NfoLD Webinar — November 2021 — Marianne Smith and Pablo Sobron
InVADER: A deep sea mission to explore oceans on earth and beyond
About Drs. Smith and Sobron:
Marianne Smith is the director of the Institute for Completion at Citrus College where she focuses on policy and practice that support student retention and completion. Additionally, she serves as PI/Co-I on several NSF, USDOE, and NASA projects that provide mentoring to underrepresented STEM students and engages them in a broad array of experiential learning opportunities while also developing support systems to ensure URM students remain in STEM.
Pablo Sobron develops sensing technologies in robotic Earth and planetary exploration that include Curiosity, Perseverance, and Rosalind Franklin rover missions. Find out more about some of his most recent work by visiting the InVADER mission and Impossible Sensing websites. The technologies that Pablo and his teams at Impossible Sensing and the SETI Institute are developing bring unprecedented scientific capabilities to astrobiology missions on- and off-Earth and transformative capabilities to climate tech applications by combining innovative optoelectronics and deep data analytics.
Abstract:
Funded by NASA PSTAR to develop new ways to explore ocean worlds, InVADER is the first-ever permanent deep-sea laboratory to study the origin of life on earth and seek life in ocean worlds. The InVADER team has completed assembly of the scientific payload and mission platform and is preparing them for launch in 2022. Destination: Axial Seamount, the largest and most active volcano on the western boundary of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate. In this talk, Pablo Sobron will share the process from design to launch of this one-of-a-kind mission.
One of the key objectives of the InVADER project is to provide increased opportunities for STEM education and other public outreach. Our E/PO efforts are led by Citrus College, a two-year MSI in the Los Angeles basin. Marianne Smith will describe our efforts, specifically targeted to underrepresented groups, to educate and build a diverse next generation of ocean explorers.
