Russell Palma will use stunning space photos to illustrate discoveries about the sun and early solar system when he presents the 2006 Douglas R. Moore Faculty Research Lecture Monday, April 10, at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
Palma, professor of physics and astronomy at Minnesota State Mankato, will discuss "NASA's Genesis and Stardust Missions: Exploring the Early Solar System" at 7 p.m. in Ostrander Auditorium of Centennial Student Union.
His presentation will feature many photos related to the Genesis and Stardust space missions, as well as short film pieces. The event is free and open to the public, and children are encouraged to attend with their parents. Refreshments will be served after the presentation.
NASA's Genesis space probe lifted off in 2001, and its capsule crashed into the Utah desert in 2004, shattering delicate wafers holding samples of atoms and ions collected from the solar wind between Earth and the sun. Since then researchers have sifted data from the fragments, and they have recently begun releasing their findings.
The Stardust mission blasted off in 1999, returning in January after a seven-year, 3-billion-mile space trek. Scientists are examining dust particles that the probe collected during its passage through the tail of comet Wild-2 and from interplanetary space.
Palma worked both on-site and in collaboration with scientists at NASA-Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, for a number of years and served as a NASA/ASEE Summer Faculty Fellow there in 1983 and '84.
He came to Minnesota State Mankato in 2004 after 24 years as a physics faculty member at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. For eight of those years he chaired the Sam Houston State Department of Physics. He also is an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Minnesota and has served as a senior research associate at Texas A&M University in College Station, a research physicist at the University of California-San Diego (La Jolla), an associate professor at Butler University in Indianapolis, Ind., and a research associate at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
Palma earned his bachelor of science degree in astrophysics, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Indiana University in Bloomington, and his master's and doctorate in space physics and astronomy from Rice University.
The Moore Lectureship celebrates excellence in research at Minnesota State Mankato.
The lecture is the 32nd President's Faculty Research Lectureship, and the 19th named in honor of former Minnesota State Mankato President Douglas R. Moore, who established the lectureship to illuminate faculty research.
Moore was president of then-Mankato State University from 1974-1978. His presidential tenure saw the transformation of Mankato State College into a university, as well as the consolidation of the Lower and Upper Campuses and construction of a new administration building.
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