LAS Meeting on Feb 21, 2008

The Longmont Astronomical Society will meet 7 to 9 pm in the Community Room at the Front Range Community College, 2121 Miller Drive, Longmont, CO on Feb 21st. The speakers will be David Gingerich from Lockheed Martin, Space Exploration Systems and Dr. John Stocke from the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy at the University of Colorado.

David Gingerich has wide-ranging experience in space exploration mission development and operations from space science payload instruments to entire space exploration satellites. He has developed flight software for Stardust, Genesis, Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor space missions. He is a Flight Software Certified Principal Engineer in Mission Operations and has been responsible for operation and maintenance of flight software on five NASA space exploration missions. He will share his experience working on the Genesis and Stardust space missions. See his more about him at Stardust/JPL/NASA page.

John Stocke is an extragalactic observer who uses all manner of space-based and ground-based telescopes to study normal and active galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and intergalactic gas. His primary interests have been in using the Hubble Space Telescope's spectrographs to discover, inventory, and study intergalactic gas clouds and to figure out their relationship to galaxies. This study has led to the first-ever detection of matter in voids. He is a member of the science team building the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) here at CU and Ball Aerospace.

Meeting Agenda
7:00 pm to 7:50 pm Presentation by David Gingerich
7:50 to 8:00 pm Break
8:00 to 8:50 pm Presentation by John Stocke
8:50 to 9:00 pm Officer reports, MARS election