May Monthly Meeting: Galilean Moons: Past, Present and Future

Location: Zoom + In-Person at First Evangelical Lutheran Church (803 3rd Ave, Longmont, CO 80501)

Summary

As Juno’s orbit has evolved over 8 years, the spacecraft has also made flybys of the Galilean moons Ganymede, Europa and Callisto. This provides an opportunity to review the history of the Galilean moons, discuss previous observations made by Voyager, Galileo, Cassini and New Horizons missions to provide the context for recent Juno flybys. Looking to the future, ESA’s JUICE and NASA’s Europa Clipper missions will be probing deeper into these very different worlds.

Bio

Dr. Fran Bagenal is a senior research scientist and professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder and is co-investigator and team leader of the plasma investigations on NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Juno mission to Jupiter. Her main area of expertise is the study of charged particles trapped in planetary magnetic fields and the interaction of plasmas with the atmospheres of planetary objects, particularly in the outer solar system. She edited the monograph Jupiter: Planet, Satellites and Magnetosphere (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Born and raised in the UK, Dr. Bagenal received her bachelor degree in Physics and Geophysics from the University of Lancaster, England, and her doctorate degree in Earth and Planetary Sciences from MIT (Cambridge, Mass) in 1981. She spent five years as a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College, London, before returning to the United States for research and faculty positions in Boulder, Colorado. She has participated in several of NASA’s planetary exploration missions, including Voyager 1 and 2, Galileo, Deep Space 1, New Horizons and Juno.