Ep 34: The Discovery of Pluto
Synopsis
Everything STEAM teamed up with the Lowell Observatory to discuss all things Pluto. A Historian & Planetary Scientist from Lowell joined the podcast to highlight the history of Pluto’s discovery, the science of Pluto, how their observatory plans for the future and the all important, Dark Skies Initiative. If you want to learn about the determinism of Pluto’s title, the features discovered during the New Horizon’s mission and the Observatory’s inclusion in present-day projects; then you my friend have come to the right place.
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Meet the Guest Stars
Kevin Schindler
Kevin is the historian and Public Information Officer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has worked for 27 years. He shares Lowell’s long history of research and exploration through writing and public presentations. He writes articles for a variety of publications and contributes a bi-weekly astronomy column, “View from Mars Hill”, for the Arizona Daily Sun newspaper. He has also written seven books, including Pluto and Lowell Observatory.
Fun fact: Schindler has both a fossil crab and asteroid named after him.
Dr. Will Grundy
Will is a Planetary Scientist at the Lowell Observatory who received a PhD in Planetary Science at the University of Arizona, 1995
Dr. Grundy does spectroscopic, thermal, and imaging observations of outer Solar System bodies using numerous large ground- and space-based telescopes including Hubble, Keck, Gemini, DCT, IRTF, and MMT.
Targets of these observations include icy satellites and Kuiper belt objects. Some of the larger bodies like Pluto, Triton, Eris, and Makemake.
He also studies cryogenic ices and ice mixtures in the Astrophysical Materials Laboratory at Northern Arizona University.
Additionally, Dr. Grundy is involved in projects to discover Kuiper belt binaries and to determine their mutual orbits and masses, using the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as laser guide star adaptive optics techniques at Keck and Gemini observatories.
Dr. Grundy is co-investigator on NASA’s New Horizons mission that encountered the Pluto system in 2015 and the Kuiper belt object Arrokoth in 2019. Lastly, Will heads the mission’s surface composition science theme team.
