In the 2030’s, two spacecrafts - NASA’s Europa Clipper and the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) missions - will enter orbit around Jupiter to study the planet’s largest moons. Until then, observations of the Galilean satellites - named for their discoverer - are restricted to observations from Earth. Read More

The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico is following an asteroid approaching Earth this week and while it poses no threat, it appears to know our planet is facing a pandemic. “The small-scale topographic features such as hills and ridges on one end of asteroid 1998 OR₂ are fascinating scientifically,” says Anne Virkki, head of Planetary Radar at the observatory. “But since we are all thinking about COVID-19 these features make it look like 1998 OR₂ remembered to wear a mask.” The National Science Foundation facility, which is managed by the University of Central Florida, has a team of experts who monitors near-Earth asteroids. This asteroid is in a special class of near-Earth asteroids called Potentially Hazardous Objects (PHOs).

The first colloquium of 2020 was held on January 21st and featured a talk describing the Unsolved Problems in Plasmaspheric Physics from Dr. Michael Denton, Research Scientist with the Space Science Institute at Los Alamos in New Mexico. Read More

On January 28th, the AO Colloquium Series featured Dr. Alain Herique of the Institut de Planetologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG) University Grenoble Alpes in France. Read More