"Chaos On Io”, an illustrated lecture by Professor William
B. McKinnon of Washington University, is the featured at the April meeting
of the St. Louis Astronomical Society. The presentation, cosponsored
by NASA's Missouri Space Grant Consortium, is open to the public free
of charge.
Jupiter’s
superheated moon, Io, is the most geologically active body in our Solar
System. It has been a special target for the NASA spacecraft Galileo
Orbiter’s extended mission and its Millennium mission. Dr. McKinnon
will present a tour of Io’s numerous volcanoes, lava fields, plumes,
and towering mountains. He will also discuss an intriguing parallel
with the volcanically disrupted ice shell of Io’s neighboring sister
world, Europa.
Dr. William B. McKinnon
is a Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and a Fellow of the McDonnell
Center For the Space Sciences at Washington University in Saint Louis.
He received his Doctorate from the California Institute of Technology
in 1981. His research interests center on the structure and evolution
of the icy bodies of the outer solar system - the Pluto-Charon system,
the satellites of the giant planets, and the small frozen worlds that
lie beyond Pluto. He is also a specialist in impact processes, the collisions
that shaped the surfaces of the solid planets and the satellites early
in their histories.