Leslie J. Sage is an Astronomy Editor for NATURE magazine and Contributing Editor to the RASC JOURNAL (Second Light column) . Talk Title: My life with Nature Magazine View this talk on YouTube Abstract: In mid-July 1993 I flew to London to start my new job as the astronomy editor of Nature. I spent almost […]
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission recently grabbed a sample from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu.
Title: The Mission of Apollo 14 Speaker: Randy Attwood January 2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the third successful lunar landing in the Apollo program. There was extra pressure on the crew of Apollo 14 to pull off a successful mission, following on the aborted Apollo 13 mission nine months earlier. Changes were made to […]
Speaker Night topic to be announced 2020 Mississauga Centre Annual Meeting
Host: Randy Attwood
Speaker: Mary Beth Laychak, Director of Strategic Communications, CFHT
Talk Title: The Canada France Hawaii Telescope
Talk Abstract: The Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope is a forty year old facility on the summit of Maunakea and consistently ranks among the world’s most astronomically productive. Mary Beth Laychak, director of strategic communications at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope shares the science, instrument suite and staff of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. She will discuss how those pieces work together to create the magic that is CFHT.
Speaker: Emily Carney
Title: Skylab: An Overview
Talk Abstract: Skylab, which was crewed from 1973 to 1974, enjoyed only a brief moment in the cultural zeitgeist (and, of course, infamously reentered over parts of Western Australia). While the United States’ first space station is often overlooked in the canon of space history, this talk will discuss its origins from its “wet workshop” days to its legacy, and direct descendant – the International Space Station (ISS), which still orbits above us.
Information about our speaker:
Emily Carney is a spaceflight enthusiast and author hailing from Saint Petersburg, Florida. Her first vivid space memory was seeing Columbia launch in late 1981 (STS-2). Even though she was very young (three years old) and the launch was 140 miles away from where she stood, she’ll never forget it. From then on, she was obsessed with the space shuttle, and spaceflight in general.
In 1997, Carney enlisted in the United States Navy, and at one point worked as a nuclear propulsion mechanical operator aboard the USS George Washington (CVN 73). When she was honorably discharged in 2003, she went back to college and earned a degree in education. She only taught for a brief time, but after she left the education field, her passion for spaceflight was reignited.
Carney worked as a freelance writer from 2008 to 2011, and during that time she started a spaceflight blog, This Space Available (accessible via https://space.nss.org/category/this-space-available/). She also co-hosts a weekly podcast, Space and Things, with Dave Giles (https://spaceandthingspodcast.com/).
In 2011, Carney wanted to start a Facebook group for space enthusiasts, but was struggling to find a good name. Her husband, Steve, suggested “Space Hipsters” as sort of a sarcastic placeholder, but the name stuck. The group grew more quickly than she could imagine, and at present time it totals over 20,000 members. Space Hipsters boasts members from all around the world, and includes space enthusiasts, writers, artists, scientists, engineers, aspiring astronauts, and even a few actual astronauts.
Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84379657584
Speaker Night
Host: Randy Attwood
Speaker: Dr Kim Tait, Royal Ontario Museum
Kimberly Tait is a Curator of Mineralogy and oversees mineralogical, gemmological and meteoritic research at the ROM. She is also a cross-appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Geology at the University of Toronto.
Title: ROM Martian Meteorites and Mars Sample Return
Description: Although the ROM does have an exceptional martian meteorite collection, there is still much to be learned about Mars. Dr. Kim Tait will discuss the goals of the Mars Sample Return Program, and her role in the mission.
Speaker: Dr Laurie Rousseau-Nepton is a resident astronomer at the Canada-France-Hawaii Observatory and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii between 2017 and 2019. First indigenous woman in Canada to obtain a PhD in astrophysics, she received her diploma from Université Laval by studying regions of stellar formation in spiral galaxies.
Dr Michelle Thaller of the Goddard Space Center, NASA talks about Space’s Scariest Monsters: Neutron Stars and Black Holes
Join us for this special Halloween Space Treat!
Getting The Most Out Of Your Beginner Telescope
Join Nova Scotia author and astronomer John A. Read as we explore the three most popular RASC certificate programs and using a finder and a star map to find the required targets (star hopping 101).
Speaker: Dr Lea Hirsch, University of Toronto - Mississauga
Here Come the Suns: The statistics and habitability of planets in binary star systems
Most planet searches focus on single stars, like the sun. But half of all sun-like stars actually live in binary or multiple stellar systems, whose planet-hosting capability may be quite different. In binary systems, planets can occupy either circum-stellar or circum-binary orbits, but many orbital configurations are thought to be unstable due to the effects of the binary companion. Binaries are also thought to affect the proto-planetary disks of their companions, potentially disrupting their ability to form planets at all.
2021 Annual Meeting
A review of the Mississauga Centre's activities during 2021.
