EEPS Colloquium: William McKinnon and Ryan Ogliore

A special talk by Clark Way Harrison Distinguished Professor Bill McKinnon and from WashU's Department of Physics Associate Professor Ryan Ogliore.

Volcanism on Io and the Prometheus Mission

Laboratory analyses of samples from asteroids, comets, the Moon, Mars, and Earth are the scaffolding of our knowledge of the building blocks, formation, and early evolution of the terrestrial planets. However, our understanding of the satellites and planets beyond the asteroid belt is not based on cosmochemical "ground truth" because we have not returned samples from this region of space. I will describe a mission concept, for NASA's New Frontiers program, to return hundreds of milligrams of material from Jupiter's ultra-volcanic moon Io. A sample from Io would allow us to see into the formation of the Galilean moons from Jupiter's circumplanetary disk, and would inform us about other interesting worlds inaccessible in time and space: the Archean Earth and tidally heated exoplanets.

EEPS colloquia are made possible by the William C. Ferguson Fund