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K. Michael
Malolepszy, Vice-President of the Saint Louis Astronomical Society,
will be the featured speaker at the March 18th meeting of the Society.
For the first time since 1981, new close-up views of the giant ringed planet Saturn and its satellites are being seen through the robot eyes of NASA spacecraft. The Cassini spacecraft arrived last July for a four year tour of the Saturn system. It has been sending back spectacular pictures of the ring system and a number of the major satellites. New moons have been discovered, lurking within and just outside the rings. In January, Cassini’s European-made Huygens probe descended to the surface of the planet-sized moon, Titan. After a two hour rocket-and-parachute ride through an atmosphere twice as dense as Earth’s, the probe successfully landed on the frigid (-300o F) ground. Mr. Malolepszy will present some of the recent findings of the Cassini instruments, illustrated by the spacecraft’s images, and sketch NASA’s plans for the rest of the mission. The ringed planet Saturn is easily visible to the unaided eye as a bright, non-twinkling star, so he will also explain how to find it in the night sky this Spring. Michael Malolepszy is a veteran amateur astronomer and vice president of the Saint Louis Astronomical Society. He was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Missouri, St. Louis. He has worked at the Very Large Array national radio astronomy observatory in New Mexico, and has presented astronomy programs at the McDonnell Planetarium, now operated by the St. Louis Science Center, for many years. |