NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NASA Ames and the SETI Institute are co-sponsoring a talk entitled: "From Crystalline Spheres to the Modern Universe: The 400-Year Journey from Kepler's Laws and Galileo's Telescope to NASA's Kepler Mission." The speakers are Edna DeVore and Dr. Jon Jenkins, both of the SETI Institute.

This lecture is free and open to the public and will take place on Thursday, Aug. 27, at 7 p.m., in the Eagle Room in Building N943.

Four hundred years ago, when spyglasses were all the rage in Europe, Galileo designed and built more powerful models and turned them to the sky. His marveling eyes saw a far different universe than the common wisdom of the time might have predicted: craters and hills on the moon, and spots on the sun; moons around Jupiter; the phases of Venus and other evidence of heliocentrism; and a dizzying array of new stars in an astonishingly vast universe. At about the same time, Kepler took up the Copernican idea of a heliocentric universe and Tycho's observational data, and showed that the Earth and the other planets traveled around the sun in elliptical orbits. He published his first two laws of planetary motion in 1609.

This lecture will examine those early blows to the idea of planets orbiting along perfect crystalline spheres at the center of creation, and then leap to how the NASA Kepler mission may further revolutionize our understanding of the workings of the universe.

About the speakers
Edna DeVore, a science and astronomy educator, is the deputy CEO and the director of Education and Public Outreach (EPO) at the SETI Institute. She's been a researcher, planetarium director, teacher and curriculum writer and currently is busy with projects related to education and SETI. Notable among these are the "Life in the Universe" curriculum materials for students in grades 3-9 and a new high school course, "Voyages Through Time." DeVore also co-directs the education and public outreach programs for two NASA missions: SOFIA and Kepler.

Jon Jenkins is the analysis lead for Kepler, which means that he heads up a group of about a half-dozen scientists and programmers who are designing and testing the software that will be the brains behind this dramatic search for other worlds. With a brightness precision of 20 parts per million, Kepler should be able to discover planets that are the same size as the rocky, inner orbs of our own solar system. By making an inventory of such worlds, Kepler will answer one of the most intriguing questions in astrobiology: are Earth-size planets abundant or rare?

About the series
This is the latest in a series of Ames-hosted public lectures centered around the concept of evolution. In honor of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of "On the Origin of Species," Ames will be looking at the evolution of science and technology, particularly as it contributes to the NASA mission.