Next Brown Bag Seminar Series on November 5th Features Lindsay Anderson
The fall semester Brown Bag Seminar Series features graduate students providing presentations on their current research and recent internships. The series continues on Wednesday, November 5th, featuring grad student Lindsay Anderson presenting “ Using Weather Radar Data to Detect Meteorite Falls and Calculate Strewn Fields”.
This series of presentations will be held in the Space Studies Library at noon. Lunch will be served. All grad students are expected to attend.
About the topic: Meteorites are of great scientific importance in the study of the solar system’s early formation and it is for this reason they are collected and studied. However, the discovery of these objects can be problematic. To dispel some of these issues, methods more precise than eyewitness accounts need to be developed to help determine if there are meteorites from a fireball and where they may have fallen. One such technique that has been shown to work is studying Doppler radar data. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has made NEXRAD data publicly available online, allowing for easy access to a resource that can be used to identify meteorite fall locations. By searching the areas surrounding a fireball report, meteorite fragments, or their effects, may be detected in radar data. This information can then be used in conjunction with eyewitness reports, atmospheric conditions, and dark flight modelling to calculate a probable strewn field on the ground. This technique has been successfully used in the past, but recently it was discovered that there was a drop in radar sensitivity over approximately the last year. This may change the way this technique is used until the next upgrade of the NEXRAD system. Still, it is evident that radar data holds information that is important in the hunt for meteorites, but as yet it is a time consuming and labor intensive process.
This presentation will also discuss some of the history of Johnson Space Center that can be seen and others experiences available to interns.
About the presenter: Lindsay Anderson has a B.S. in physics with a concentration in Astrophysics and a minor in mathematics. During her undergraduate career, she had the opportunity to observe at Kitt Peak on the 2.1 meter telescope for four nights and had an REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) at Texas Christian University researching the M Cloud in the Local Super-cluster. She was also a founding member of the Frozen Fury rocket team. Since joining the Space Studies Department as a MS student, she has been working as a Graduate Research Assistant with Dr. Pablo de Leon focusing on space suits and space analog studies.
For information on the Brown Bag Seminar Series, please contact Space Studies faculty member Dr. Vadim Rygalov.