Michelle Thaller: Cosmic Treasures

Discovery Building 330 North Orchard Street, Orchard View Room, Madison, WI, United States

Chasing Asteroids for Clues to the Origins of LifeJoin Michelle Thaller, former NASA science communicator, for an evening exploring the origins of life. Thaller, in conversation with Eric Wilcots, Dean of the College of Letters & Sciences and Professor in the Dept of Astronomy, will talk about the OSIRIS-REx mission – an audacious project to return a sample from an asteroid. No problem, right? Just chase down a small rock 200 million miles away, traveling literally faster than a speeding bullet, vacuum up a sample of its surface, and shoot it back to Earth. The story turned out to be more [...]