“Volcanism in the Solar System”.

Speaker: Dr. Rosaly M. C. Lopes,Senior Research Scientist at JPL and Editor-in-Chief of the planetary journal Icarus. Her research expertise is on planetary geology and volcanology and she has studied Mars, Io, and Titan. She was a member of Galileo’s Near-Infrared Mapping Spectrometer team from 1991-2003 and of the Cassini Titan Radar Mapper (2003-2019). She is the PI of the NASA Astrobiology Institute project “Habitability of Hydrocarbon Worlds: Titan and Beyond”. She is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Geological Society of America, and the American Geophysical Union. She has received several awards including the Carl Sagan Medal from the American Astronomical Society, the Ambassador Award from the American Geophysical Union, and two NASA Exceptional Public Service Medals. Her discovery of 71 active volcanoes on Io led to her being included in the 2006 Guinness Book of World records as the discoverer of the most active volcanoes anywhere.

Speaker: Dr. Melissa A.Morris a Senior Support Scientist with ASRC Federal and NASA.

Topic: Update on the OSIRIS REx Mission. OSIRIS Rex seeks answers to the questions that are central to the human experience: Where did we come from? What is our destiny? Asteroids, the left over debris from the solar system formation process, can answer these questions and teach us about the history of the sun and planets. OSIRIS REx will journey to the asteroid Bennu, map it and gather a physical sample and return the sample to earth.

Speaker: Dr. Thomas Mozdzen (Assistant Research Scientist at ASU and Vice President of East Valley Astronomy Club).

Topic: “Recent efforts at ASU to find evidence of when the first stars formed”. What were those first stars like and when did they form? How did they affect the rest of the universe? Dr Mozdzen will discuss how a new research tool named EDGES will help describe the creation of galaxies, the strength of the X rays from their central black holes, and the interaction with the cold clouds of primordial hydrogen.

Speaker: Dr. David Williams from ASU
Topic: “Exploring Ocean Worlds”. This talk will discuss the evidence for ‘ocean worlds… worlds in our Solar System beyond Earth that appear to have liquid water oceans in their interiors. What do we know about them? What do they imply for exoplanets, and life elsewhere in the Universe?

“New Telescopes that will Expand Hubble’s Frontier”.

Speaker: Dr. Rogier A. Windhorst from ASU. Dr. Windhorst is an astronomer and a professor of physics and astronomy at Arizona State University and formally presided over The School of Earth and Space Exploration. His research lies in astronomy, cosmology, galaxy formation and evolution. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, his group at ASU has contributed significantly to unraveling the formation and evolution of distant galaxies. His research has led to new understandings of how the universe first began. He also studies black holes and he is the principal investigator of the Hubble Space Telescope mid-UV bright galaxy survey.