Breaking through the Seeing Barrier in Planetary Astronomy

When Galileo Galilei pointed his telescope toward Jupiter in 1609 and discovered what we now call the Galilean moons, he did not realized that he had just established a new research field in astronomy. In the past four centuries, planetary astronomy, the study of our solar system bodies using telescopes, has increased our knowledge of the environment of Earth, the evolution of the planets, the origin of comets and asteroids and the formation of our solar system. Space exploration accelerated planetary astronomy in the 1960s by allowing planetary scientists to access in-situ and detailed data.

In this talk, Dr. Marchis will discuss the contributions of telescopic observation over the  past 50 years to planetary science, particularly the recent developments like adaptive optics  which renewed interest in ground-based observations of planets and the search for exoplanets.  He will explore the future of astronomy with the contribution of all-sky surveys like Pan-STARRS  and LSST, which provide several terabytes  of data a week, changing radically the way we  do astronomy. The potential of promising new projects like the extremely large telescopes  such as the Thirty Meter Telescope and the Colossus Telescope will be discussed.  These projects constitute a paradigm shift in the field of planetary astronomy.

Speaker: Dr. Frank Marchis, SETI

Editor's Note: The original topic, Near Earth Asteroids: Friends or Foes, has been changed by the speaker.