Meeting by Zoom
Agenda:
7:00 - 7:30 General Meeting & Announcements
7:30 - 7:45 Refreshments
7:45 - Public Presentation
Speaker: Geoffrey Landis
Researcher- John Glenn Research Center
Topic: Triton's Mysteries
Description of Talk:
Triton, the largest moon of Neptune, is Pluto’s big brother: mysterious, icy, backwards, and pink. Icy? The mountains of Triton are made of water ice, and the geysers are liquid nitrogen. Backwards? It’s the only large moon in the solar system that orbits retrograde, in the opposite direction from the planet’s spin. Pink? Yes, it has a surface partially covered with tholins, complex organic molecules with a peculiar reddish-pink tint. Icy on the outside, liquid on the inside, it has only been visited once, by the Voyager-2 probe, which flew past it on the way out of the solar system.
Dr. Landis will talk about a concept for a future mission to try to learn more about Triton’s mysteries, a mission to send a vehicle to land on Triton and then hop from site to site using a radioisotope-powered rocket engine.
.About the Speaker:
Dr. Geoffrey Landis is a researcher at the NASA John Glenn Research Center, where he works on developing advanced technologies for space. He also contributes expertise on the physics of the space environment to the NASA Glenn COMPASS spacecraft design team, where he has worked on planetary missions to destinations ranging from Mercury to Europa to beyond Pluto. He was the Ronald McNair-NASA Professor of Astronautics at MIT, where he taught a graduate course on spacecraft design. He holds ten patents and has been involved in a number of space missions, including the Mars Pathfinder mission, the Mars Exploration Rovers, and the Parker Solar Probe.
He is a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts fellow and a fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. In 2013, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics awarded him the AIAA Aerospace Power Award for contributions to power systems for planetary and space missions.
In his spare time, he is an award-winning science fiction writer. He is the author of the novel Mars Crossing and the story collection Impact Parameter (and Other Quantum Realities), and has written over eighty published science fiction stories.
