Science Cafe Orlando

The age of the solar system (and Earth) has had a long history of contentious debate, most famously in the last decade of the 19th century between Lord Kelvin and his one-time assistant John Perry. Today radiometric dating has the precision to detail events during the formation of the solar system and the geochemical evolution of the Earth. Dr Britt will review how we know the ages of the Solar System and the Earth and how that knowledge has changed our understanding of their formation and evolution.

Dr. Daniel Britt is an Associate Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences in the Department of Physics at UCF. He was educated at the University of Washington and Brown University, receiving a Ph.D. from Brown in 1991. He has had a varied career including service in the US Air Force as an ICBM missile launch officer and an economist for Boeing before going into planetary sciences. He has served on the science teams of two NASA missions, Mars Pathfinder and Deep Space 1. He was the project manager for the camera on Mars Pathfinder and has built hardware for all the NASA Mars landers. He currently does research on the physical properties and mineralogy of asteroids, comets, and Mars under several NASA grants. Honors include 5 NASA Achievement Awards, election as a Fellow of the Meteoritical Society, and an asteroid named after him: 4395 DanBritt. He was recently elected President of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society.

Slides of the presentation are available. MSFT PPT / ODP / PDF