Inaugural Ross and Sue Benitez Space Exploration Forum

Exploration of the Outer Solar System

New Horizons at Pluto & Juno at Jupiter​

Spanos Theatre, Wednesday, April 12, 7:00-8:30 p.m.
Free and open to the public

Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
For more information call 805-756-2859

Fran Bagenal, one of the team leaders on NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and Juno mission to Jupiter, will unpack what scientists have learned from these missions to the largest and smaller worlds in the solar system. Learn how New Horizons came to be, how the spacecraft got to Pluto, and how the findings are challenging our understanding of ice worlds in the outer solar system. Bagenal will also describe ongoing discoveries from the Juno mission, including findings about Jupiter’s core and magnetic field and the presence of water in the atmosphere.

Water ice mountains as big as the Rocky Mountains, glaciers of nitrogen ice, an ice volcano as big as Mauna Kea, and a landscape that resembles the skin of a snake: “Even in our wildest dreams none of us on the New Horizons team really expected the July 2015 flyby of Pluto to produce such riches.” -Fran Bagenal

About Fran Bagenal

Fran Bagenal is a research scientist and professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder and team leader of the plasma investigations on NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and Juno mission to Jupiter. Her main area of expertise is the study of charged particles trapped in planetary magnetic fields and the interaction of plasmas with the atmospheres of planetary objects, particularly in the outer solar system. She has participated in several of NASA's planetary exploration missions, including Voyager 1 and 2, Galileo, Deep Space 1, New Horizons and Juno. Bagenal edited the monograph Jupiter: Planet, Satellites and Magnetosphere (Cambridge University Press, 2004).