June AstroTour: Keynote Talk – Why Planetary Science Needs Space Probes: New Horizons at Pluto and Juno at Jupiter

by Dr. Fran Bagenal

The AstroTour Keynote is an annual event that brings in astronomers that are both world-renowned researchers and amazing public speakers from around North America to give talks in Toronto. The event also features solar and night-sky observing through the Astronomy Department’s many telescopes, planetarium shows run live by astronomer, a Ask-an-Astronomer reception, and more!

Even in their wildest dream the New Horizons team didn’t expect the July 2015 flyby of Pluto to produce such riches: water ice mountains as big as the Rocky Mountains, glaciers of nitrogen ice, and an ice volcano as big as Mauna Kea! In this fascinaiting lecture Dr. Bagenal will describe how New Horizons came to be, and how the spacecraft go to Pluto.

Furthermore, Dr. Bagenal will also discuss the upcoming Juno mission, a spacecraft scheduled to go into orbit around Jupiter on July 4th 2016. The mission will provide amazing new information as it investigates the existence of a solid planetary core, map Jupiter’s intense magnetic field, and measure the amount of water and ammonia in the deep atmosphere. This lecture explain why we need robots to explore planets and how telescopes could never tell us the things we’ve learned!

For full details, see the AstroTours site

Image Credit: NASA/JHU APL/SwRI/Steve Gribben