Free Public Talk on a Mission to a Metallic Asteroid

Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, will give a free, illustrated, non-technical lecture entitled:

"The NASA Psyche mission: First Journey to an Unknown World"

in the Smithwick Theater at Foothill College, in Los Altos (see directions below)

The talk is part of the Silicon Valley Astronomy Lecture Series, now in its 27th year.

The NASA Psyche mission is on its way to orbit a small but immensely ancient world in our asteroid belt: A metallic object, the first humans will ever have visited. When our solar system was in its infancy, thousands of planetesimals (tiny planet-like objects) formed in less than a million years. (If the history of the entire solar system were compressed to a single day, the planetesimals would have formed in the first 18 seconds!) Many planetesimals later melted, allowing metal cores to form inside rocky mantles. One of these metal cores may be revealed in the asteroid (16) Psyche. Dr. Elkins-Tanton will discuss what is known and what is hypothesized about the asteroid, explain how they planned a mission and built a spacecraft to study this unknown object, and update us of where we are over two years post-launch.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a planetary scientist and the lead of the NASA Psyche mission. She is Director of the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. Previously, she was a Vice President at Arizona State University, Director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science, and faculty at MIT. Elkins-Tanton's research focuses on the formation and evolution of rocky planets, volcanic activity and extinctions on Earth, as well as on building effective teams and future-facing educational practices. Asteroid (8252) Elkins-Tanton is named for her, as is the mineral elkinstantonite. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Foothill College is just off the El Monte Road exit from Freeway 280 in Los Altos.

For directions and parking information, see: https://foothill.edu/parking/
For a campus map, to find the Smithwick Theater (Bldg. 1000), see:

https://foothill.edu/map/

Note: Parking lot 1 is closest, with access to the theater by a long set of stairs. Parking lot 5 provides access from the same elevation as the theater. Elevator access: Lot 8 (via building 8100 and then building 8400 elevators.)

The lecture is co-sponsored by:

* The Foothill College Science, Tech, Engineering & Math Division

* The SETI Institute and

* The Astronomical Society of the Pacific

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