NASA’s Lucy Mission Updates & Occultations
October 17 at 7pm & October 18 at 7pm
NASA’s Lucy Mission launched in October of 2021 and will be the first to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. By the end of its twelve-year mission, the spacecraft will have flown by a record-breaking number of asteroids for a single mission (eleven and counting!).
Why does the mission’s asteroid count keep increasing? And how does the Lucy Team pinpoint the asteroid positions in the first place?
Join a member of the Lucy Occultation Team for a deep dive into the science and adventure of observing asteroids by observing the shadows of these celestial bodies as they pass in front of distant stars (kind of like a mini solar eclipse). Stick around for mission updates including the latest results from last year’s encounter with the asteroid Dinkinesh and what to expect from Lucy’s travels in the upcoming months.
Brian Keeney, Principal Analyst – Southwest Research Institute
Dr. Brian Keeney received his PhD from CU Boulder and is now a Principal Analyst at the Southwest Research Institute, where he has planned dozens of stellar occultation campaigns for NASA's Lucy and New Horizons missions. Dr. Keeney has also used data from New Horizons to measure the far-UV surface reflectance of Pluto’s moon Charon, measured the amount of O2 in the coma of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko using far-UV spectra from Rosetta, and studied the circumgalactic medium using the Hubble Space Telescope's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph.
Ivy Knudsen, Assistant Researcher in Planetary Science – Southwest Research Institute
Ivy Knudsen - I am a graduate of the Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences program at CU Boulder, class of 2023. I have since been hired to work at the Southwest Research Institute to work on a project for the New Horizons mission, analyzing small impact craters on small bodies. I recently presented the progress of this project in Taiwan at the TNO2024 conference. I also help with telescopic instrumentation for LUCY mission occultations, as well as further crater analysis on the Moon, and Mars. I will be helping with these contributions to understanding solar system formation until I begin graduate school for planetary science and/or astrophysics. l adore this work, having very strong enthusiasm for a wide variety of fields including planetary dynamics, Solar System formation and exploration, geophysics, galactic formation, and many others!
