August 24 Speaker - Adam McKay
Dr. Adam McKay, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas brought oue club the third program in our series focusing on astronomy and space exploration during our meeting of August 24.
Dr. McKay told members and gursts about the space probe Rosetta,built and launched by the European Space Agency. On 12 November 2014, the mission performed the first successful landing on a comet. The mission continues to return data from both orbit and the comet's surface.
He also updated us on the Dawn mission to orbit the protoplanet Vesta and then orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres in order to characterize the conditions and processes that shaped our solar system. By studying these two giant remnants from the epoch of planet formation, Dawn will provide scientists with new knowledge of how the solar system formed and evolved.
