Presentation: January 2014

This month's AE presenter: Jeff
Date of presentation: 13-Jan-2014
Subject: Ten Billion Miles From Home: The Voyager Probes
Description: Jeff talked about the status of the Voyager missions 1 and 2, 35 years after their launch date.  He discussed a number of aspects to the missions, including: their location with respect to the solar system; where in the sky they could be found if one had a powerful enough telescope; Voyager 1's status as the most distant man-made object in existence; the 1970s technology used to build and monitor the probes; the trillions of bits of data they have sent back to Earth over their lifetimes; the faintness of their signals; their present condition; and finally, the imminent end to their transmissions (and therefore their missions) due to weakening of their nuclear power sources.

Download PDF (144kb)

Presentation: July 2013

This month's AE presenter: Jeff
Date of presentation: 15-July-2013 (or possibly 22-July)
Subject: The GRAIL Mission: Update
Description: This presentation (originally intended to be given in June) gave a brief update on discoveries made by NASA's GRAIL mission, including gravity field maps of the moon and scientific conjecture that could be made based on the data generated by the mission, such as partial confirmation that samples returned by the Apollo astronauts in the 1970s are indeed indicative of global processes.

Also presented this same evening: a series of photographs taken by workers involved in the process of cleaning up after and documenting the Asiana crash at SFO back in early July.

Download GRAIL Mission Update (PDF, 1.1MB)