The 2012 Sverdrup Visiting Scientist Lecture will feature Brian J. Anderson ’82, deputy project scientist, NASA MESSENGER mission. Anderson will speak about the MESSENGER mission to explore the planet Mercury and about space exploration as a moral imperative. Anderson is a physicist with The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and serves as magnetic fields co-investigator and deputy project scientist for NASA’s MErcury Surface Space ENvironment GEochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) mission.
Sverdrup Lecture, 7:30 p.m. Monday, April 16, Hoversten Chapel
Title: MESSENGER at Mercury: Solving the riddles of the innermost planet in our solar system Continue reading “Sverdrup lecture features Brian J. Anderson '82”
Last week, just past midnight after St. Patrick’s Day, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft successfully slipped into an orbit around Mercury, the innermost planet. This was a difficult maneuver against the pull of the sun, and the groups of science teams around the country who have worked on the Mercury MESSENGER project for seven years were elated, to say the least.
On Jan. 14, NASA’s Messenger spacecraft made its first flyby of the planet Mercury — the first by any Earth craft in over 30 years. Behind the scenes of this long-awaited return to Mercury, there was an Augsburg connection: Distinguished Alumnus Brian Anderson ’82 is the mission’s Magnetometer Instrument Scientist. One of the main goals of the Messenger mission is to understand the nature of that dense planet’s magnetic field.