Cacey Bester, Swarthmore College
Title: Making a Splash: Studies of Impact in Granular Materials
Abstract:
Examples of granular materials, or large collections of macroscopic grains, exist in abundance, from rice and cereal to sand and rocks. These particulate systems seem simple; they consist of dry, rigid grains interacting by contact. However, granular materials present complexities that are not well-understood, such as flow behavior that can readily changes between solid-like and liquid-like. This talk will give an introduction to the unique behavior of granular materials and the use of high-speed video photography to probe the complexities of a granular medium as revealed through an impact experiment.
Carrie Nugent, Olin College
Title: Near-Earth Asteroids (or, Why Dinosaurs Should Have Learned Physics)
Abstract:
An asteroid impact is the only natural disaster we have the technology to prevent. But prevention takes time, meaning we need to discover and track near‐Earth asteroids now. This talk will give an overview on asteroids, including a few notable asteroid impacts. I will also discuss the work I’m doing at Olin College to re-process the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) dataset. NEAT operated from 1995 to 2007 and discovered 41,227 asteroids and comets (Helin et al., 1997 and Pravdo et al, 1999), and reported observations of 258 comets.