Lecturers: Dan Britt, University of Central Florida
Robert Jedicke, Hawaii Institute for Astronomy
Dr. Daniel Britt is the Pegasus Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences at the Department of Physics, University of Central Florida. He was educated at the University of Washington and Brown University, receiving a Ph.D. from Brown in 1991. He has had a varied career including service in the US Air Force as an ICBM missile launch officer and an economist for Boeing before going into planetary sciences. He has served on the science teams of four NASA missions, Mars Pathfinder and Deep Space 1, the New Horizons Mission Science Team for the flyby of the Kuiper Belt asteroid 2014 MU69, and the Lucy Mission Science Team for a series of flybys of asteroids near Jupiter. He was the project manager for the camera on Mars Pathfinder and has built hardware for all the NASA Mars landers. He currently does research on the physical properties and mineralogy of asteroids, comets, the Moon, and Mars under several NASA grants and is the director of the Center for Lunar and Asteroid Surface Science (CLASS), a node of NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI). He has served as the Chair of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society and the Planetary Geology Division of the Geological Society of America. Honors include 6 NASA Achievement Awards, election as a Fellow of the Meteoritical Society, and an asteroid named after him; 4395 DanBritt.
Dr Robert Jedicke was drafted at the top of the 3rd round by the B.C. Lions in the Canadian Football League in 1985, but instead of colliding with football players he pursued careers in colliding sub-atomic particles and colliding asteroids. He has been at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy for the last 16 years where he managed the development of the Moving Object Processing System for the Pan-STARRS telescope on Maui that is now the world’s leading discovery system for asteroids and comets. His current research interests include studying the properties of interstellar objects and developing spacecraft concepts to identify asteroids that can be profitably mined.
Topic: Prospecting Asteroid Resources
Recommended Readings:
Finding Very Small Near-Earth Asteroids using Synthetic Tracking
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope as a Near-Earth Object Discovery Machine
UArizona Looks Toward Work on NASA’s Potential Asteroid-Hunting Space Telescope
NEOCam Finding Asteroids Before They Find Us
Recorded talk: https://youtu.be/fKs8g41rK8s