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Fran Bagenal, PhD

Pluto: The Pugnacious Planet


About the topic

Bio


 

About the topic

Even in our wildest dreams none of us on the New Horizons team really expected Pluto to produce such riches: water ice mountains as big as the Rocky Mountains, glaciers of nitrogen ice, black hydrocarbons covering aging craters, fresh methane frost dusting tops of mountains, pitted landscapes shaped by sublimation, an ice volcano as big as Mauna Kea, and, most bizarre of all, a landscape that resembles the skin of a snake. My favorite image is a glance back, outbound from the flyby, looking at an icy landscape back-lit by layers of atmospheric hazes. In this talk I describe how New Horizons came to be, how the spacecraft got to Pluto, and how the findings are challenging our understanding of ice worlds in the outer solar system. New images are released frequently on the New Horizons site managed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.

Pluto



Bio

Fran Bagenal

Dr. Fran Bagenal is co-investigator and team leader of the plasma investigations on NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto (flyby July 14, 2015) and the Juno mission to Jupiter (arrival July 4th, 2016). In addition to New Horizons and Juno, she has participated in many of NASA's planetary exploration missions, including Voyager 1 and 2, Galileo, and Deep Space 1. She obtained a BSc degree from the University of Lancaster i her native England, and a PhD in Earth and Planetary Sciences from MIT. She is Professor of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Dr. Bagenal last spoke at the Denver Café Sci in 2006, to tell us about the then-upcoming launch and mission of New Horizons. Here's our chance to discover what they discovered!

There is much interesting information about Dr. Bagenal and her work on line. For example, NASA's Solar System Exploration has a personal profile.

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