Fall CASPER Seminar Presents University of Stuttgart Researcher

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Baylor University's Center for Astrophysics, Space Physics and Engineering Research (CASPER) will host a seminar featuring Dr.-Ing. Ralf Srama, associate researcher at the Institute of Space Systems at the University of Stuttgart, at 3 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 15, in Room D110 of the Baylor Sciences Building on the Baylor campus.
The event, which is free and open to the public, is a part of the seminar series CASPER hosts every semester.
Srama will lecture on in-situ dust instrumentation, which is capable of determining grain properties, such as trajectory, speed, size, charge and composition simultaneously. The first in-situ sensors in interplanetary space were flown more than 30 years ago and are now suited for Earth orbiting satellites, moon or planetary orbiters and interplanetary missions. Srama will discuss basic instrument principles, such as charge induction, impact ionization, depolarization and time-of-flight mass spectrometry.
Srama was appointed as an adjunct associate professor for CASPER in fall 2010. He also is a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, and has five NASA awards for his contributions to Cassini-Huygens, a spacecraft mission studying the planet Saturn since 2004.
Other speakers this semester include:
? Dr. Greg Leman, Hankamer School of Business Chair in Entrepreneurship at Baylor University, 1:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 23.
? Anindya Dey, graduate student studying string theory and cosmology at the University of Texas, 1:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 7
? Dr. Romualdo de Souza, Provost Professor of Chemistry at Indiana University, 1:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 28
? Dr. Rainer Sandau, DLR Berlin/ IAA Paris, 1:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 18
All of the seminars are in Room D110 of the Baylor Sciences Building.
CASPER is an official Baylor research center formed by a partnership between Baylor and Texas State Technical College-Waco. Space research within CASPER has a proud heritage dating back to the 1960s, including flight projects from Explorer I forward. Personnel within the Center have been actively involved on a number of NASA and ESA flight missions.
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by Katy McDowall, student newswriter, (254) 710-6805