Meet the Speakers
Join us for our final night to learn about cosmos matters! Starting with tracking Martian weather to gravitation waves.
Tickets are free and we encourage donations. Please click the link at the bottom to register for the guest list!
Dr. David Klassen is a planetary scientist researching how clouds affect the water cycle and climate of Mars. I teach math methods and stellar astrophysics classes.
How Do You Measure Clouds on Mars to inform Climate Models?
One of the major open areas of climate modeling is the net effect of clouds. Clouds are very good at moving energy around and affect local temperatures—during the day they make it cooler but at night they make it warmer.
The work I do uses images created from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) and sophisticated math to locate and measure the amount of water in martian clouds over an entire martian year.
Dr. Jeremy Sakstein originally from London, England, spent his life trying to understand gravity—what is it? How it works? And why? As a theoretical physicist, his tools for answering these questions are simply pens, paper, and coffee.
Gravitational Waves: A New Window to the Universe
Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time. They originate from the most extreme events in the cosmos—black holes merging, stars colliding, and the Universe when it was less than a nanosecond old.
I will tell you what they are, how we measure them, and what we can learn by studying them. I will show you some of the amazing new discoveries we have already made, and the amazing things we are going to learn in the future.
Expect lots of movies and cool animations!