Topic for the June 21st meeting is "Jupiter and the Juno Mission" by Dr. Fran Bagenal. Join Dr. Bagenal as we explore what NASA’s Juno spacecraft is telling us about the largest planet in our solar system. Juno’s principal goal is to understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter. Instruments on Juno are revealing swirling clouds, intense aurora and deep weather systems - plus the spinning Great Red Spot. Underneath its dense cloud cover, Jupiter safeguards secrets to the fundamental processes and conditions that governed our solar system during its formation.
Bio
Fran Bagenal is professor of astrophysical and planetary sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder and is a co-investigator on the New Horizons mission. Her main area of expertise is the study of charged particles trapped in planetary magnetic fields. She is interested in finding out if the solar wind interaction with Pluto's escaping atmosphere acts like a comet.
Fran received her doctorate degree from MIT in 1981 and spent five years as a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College, London, before returning to the United States for research and faculty positions in Boulder, Colorado.
She has participated in many of NASA's planetary exploration missions, including the Voyager mission to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. She was on the science teams of the Galileo and Deep Space 1 missions and looks forward to participating in the recently-selected Juno mission to Jupiter. Dr. Bagenal chairs NASA's Outer Planet Assessment Group that provides input from the scientific community on exploration of the outer solar system.
Location:
The meeting will be at the IHOP Restaurant, 2040 Ken Pratt Boulevard, Longmont. Please join us for coffee, dinner, or just desert around 6 pm; The general meeting and presentation will begin at 7 pm.
