On Friday, April 24, 2015, 10:00 - 11:00 am in the Electronics Lab, A talk on how to Encourage Girls on how to Major in Sciences by Dr. David E. Harker; He is an Associate Research Scientist at the University of California, San Diego/Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences (UCSD/CASS), and has studied the dust properties of comets for over 15 years. He began his career participating in numerous flights on the NASA Kupier Airborne Observatory, flying out of the NASA Ames Research Center (Moffet Field, CA) and Christchurch, New Zealand. Subsequently, as a graduate student at the University of Wyoming, he became involved with mid-infrared spectrophotometric observations of comet C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp) at the 2.3-m Wyoming Infrared Observatory and the 3-m NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF). As an NRC postdoc at NASA Ames, he continued to observe comets at the IRTF and the NOAO Gemini 8-m telescope on Hawaii and in Chile. He led the Gemini-North (Mauna Kea, HI) observations of the NASA Deep Impact Mission in 2005 in which an impactor collided with comet 9P/Tempel 1, as well as led the Gemini-South (Cerro Pachon, Chile) observations of comet 103P/Hartley 2 during the NASA EPOXI Mission in 2010 during which the Deep Impact satellite performed a close flyby of comet Hartley 2. Along with collaborators, he has been involved with observations of a suite of comets using the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope, creating a large database of cometary spectra. He was also involved in the planning and execution of ground-based IR observations from the IRTF and Gemini-N of the NASA LCROSS experiment in which an impactor collided with the southern polar region of the Moon in search of subsurface water. Dr. Harker has been a researcher with UCSD/CASS for over 10 years, his research centering on the dust mineralogy in comets, and what that mineralogy tells us about the conditions in the early protosolar nebula that not only led to the formation of early cometesimals, but to the planets as well. Specifically, he observes comets in the mid-infrared part of the spectrum, taking images and spectra. He then analyzes the spectra using laboratory measured spectra of minerals and tries to match those with the spectra we get from the comets.

• published: 04 May 2015
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