for a planetary system around the nearby A star Fomalhaut. Optical coronagraphic observations using the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard HST shows a vast dusty debris belt offset from the star and cleanly sculpted at its inside border. Follow-up HST images have further revealed a co-moving point source with apparent orbital motion 18 AU interior to the dust belt. I will discuss both the observational and theoretical evidence that the point source is a planet with < 3 Jupiter masses, making Fomalhaut b the lowest mass planet candidate detected via direct imaging. I will give alternate explanations and discuss future plans for the detailed mapping of Fomalhaut's planetary system.
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