Michigan Theater Ann Arbor, MI
Dr. Justin Kasper
Associate Professor of Atmospheric and Space Sciences, University of Michigan
Sunshine— The Solar Probe Plus Project
Program Description
A discussion of the Solar Probe Plus project, and the differences between the spacecraft in the film and the real-life Solar Probe.
Presented At
Michigan Theater Ann Arbor, MI
Film Synopsis
A team of international astronauts is sent on a dangerous mission to reignite the dying Sun with a nuclear fission bomb in 2057.
50 years in the future, the Sun begins to die, and Earth is dying as a result. Though the encroaching darkness at first seems unstoppable, scientists have devised one desperate final plan to buy the human race a temporary reprieve from the grim future that looms just past the horizon. A crew of eight men and women has been given a nuclear device designed to reignite the sun and are sent hurtling through the cosmos on the most crucial space mission ever attempted. Suddenly, as the crew loses radio contact with mission control, everything begins to fall apart. Now, in the farthest reaches of the galaxy, the men and women who may hold the key to ultimate survival find themselves struggling for their lives and their sanity.
About the Speaker
Dr. Justin Kasper is an associate professor of atmospheric and space sciences at the University of Michigan. He is interested in understanding the forces that lead to solar flares and the solar wind, a stream of particles heated to millions of degrees in the Sun’s atmosphere, or corona. His major results concern heating, instabilities, and helium in the solar corona and solar wind, and the impact of space weather on society. In 2007, he used measurements by the Voyager spacecraft to detect the termination shock, a massive shockwave surrounding our solar system. He previously worked at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and has served on advisory committees for NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Academy of Sciences. He currently leads the SWEAP Investigation, an international team of scientists and engineers building sensors that will collect samples of the Sun for the NASA Solar Probe Plus spacecraft, a mission of exploration that will make history in 2018 as the first human-made object to plunge into the solar corona.