The students are on a multidisciplinary team led by associate professor Christopher Edwards, co-led by professor David Trilling, postdoctoral scholar Chris Haberle and associate professor Michael Shafer. They are building the cameras during classes with the goal of having fully flight-qualified instruments by March 2023.
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On Monday [Sept. 26]at 4:13 p.m. (Arizona time), more than 7 million miles away, NASA’s DART mission, Double Asteroid Redirection Test, successfully slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos, making history as the first step toward a possible future planetary defense strategy (NAU Review, Sept. 28).
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For asteroid scientists, their work is just beginning.
By design, the crash occurred when the asteroids were fairly close to Earth.
That allowed telescopes on Earth to get a good look. About 40 of them were pointed at… Read more
On Monday, [Sept. 26], at 4:13 p.m. (Arizona time), more than 7 million miles away, NASA’s DART mission, Double Asteroid Redirection Test, successfully slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos, making history as the first step toward a possible future planetary defense strategy.
Cristina Thomas, assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science and team lead on the DART mission, along with Jason Wilder, vice president for research, were at Mission control in Laurel, Maryland to witness… Read more
“It’s going to be thrilling—and very stressful—but ultimately, I think we’re going to learn a lot,” says Cristina Thomas, a planetary scientist at Northern Arizona University who leads the observation team for the DART mission.
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David Trilling, SICCS professor (and APS affiliate faculty) Mike Gowanlock, and SICCS MS student Daniel Kramer ran an astroinformatics boot camp before the beginning of the semester:
Seven students from a range of majors participated in the bootcamp to learn skills in computer science, astronomy, and astroinformatics. The goal of the boot camp was to increase participation in astroinformatics by students from underrepresented backgrounds.
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Assistant professor Cristina Thomas of Northern Arizona University’s Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science, who started working on the project as a Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , has now taken the lead as the principal investigator, funded through a $848,013 grant from NASA for the next three years.
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