Ithaca College

Professor Beth Ellen Clark Joseph will give the Keynote presentation at the European Planetary Science Congress in Riga, Latvia at the session on Spacecraft Missions on 18-September 2017.

Her talk will focus on the spectral mapping challenges and new technologies that will be employed during NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission operations at asteroid 101955 Bennu in Spring 2019.  Dr. Clark Joseph will be presenting some of the work performed by her Ithaca College research students Salvatore Ferrone, Fedor Efremenko, and Stavrini Tsangari (all Physics majors).  While in Riga, Professor Clark Joseph will be meeting with the OSIRIS-REx international science team members from Britain, France, Italy, and Canada to discuss the possibilities for international collaboration on the NASA mission. Of particular interest will be sharing some of the time-critical mineralogical analyses that will be necessary to select a site on the surface of the asteroid where the spacecraft will descend and perform an autonomous sample acquisition maneuver in Spring of 2020.  The observations conducted by the spacecraft will result in more than 200 maps of the asteroid’s compositional and thermophysical properties that must be synthesized and summarized to inform sample site selection.  Professor Clark Joseph’s role on the mission includes leading this effort.