News

Several students and faculty in the Planetary Sciences Group participated in an event designed to raise awareness about NASA’s budget for planetary exploration. The event was picked up by media outlets in Orlando and all over the country (for example).

On June 5, Venus will pass directly between Earth and the Sun. This alignment is fairly rare — this is the last time it will happen until 2117! What we’ll see from Earth is a little black spot of Venus slowly make its way across the Sun’s face. Robinson Observatory and the Astronomy Society will…

Congratulations to Kevin Stevenson on the successful defense of his Ph.D. Dissertation.  His dissertation on “DETECTING AND CHARACTERIZING EXOPLANETS: THE GJ 436 AND HD 149026 SYSTEMS” included analyses of over two dozen eclipses and transits of exoplanets in two separate planetary systems, all measured by the Spitzer Space Telescope.  Kevin discovered two planet candidates as…

Congratulations to Kévin Baillié on the successful defense of his Ph.D. Dissertation on July 7, 2011. His dissertation on “Fine-Scale Structures in Saturn’s Rings: Waves, Wakes and Ghosts” included an analysis of stellar occultation data from Cassini and the discovery of more than a dozen new density waves. Kévin is the first recipient of a…

The dissertation defense of Robert J. Macke, SJ, takes place in MAP 318 at 10:00 am.  The defense is open to the public and begins with a 45-minute presentation of the work.  The thesis is entitled Survey of Meteorite Physical Properties: Density, Porosity and Magnetic Susceptibility and includes measurements of over 1200 meteorites from collections…

Registration is now open for UCF Planetary Science’s second Winter Workshop, which is also the second meeting of the Next-Generation Suborbital Research Conference.  The meeting will be held in the UCF Student Union from February 28 – March 2, 2011.  UCF and SwRI are sharing organization of the meeting.  Learn more and register.

The Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, the world’s leading and largest professional organization of planetary scientists, has elected UCF Prof. Daniel Britt to serve as Vice Chair in 2010-2011 and Chair in 2011-2012.  See the UCF News story for more details.

On the April 29 issue of the journal Nature, UCF faculty Drs. Humberto Campins and Yanga Fernandez and student Kelsey Hargrove report the first detection of water ice and organic material on an asteroid. This discovery has implications on the origin of water, organic molecules, and life on Earth.