About the Seminar:
Colorado State University Pueblo is pleased to invite you to attend a special webinar focused on NASA’s upcoming mission to Jupiter’s Moon Europa happening on Oct 1st at 1:00pm MT. Join Dr. David Young as he discusses the search for life in our solar system, the Europa Clipper Mission launching in October, and the instrumentation used to look for evidence of life off of our planet.
Earth formed out of the solar nebula 4.5 billion years ago. Simple bacteria appeared 800 million years later, complex animals took another 3.7 billion years to evolve and modern Homo sapiens showed up a mere 300,000 years ago. Much more recently we entered the Space Age, at which point we began to wonder whether the terrestrial scenario of life’s origins could play out elsewhere in the Universe.
There are 8 major planets in our solar system. Recent observations of our celestial neighborhood put the number of potentially habitable planets meeting the “Goldilocks criteria” for life (solid surface, water, organic material, the right star and orbit) a a billion or so.
But did life start elsewhere? Or are we ‘alone’? Given enough time (the Universe is 13.8 billion years old) and Goldilocks planets, many scientists bet there is at lest life and, possibly, intelligence. However, looking for evidence of life is a tricky business, even in our own solar system.
Over the next two decades a dozen ground- and space – based telescopes will search remotely for evidence of life. In another approach, a half dozen space missions will be sent to search in situ for evidence of life on Mars, Titan, and Jupiter’s moon Europa.
This talk is about the Europa Clipper, NASA’s newest planetary mission, scheduled to launch this October. It will carry the ultra-high performance Mass Spectrometer for Planetary Exploration (MASPEX) built by the Southwest Research Institute to “determine whether the conditions for habitability exist or have ever existed on Europa.” But really, we’re looking for life.
About the Speaker:
David Young received his Ph.D. from Rice University. He has held professorships at the University of Bern, Switzerland, the University of Michigan, and Rice University. Dr. Young has led teams developing experiments, primarily mass spectrometers, for NASA missions to study the magnetospheres of Earth, comets, Saturn and its moons, and search for evidence of habitability on Jupiter’s moon Europa. He retired in 2012 as Director for Research and Development in Space Science at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
This is a free opportunity. You can register HERE for this webinar.
