Dr. Peter Jenniskens, June 1

Post date: May 16, 2013 11:44:50 PM

The Gold Trail Grange presents

The Sutter’s Mill Meteorite: One Year Later

Dr. Peter Jenniskens from the SETI Institute

Saturday, June 1, 2013

@ 7:30 PM

Doors open at 6:30 for Social Hour – light refreshments available for purchase

Gold Trail Grange

319 Highway 49, Coloma, CA

Dr. Jenniskens will present his latest findings from the meteorite that fell upon Coloma and the surrounding area in April 2012. Part of the presentation will focus on two other recent meteor events: one that fell in Novato and another at Chelyabinsk, Russia. He will also inspect potential Sutter’s Mill meteorite samples.

No Fee, Donations gratefully accepted to benefit SETI and Gold Trail Grange

THE SUTTER'S MILL METEORITE FALL and other stories out of this world

DR. PETER JENNISKENSJune 1 -Coloma

Last December 21, a consortium of researchers published in the journal Science the first results from the analysis of the Sutter's Mill meteorites and the circumstances of the asteroid impact over California's Gold Country on April 22, 2012. Consortium lead Dr. Peter Jenniskens is visiting Coloma to report on these results and talk about the efforts made by NASA Ames Research Center and the SETI Institute to coordinate the recovery with residents of Coloma and Lotus in order to learn as much as possible about the asteroid that shook people’s imagination. Jenniskens invites youto bring possible finds for verification, as Sutter's Mill meteorites can still be found. Dr. Jenniskens will also talk about the most recent meteorite fall in California in October, which was a product of his video meteor surveillance project, called CAMS, that tracked the fireball to the town of Novato. Finally, he will report on visiting the city of Chelyabinsk in Russia, where an airburst occurred on February 15 that injured over a thousand people.Dr. Jenniskens is best known for teaming up with University of Khartoum researchers and scientists to track down the meteorites following the impact of the small asteroid 2008 TC3 on October 7, 2008, still the only asteroid that was seen coming in before hitting the Earth. Sutter's Mill was the next biggest impact over land. His latest project is a video surveillance of the night sky to map out our meteor showers. Before that, he has been the Principal Investigator of a number of airborne observing campaigns that studied meteor showers and the fireballs created when spacecraft returned from interplanetary space. He received his Ph.D.inastronomy from Leiden University in the Netherlands and has since been associated with NASA Ames Research Center and the SETI Institute. He is the author of “Meteor Showers and their Parent Comets” (2006).