An Outreach and Public Engagement event of the IAU General Assembly 2024. The Cape Town Science Centre is hosting a free public talk “Insights from Nature and Space: The Dung Beetle and Juno’s Journey to Jupiter” with two speakers – Marcus Byrne (University of Witwatersrand) and Heidi Becker (NASA Heidi Becker – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory). The MC for the event will be Steve Sherman (Living Maths).
Date: Wednesday, 14 August 2024
Time: 18:00 – 20:00
Venue: SAP Auditorium at the Cape Town Science Centre
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‘Dung Beetles as Canaries: What Dung Beetles Can Tell Us About Our World’: Marcus Byrne – University of Witwatersrand
Making a living on dung is not a glamourous lifestyle. Nevertheless, despite having tiny brains, dung beetles have solved many of life’s challenges, including how to get around on earth. They use the sun and the stars to find their way across the veld, and by picky eating they can even make a decent meal out of dung. By allowing us to see into their world, these small, tenacious insects reveal how evolution has fitted them for their role as recyclers, and how our actions can upset many of their ecosystem services that we rely on.
‘Spacecraft Juno’s journey to Jupiter – and the science adventures of its low-light navigation camera’: Heidi Becker – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
NASA’s solar-powered Juno spacecraft continues its journey around Jupiter and its moons, braving the most extreme planetary radiation environment in our solar system. Since arriving at Jupiter in July 2016, Juno’s discoveries have transformed our view of Jupiter, thanks to a specially designed orbit and state-of-the art science instruments. Some of the most exciting science has come from the innovative use of Juno’s low-light Stellar Reference Unit (“SRU”) star tracker, a navigation camera designed to take pictures of dim stars. The SRU has captured the first ever image of Jupiter’s faint and mysterious dust ring from the inside looking out, discovered a new kind of lighting on Jupiter’s night side, and is collecting remarkable images of Jupiter’s moons as the journey continues…
