Our guest speaker for this Friday is Dr John Ristvey, a Senior Director at McREL. The title of his talk will be: “Comet Mysteries Revealed: A tale of two spacecraft, three comets, and four missions – Oh My”.
Learn about two exciting NASA Discovery Program missions encountering comets, two of which are arriving at their spectacular destinations this winter! For EPOXI, the Deep Impact spacecraft has been re-purposed to flyby comet Hartley 2 on November 4, 2010. We will review some of the imagery and science from this mission and preview the upcoming Stardust-NExT mission set to flyby comet Tempel 1 on February 14, 2011.
Participants will sample hands-on educational activities provided by the education and public outreach team from Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL).
John Ristvey is a Senior Director at McREL. He is responsible for managing the work and resources of multiple contracts including education and public outreach for NASA’s Dawn mission with UCLA, EPOXI mission with University of Maryland, and Stardust/NEXT mission with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Whitney Cobb, is a Senior consultant with McREL. As a former teacher and administrator, she has many years experience engaging students and teachers in the compelling stories of science in schools across the country.
Sandra Weeks, is a Senior Consultant at McREL. Sandra has worked as a classroom teacher for high school science. At McREL, she has developed assessment items, reviewed instructional materials, and created lesson plans for science and mathematics.
Weather permitting after the presentation, visitors will be invited to look through our large telescope at various celestial objects.
Public star nights are held the third Friday of each month (except July, when we are closed for annual maintenance). No reservations are necessary for these nights. Just come and join us for the talk and some observing afterwards.
If you have any questions, please call the observatory information line at 970-613-7793 or check the LTO web site at: www.starkids.org
