Northampton Neighbors Speaker Series Presents
Exploring Our Solar System
Martha Hanner
Friday February , 2022
3pm-4pm on ZOOM
Throughout human history, people have wondered about the planets ("wanderers") that slowly moved against the background constellations. Within our lifetime, our views of the planets have been transformed from the distant points of light into individual worlds with a surprising variety of physical properties. Robotic spacecraft have explored all of the major planets, as well as a sampling of the smaller moons, asteroids, and comets. This talk will highlight some of the discoveries, from the swirling clouds of giant Jupiter to a frozen moon with lakes of ethane.
Martha S. Hanner is an Adjunct Professor in the Astronomy Department at UMass. She began her career after completing her Ph.D. at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1969. She became involved with an experiment on Pioneer 10 and 11, the first two spacecrafts to travel beyond Mars for a close flyby of the giant planet Jupiter. She spent the next two years as a Visiting Scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany.
After her family moved to Pasadena, California, Martha spent 25 years as a Senior Research Scientist at NASA's Caltech/Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She worked on a number of space missions, including the Galileo Jupiter Orbiter, the European mission to Comet Halley, the Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope, and Stardust, a spacecraft that returned a sample of particles from a comet. She also conducted a research program on comets, using the large telescopes at 14,000 feet on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. She retired from NASA and moved to Amherst in 2003.
Zoom link
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/99367882715?pwd=VnlmK3VEaFdCTmR4Y0J5ZFAyNFVlQT09
Meeting ID: 993 6788 2715
Passcode: 591001
NN offers live transcription of the event so you can read along with the spoken word during the presentation. Call 929 436 2866 to listen by phone without video.
View the Northampton Neighbor Speaker Series Archive (recorded since 2020)
On YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOnQjBXLKYlweLoiacajnN4A7ivlVd93c
And on Channel 12/Northampton Open Media
https://northamptonopenmedia.org/