Past Events

October 1, 2018 General Meeting

Posted October 01, 2018

Our next general meeting will be on October 1, 2018 from 6pm-8pm in Social Work Building Room 101. Our speaker will be Dr. Patrick Hartigan. He is a Physics and Astronomy professor at Rice University. His topic will be “The Next Three Great Observatories: LSST, TESS and JWST.”

If you want to know more about what the talk will be about, Dr. Hartigan’s abstract is below.

What is on the horizon for new astronomical missions in the wake of the remarkable successes of Kepler (extra-solar planets) and WMAP (origin of the universe), and how can we build upon the daunting legacy of the Hubble Space Telescope? The next few years will see three massive undertakings come to fruition. These projects will open the time-domain in astronomy (LSST), search for planets around all the bright stars in the sky (TESS), and unleash a large space telescope that
will probe the origins of stars and galaxies with infrared light (JWST). In this talk I will summarize the motivations for these projects, and show how innovate engineering and computational designs will usher in the next era of observational astronomy. Opportunities exist for the public to participate in analyzing the vast amounts of data these endeavors will produce.