Free Live NSN Webinar Series: NASA’s Mission to the Trojan Asteroids
Join the NASA Night Sky Network on Wednesday, August 18 at 6:00pm Pacific Time (9:00pm Eastern) to hear Dr. Cathy Olkin give an update on NASA’s Lucy Mission to visit Jupiter’s Trojan Asteroids.
NASA’s Lucy mission will be the first spacecraft to travel through the Jupiter Trojan asteroids. Over the course of 12 years, one spacecraft will visit 7 Trojan asteroids and 1 Main Belt Asteroid. The mission is designed to flyby a large number of Trojan asteroids to understand the diversity of the Trojan asteroids and investigate how they came to be located in Jupiter’s L4 and L5 Lagrange points.
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About Dr. Cathy Olkin
Cathy Olkin is a planetary scientist at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, CO. Her main topic of research is the outer solar system, specifically planetary atmospheres and surfaces. She carries out ground-based observations to learn about the size and atmospheres of small worlds. She also works on NASA’s New Horizons mission as the lead of one of the scientific instruments, the color camera and composition mapper. NASA’s New Horizons mission provided us the first close up images of Pluto and its moons in 2015. In 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft made the most distant encounter of any solar system object, Arrokoth. Cathy is also the Deputy Principal Investigator for NASA’s Lucy mission. The Lucy mission will be the first spacecraft to visit the Trojan asteroids, asteroids that share an orbit with Jupiter.
In her free time, Cathy mentors FIRST robotics programs providing hands-on STEM education for students from 4th grade to 12th grade.
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Viewing Options
The event will stream live on YouTube, but please note that questions asked over the NSN-members-only Zoom Q&A will be prioritized.
The recording will be uploaded both to the webinar’s resource page and to the NSN YouTube page for folks that are unable to attend this evening’s session.
