Public Lectures  -  Fall 2012 / Spring 2013

The two Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977, the beginning of a journey that took them past the giant planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune—and out of the solar system, into the interstellar medium. We will look back on how the Voyager mission was started, the instruments they carried and trajectory they followed. The Voyager mission has involved several LASP scientists and engineers and the scientific results shown in many CU-Boulder classes. We will show the huge impact of their scientific discoveries not only on our understanding of the solar system but also in inspiring many people across the world.

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The Student Dust Counter (SDC) onboard the New Horizons mission to Pluto is the only student-built instrument flying in deep space. SDC studies the dust that strikes the spacecraft during its journey across the Solar System. These observations will advance our understanding of the origin and evolution of our own Solar System, and of planet formation in dust disks around other stars. After its Pluto-Charon fly-by in 2015, SDC will continue to measure dust in the Kuiper Belt. This talk will review the SDC instrument and its most recent data.

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With NASA’s recent interest in human missions to a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) comes a desire to catalog the NEA population. This activity is valuable to NASA explorers and scientists as well as all humans because of the potential consequences of an NEA impacting Earth. The B612 Foundation has been considering NEA threats since 2002, and has recently embarked on a project to privately fund and build the Sentinel mission. This mission will survey the NEA population to determine their orbits with enough precision to project the orbits forward, ultimately identifying human mission targets or potential impact threats. This presentation will review what we know about NEAs and present the current status of the Sentinel project.

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From the Explorer 1 mission to the latest modern satellite observations, space physics research has had profound societal relevance. The studies of acceleration properties—especially very high energy particles in the Van Allen belts—are central to space weather concerns that affect navigation, communications, remote sensing, and other operational human endeavors. LASP Director Dan Baker will explore the evolving understanding of Earth systems, the application of this research to other planets, and how space physics impacts human society.

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“Whirls and swirls of icy fare, and wispy feathers in the air, and bands and billows everywhere…” While these words might be reminiscent of a 1960s song, they in fact describe clouds that are being studied by the NASA Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) mission. Poetically referred to as “noctilucent” or “night-shining” clouds, they are also known as polar mesospheric clouds because they appear at high latitudes in the summertime mesosphere far above the Earth, on the edge of space. This talk will summarize some of the scientific highlights of the AIM mission, and will explain how the investigations have led to an increasing realization of the extent to which distant regions of the atmosphere are linked together.

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Antarctic stratospheric ozone depletion (“the ozone hole”) has been a recurring human caused environmental impact for more than 30 years. Thanks to the phase-out of many of the chemicals responsible for stratospheric ozone depletion in the 1980’s and 1990’s we should start to see a recovery in the ozone layer over the current decade, and we are looking for the first signs of this environmental success. We will present some recent measurements from inside the ozone hole, discuss its current state, and address the forecasts and challenges for a complete recovery of the ozone hole.

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The Sun provides nearly all the energy for the Earth’s climate system. Even small changes in the Sun’s energy output can have large effects on climate, since the energy received from the Sun is so much greater than all other climate energy sources combined. Fortunately, the Sun is extremely stable at the present; which makes it very difficult to measure changes in its output over long periods of time, such as are needed for climate records.

How variable is the Sun? And how much does it affect the Earth’s climate compared to other natural effects or to human-caused influences? How do we measure it to the needed levels of accuracy?

A new spacecraft experiment to be launched later this year will be continuing the existing measurement record of the Sun’s energy output. This mission was done much as others should be: It was assembled quickly and relatively inexpensively, staying on schedule and budget thanks to an enthusiastic team of professionals and students working together.

We will discuss what we know about the Sun and its influences on Earth’s climate, and describe the current and planned measurements of this important solar climate data record.

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