2024 Exploration and Origins Colloquium

Dear Astrobiology, Origins, and Space Enthusiasts,

 

The ExplOrigins early career group invites you to join the 2024 Exploration and Origins Colloquium! This colloquium will have events on two days: a poster session on Feb. 8th  (5-6pm) and talks on Feb. 9th. We are thrilled to feature plenary talks by Dr. Jill Mikucki from UT Knoxville and Dr. Masatoshi Hirabayashi from Georgia Tech. 

Talks and the poster session will be held in person at Georgia Tech, with a virtual viewing/presenting option for talks. Our aim is to highlight early career projects that explore, conceptualize, celebrate, and discover pieces of space, life’s origins, and astrobiology from any field in the Atlanta area. Through this colloquium, we hope to:

  • forge relationships between diverse individuals of various fields, experience levels and backgrounds
  • expand our internal awareness of local work and innovations
  • encourage collaboration and interdisciplinary understanding
  • provide a professional growth opportunity for early career individuals including undergraduates, graduates, and post-docs

General registration and abstract submission are through this formAll early career individuals (undergrads, grads, postdocs, research scientists, and more) are highly encouraged to submit abstracts, due by the end of the day January 26th. To prepare your abstract you will need a title, author/affiliation list, and one descriptive paragraph. The announcement of selected speakers and poster presentations will be made on February 1st. 

Thank you for your consideration. We hope to see you there!

 

 

Sincerely, 

The Georgia Tech Astrobiology Fellows

Colin Burnett, Sarah Kingsley, Mohamed Nassif, Chad Pozarycki, Vahab Rajaei, and Jose Luis Ramirez Colon

Fall 2023 GT Astrobiology Distinguished Lecture and Social Event on Sep 22nd!

Seminars

Join us for the Fall 2023 GT Astrobiology Distinguished Lecture and Social Event on Sep 22nd!

We’re excited to host Dr. José C. Aponte, Research Scientist from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) as our distinguished lecturer. Please see the below flyer for more info

In the afternoon, there will be a social event with lawn games, food and refreshments beginning at 4:00 PM, located at the Molecular Science and Engineering (MoSE) outdoor patio, ground floor. We will also be taking a group photo at this time, so bring your GT Astrobiology(grey) shirts! If you are a new member or didn’t receive a shirt last year, we have extra shirts to hand out.

 

Astrobiology Fall Distinguished Speaker and Social Event on Sept 2!

Events

Join us for the  GT Astrobiology Distinguished Lecture Fall 2022 on September 2, 2022!

Co-sponsored by GT Astrobiology and C-STAR.

11am-12:30pm Eastern: Public lecture “Contending with the Truly Alien: Agnostic Approaches to Life Detection” presented by Professor Sarah Stewart Johnson – watch online or in MoSE G21

4-6pm Eastern: Social event on MoSE Patio – trivia, t-shirts (in new color!), food, group photo!

Organized by 2022-2023 GT Astrobiology Fellows: Sharissa Thompson, Emmy Hughes, Tatiana Gibson, and Claire Elbon

GT Astrobiology Fall Welcome Event

Events

Georgia Tech Astrobiology and ExplOrigins Community,

Please join us for the Fall 2021 GT Astrobiology Distinguished Lecture and Social Event!

event flyer

Title: Exploring Jezero Crater with the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover

Presented by: Dr. Kathryn Stack-Morgan, JPL — Mars 2020 Project Scientist

Date/Time: Friday, September 10th, 2:30 PM–3:30 PM Eastern *note new time*

Location: virtual via BlueJeans (link: http://primetime.bluejeans.com/a2m/live-event/udqsqwfd) and on YouTube Live (http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxcmACiPDyN21-KRTXCc1wg/live).

Following the virtual seminar, there will be an in-person social with refreshments beginning at 4:00 PM, located at the Molecular Science and Engineering (MoSE) outdoor patio, ground floor. We will also be taking a group photo at 4:15pm, so bring your GT Astrobiology shirts!

We hope to see you there!

Organized by Astrobiology Fellows, 2021-2022:

Becca Guth-Metzler, Christina Buffo, Tyler Roche, Taylor Plattner, and Jordan McKaig

Sponsored by GT Astrobiology and CSTAR

Titan@Tech

Events

CSTAR Distinguished Lecture

Dragonfly: In Situ Exploration of Titan’s Organic Chemistry and Habitability

Dr. Elizabeth Turtle, PI of Dragonfly Mission

Thursday, November 19, 6:30 pm

REGISTER: https://primetime.bluejeans.com/a2m/register/rgyxupxq

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is an Ocean World with a dense atmosphere, abundant complex organic material on its icy surface, and a liquid-water ocean in its interior. The joint NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission revealed Titan to be surprisingly Earth-like, with active geological processes and opportunities for organic material to have mixed with liquid water on the surface in the past. These attributes make Titan a singular destination to seek answers to fundamental questions about what makes a planet or moon habitable and about the pre-biotic chemical processes that led to the development of life here on Earth.
 
NASA’s Dragonfly New Frontiers mission is a rotorcraft lander designed to perform wide-ranging in situ investigation of the chemistry and habitability of this fascinating extraterrestrial environment. Taking advantage of Titan’s dense atmosphere and low gravity, Dragonfly can fly from place to place, exploring diverse geological settings to measure the compositions of surface materials and observe Titan’s geology and meteorology. Dragonfly will make multidisciplinary science measurements at dozens of sites, traveling ~150 km during a 3-year mission to characterize Titan’s habitability and determine how far organic chemistry has progressed in environments that provide key ingredients for life.
 
Speaker bio: Dr. Elizabeth (Zibi) Turtle is a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Her research combines remote-sensing observations and numerical geophysical models to study geological structures and their implications for planetary surfaces, interiors, and evolution, including tectonics and impact cratering on terrestrial planets and outer planet satellites, the thickness of Europa’s ice shell, Ionian mountain formation, and Titan’s lakes and weather. She is the Principal Investigator for the Dragonfly New Frontiers mission to Titan and the Europa Imaging System (EIS) cameras on the Europa Clipper mission, and has participated in the Galileo, Cassini, and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter missions. She earned her Ph.D. in Planetary Sciences from Univ. Arizona and B.S. in Physics from MIT.