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Robotic telescopes subject of Astronomy Days lecture tonight at museum

The fifth in the Bradbury Science Museum's Astronomy Days series of talks is at 7 this evening when Tom Vestrand of Space and Atmospheric Sciences (ISR-1) discusses "Mining the Night Sky with Robotic Telescopes."

The talk focuses on the RAPid Telescopes for Optical Response, or RAPTOR, telescope system at the Laboratory that is designed to identify and make follow-up observations of optical transients in real time.

Before coming to the Laboratory, Vestrand was on the faculty of the University of New Hampshire for a decade, where he was the principal investigator for the gamma-ray spectrometer on NASA's Solar Maximum Mission Satellite, and was actively involved in several spacecraft missions. At the Lab, he is currently the project leader for RAPTOR, an array of small, rapidly slewing, optical telescopes currently monitoring the sky for optical transients.

Herb Funsten of the Center for Space Science and Exploration (ISR-CSSE) will be discussing "The Heliosphere" at 7 p.m., Thursday. This talk will provide an overview of the heliosphere and its interactions with the solar system and the local interstellar medium.

Funsten is the director of the ISR-CSSE. Funsten joined the Lab as a post-doctoral fellow in 1990 and became a staff member in 1993. He is a member of the instrument teams on NASA's Cassini, IMAGE, TWINS, and Mars Odyssey missions. As a lead instrument investigator on the Department of Energy's SAVE payload, he holds four patents and three patents pending on mass spectrometry and detection technologies.

Astronomy Days and its lectures help support the Laboratory's hosting of the Earthwatch Institute's Student Challenge Awards Program entitled "Transient Phenomena in Astrophysics." The program brings eight high-school students from around the country to Los Alamos for two weeks to be exposed to aspects of research in astrophysics.

The Bradbury Science Museum is part of the Public Affairs Office. It is located at 15th Street and Central Avenue in Los Alamos. Museum hours, apart from the special events, are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Friday, and 1 to 5 p.m., Saturday, Sunday and Monday. There is no admission fee to attend museum events.

For more information, call Pat Berger at the museum at 5-0896.

--Brenna Moore

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