The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2022

Earth is our home. SWOT will give us a better understanding of the world’s oceans and its terrestrial surface waters while showing why these resources are so important.

After a year on the planet, what can Perseverance teach us about Mars’ watery past and our potential future?

We are the map makers, the orbit takers. By knowing where the small moons of our solar system are, we can plan our missions. This will be a practical story of why orbits are important when looking at solar dynamics, resonances, and moons of the outer solar system.

NASA is working on a new set of Earth-focused missions to provide key information to guide efforts related to climate change, natural hazard mitigation, fighting forest fires, and improving real-time agricultural processes.

The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, is the first space telescope capable of taking focused high-energy X-ray observations of the cosmos, providing unprecedented information on the dynamics of black holes, exploding stars, and the most extreme active galaxies. Join us to learn how NuSTAR has expanded our knowledge of the universe after almost a decade of operation.

What does it take to build a spacecraft? It’s up to the Spacecraft Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations (ATLO) team to assemble it, bake it, shake it, get it to the pad and launch it.

10 years and over 17 miles of driving has taught us there is more to Mars than we could ever imagine. We’ll take a look at highlights from the past decade of this extraordinary mission and see where it’s leading us next.

As the twin Voyager spacecraft approach their 45th anniversary, we take a look at where the mission has been, what they’ve taught us, and where they go from here. In this conversation with Suzanne Dodd, Voyager Project Manager, we’ll discuss how Voyager came to be, highlight some of the major discoveries, and hear stories about this mission that has captured the public’s attention for years.

The Ocean Worlds Life Surveyor (OWLS) is the first life detection suite to explore a wide range of size scales, from single molecules to microscopic organisms, in a water sample. OWLS is an integrated, portable, and autonomous life-detection instrument suite designed to identify and characterize life on ocean worlds. In this talk, we'll discuss why autonomy is important for this and future missions.

Comets and asteroids offer clues to the chemical mixture from which the planets formed some 4.6 billion years ago. If we wish to know the composition of the primordial mixture from which the planets formed, then we must determine the chemical constituents of the leftover debris from this formation process - the comets and asteroids. In this talk, we'll discuss with how Near Earth Objects are opportunities for discovery.