Special Events

NASA’s Lucy mission launched in October of 2021 and will be visiting a record-breaking number of Trojan asteroids. The Trojans share an orbit with Jupiter in Jupiter’s L4 and L5 LaGrange points (gravitationally stable regions of the solar system, sort of like celestial parking lots). Trojan asteroids can be thought of as the ‘fossils’ of the solar system, and learning about them will increase our knowledge about how the solar system formed. But before Lucy can get there, we can learn about the target asteroids from Earth, via occultations. Occultations are similar to a solar eclipse, but on a much smaller scale. Instead of the Moon eclipsing the Sun, these asteroids eclipse faint background stars, which we can see from Earth. Ivy will be speaking about the occultation campaigns involved with the Lucy mission, the results of them, and what is next to come for Lucy!

Ivy is a Berthoud High School alumnus, class of 2019! Doing her summer STEM project at LTO, she quickly became an astronomy enthusiast and went on to get a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics from CU Boulder. While there, she worked with Dr. Terry Bullett (another LTO volunteer!), building ionosonde radio antennas around the world to perform measurements of the ionosphere. After graduating from CU, she was hired by Dr. Kelsi Singer (Deputy PI of New Horizons) at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, CO. She works for both the New Horizons and Lucy missions, and has been involved in projects involving small-body impacts, the Moon, Mars, Pluto, and large-scale telescopic observations. Looking forward, she has recently been accepted to begin her PhD in Astronomy & Planetary Sciences at Northern Arizona University (NAU) this coming fall!