Mittelman Astronomy Lecture Series

Exploring the Solar System with the James Webb Space Telescope

NASA’s next flagship facility is the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in October 2021.  Dr. Hammel is one of the six Interdisciplinary Scientists for Webb, and thus has guaranteed observing time.  Her Webb observing program focuses on our Solar System!  Planned targets run the gamut of Solar System objects: asteroids, moons, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, rings, Uranus, and Neptune.  In some cases (Pluto and other Kuiper Belt Objects, comets, and Titan), she will coordinate with other guaranteed time observers to ensure most efficient use of JWST.  In this talk, she will give a status update on Webb, review some of the overall science goals of the Webb mission, and explain what she and her team hope to learn with this new tool for exploring our Universe.

Heidi Hammel

Vice President for Science, Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy & Interdisciplinary Scientist, James Webb Space Telescope, NASA

Dr. Heidi B. Hammel received her undergraduate degree from MIT in 1982 and her Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii in 1988.  After a postdoc at JPL, she returned to MIT, where she spent nearly nine years as a Principal Research Scientist in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.  She is now the Vice President for Science at AURA, and works in Washington, DC, helping to manage large telescopes for the US government.

Her research has focused on Neptune and Uranus, using Hubble Space Telescope and many other facilities.  Hammel is one of the six Interdisciplinary Scientists for NASA’s next flagship facility: the James Webb Space Telescope.  She has received many awards, both for her science and her outreach work, and has been interviewed for Newsweek and the New York Times.  Asteroid “1981 EC20” has been renamed “3530 Hammel” in her honor.

Please register for this free webinar at http://go.middlebury.edu/astrotalk/