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ONLINE – General Meeting – April 2021
April 2, 2021 @ 6:30 pm - 9:00 pm
TAAA’s general member meeting will be held on April 2 and be conducted online. The meeting will start at 6:30 P.M. It will be followed by Mary Turner’s popular Seasonal Night Sky Presentation. The main presentation and Night Sky Presentation are open to the public. A Members Only Meeting will follow. To view the meeting, please visit Tucson Astronomy Facebook Live
6:30 pm – Main Public Presentation
Title: OSIRIS-REx: Mission Update Before Final Farewell Flyby of Bennu
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission team has passed many milestones in its long journey to study near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu; overcoming unforeseen obstacles including house-sized boulders in its path, pandemics, and concerns of sample loss after successful sample collection in October 2020. This presentation will focus on recent discoveries and results of the Touch-and-Go-Sample Acquisition Maneuver (TAG event) last Oct. 20th.
Before heading back toward Earth, the team will conduct a Final Flyby of Bennu on April 7. Presenter Dolores H. Hill will explain the purpose of the flyby, as well as the important discoveries made all along both about navigating the mission, and about this “rubble-pile” asteroid’s formation and the history of the Solar System. The returned sample will reveal even more important details about Bennu, and the organic materials important to life. Join us us on Friday, April 2nd for the latest OSIRIS-REx news, and what to look forward to as well.
Presenter: Dolores H. Hill is former OSIRIS-REx Ambassadors lead and is currently a member of the sample team for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission and coordinates LPL outreach. She is co-lead of the Astronomical League’s Target NEOs! Observing Program that transitioned from OSIRIS-REx Target Asteroids! citizen science program, honored as a White House Champion of Change for Citizen Science in 2013. Since 1981 Dolores has analyzed a wide range of meteorites at UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson, and provided technical support to space missions and LPL laboratories. A longtime member of the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association, Dolores also co-founded the Sunset Astronomical Society in Midland, Michigan, and was a member of the Warren Astronomical Society in the Detroit-area. Near-Earth asteroid (164215) Doloreshill is named after her. She looks forward to seeing samples of near-Earth asteroid Bennu in 2023!