OpenTalk STEM: 1969 and All That Professor Monica Grady

1969 was the year when Neil Armstrong took his small step on the Moon. But the Moon was not the only planetary body that started to give up its secrets in 1969. Two spacecraft flew closer to Mars than ever before, picturing its cratered surface and one of its polar caps. Two large meteorites fell, one in Mexico, the other in Australia. They were not from the same asteroid, but each carried crucial information about happened as the Sun was born.

Two astronomers in Kazakhstan discovered a comet that was subsequently given their names, Churyumov and Gerasimenko. The comet was the target of the European Space Agency’s incredibly successful Rosetta mission. And finally, a party of Japanese glaciologists found fragments from nine separate meteorites together on a patch of blue ice. Since then, another 50,000 meteorites have been recovered from Antarctica.

Monica Grady was involved in the Rosetta mission and has collected meteorites in Antarctica. She has studied meteorites from the asteroid belt, from the Moon and from Mars. In her talk, she will explain what, 50 years later, we have learnt about the Solar System from the events of 1969.