SHEDDING LIGHT ON DARK MATTER AND DARK ENERGY
A conversation about the mystery behind what makes-up 95% of the universe with Dr. Jason Rhodes and Dr. Alina Kiessling , Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology.
Dr. Rhodes earned a B.S. in Physics from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA; an M.A and a Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University, NJ. After stints as a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and Caltech in Pasadena, California, he landed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2004. His projects include NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (formerly WFIRST), the European Space Agency's Euclid mission, and the Vera Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). All of these are designed to study "dark energy," the hypothesized cause of the Universe's accelerated expansion.
Dr. Kiessling is a JPL Research Scientist investigating dark matter and dark energy through weak lensing analysis of N-body simulations. She earned a B.Sc. (Hons) Space Science at LaTrobe University, Australia and later earned her Ph.D. Astrophysics at University of Edinburgh, UK. Alina is a member of Euclid and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Dark Energy Science Collaboration (LSST-DESC) and was a consultant on the WFIRST-AFTA Science Definition Reports. Additionally, she is co-leading the development of the 20-20-20 Airships NASA Centennial Challenge to develop stratospheric airships, with the expectation that these will become low-cost platforms for the astrophysics (and Earth science) missions of the future.
Her research interests are Weak Gravitational Lensing, Cosmology, and N-Body Simulations
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