This month’s club meeting will be hybrid–both in person at Bear Branch and online. Join us February 8th at 7:00 PM EDT.
Speaker BIO: Dr. Samantha Lawler is a professor of astronomy at the University of Regina in Canada. She completed degrees at the California Institute of Technology, Wesleyan University, and the University of British Columbia, followed by postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Victoria and NRC-Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre. She studies the orbits of Kuiper Belt objects as well as light pollution from satellites. She has been advocating for regulation of satellites as her research telescope data and her dark prairie skies have increasingly filled with bright satellites over the past 5 years, and recently helped to publicize a large SpaceX debris fall and recovery that occurred near her home in Saskatchewan.
Topic: Space Debris!
In February 2024, hundreds of pounds of potentially lethal debris from a SpaceX Crew Dragon trunk from a private astronaut mission fell on farmland near Regina, Saskatchewan. Dr. Samantha Lawler of the University of Regina has been studying the proliferation of objects in orbit over the past few years, and was stunned to learn that space debris fell so close to her home. Come hear the story of SpaceX employees driving a rented U-Haul truck to an isolated farm to be greeted by an astronomer and a dozen of Saskatchewan’s finest local journalists, and what all of this means for international law, commercial satellites in Low Earth Orbit, atmospheric pollution, and the future of astronomy.
If you can’t make it, the meeting will be simulcast on Zoom. See the connection instructions below:
Meeting ID: 879 7384 1396
Passcode: 965007
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Meeting ID: 879 7384 1396
Passcode: 965007
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