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NEXT MEETING: August 26 Main program speakers: Annie Wargetz and Leonard Ferguson Topic: James Webb Space Telescope: What Are We Learning? Our main presentation begins at 7:30. Before that, at 6:30, we will have a special FYI session: A tribute to and examination of images of Loyd Overcash |
Join us for monthly meeting on Friday, July 22
| Ponderosa Fire Station training room: 17061 Rolling Creek Drive (map) |
We’d love to see you there!
FYI Session 6:30pm
James Webb Space Telescope
Main Presentation 7:30pm
Jenny Gruber, PhD will talk about the Artemis Campaign and the programs involved.
Bio: Jenny Gruber was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. She graduated from Boston University with a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering in 1999. During her time at BU, she was a cooperative education student at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. In 2002, she earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering Science from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Her thesis title was, “A Study of Erosion Due to Low-Energy Sputtering in the Discharge Chamber of the Kaufman Ion Thruster”.
Jenny joined NASA JSC as a full-time employee in the fall of 2002. She spent 16 years in the Flight Operations Directorate, first as a Flight Dynamics Officer (FDO) in Space Shuttle Mission Control, and then as a manager for two ISS Mission Control Groups—Mission Planning Software and the Inventory and Stowage Officers. In October 2018, Jenny left Flight Operations to work on the Artemis Campaign, which aims to return humans to the moon–this time to stay and prepare for human exploration of Mars. She currently serves as the Cross Program Integration Lead for the Human Landing System (HLS), responsible for the people and processes that will ensure safe and successful interfaces between the Lander and other spacecraft or lunar surface assets. In lunar orbit, HLS will interact with the Orion spacecraft and the Gateway station. On the lunar surface HLS crew will utilize extravehicular activity suits, rovers, and habitats.
Jenny is wife to a fellow NASA engineer and mom to a teenager. In her spare time, she enjoys long-distance running, serving with her church, travel, camping and other outdoor activities, reading, mentoring young people, and learning about Ethiopian history, language, and culture.
Join us for monthly meeting on Friday, June 24th
| Ponderosa Fire Station training room: 17061 Rolling Creek Drive (map) and Zoom: (come back to this post to get the link shortly before the meeting) |
FYI Session 6:30pm
Rob Brayton will talk about the Raspberry Pi and it’s use for astronomy. We will also cover your getting started with astronomy questions.
Main Presentation 7:30pm
The Europa Clipper
Dr. Paul Schenk will discuss The Europa Clipper. This is our first return to the Jupiter system with a spacecraft dedicated to mapping the ocean world Europa and assessing its habitability. We will review the spacecraft and its mission followed by a Q&A session with the audience.
Dr. Paul Schenk – Brief Biography
Dr. Paul Schenk describes himself as a space-groupie since the Gemini days in the mid-1960s. His first formal introduction to planetary sciences was as a NASA Planetary Geology summer intern in 1979 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the Voyager 2 Jupiter encounter. Since arriving at the LPI in 1991, he has used Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini stereo and monoscopic images to map the topography and geology of the icy outer planet satellites (and somewhat on Mars and the Moon).
Dr. Schenk has also been a stereo image aficionado for many years, and does historical brass helmet deep-sea diving.
In 2012, Dr. Schenk’s Atlas of the Galilean Satellites (copyright 2010) was published, and he was co-editor of Enceladus and the Icy Moons of Saturn published by The University of Arizona Press in 2018. He was also a panel member of the Decadal Survey on Planetary Science and Astrobiology for 2023–2032, and received AGU’s Fred Whipple prize in 2021.
From 2011–2018, he was a participating scientist on the DAWN (at Vesta) mission and the Cassini mission, studying impact cratering on small bodies, plume deposition processes on Enceladus and topographic mapping of all the Saturnian mid-sized icy satellites. He has also been a co-investigator on the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond, responsible for cartography and topography of these distant planetary bodies.
Dr. Schenk’s global color moon mosaics can be found at https://www.lpi.usra.edu/icy_moons/.