Sean C. Solomon, Ph.D., director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, will deliver the 2007 McDonnell Lecture at 7:30 p.m. March 30 in the Jerzewiak Family Auditorium of the Arts & Sciences Laboratory Science Building.
The lecture is free and open to the public. Solomon will speak on “The Messenger Mission to Mercury.”
A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Solomon is principal investigator for NASA’s Messenger mission and heads a multi-institutional consortium of scientists and engineers.
Launched in 2004, Messenger is expected to be the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury.
Its path through the inner solar system includes a series of carefully orchestrated flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury to slow the craft for insertion into its orbit around the innermost planet beginning in 2011.
Solomon is a longtime colleague, collaborator and friend of Roger J. Phillips, Ph.D., the outgoing director of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences and professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences.
For more information, call 935-5332 or e-mail lucas@wustl.edu.