OLLI0112 - Exploring the Solar System and Beyond

Course Description

In this lecture series, we will focus on some of the notable past and present exploration missions that have and will help astronomers unlock secrets within our own solar system, our Milky Way, and beyond. We will begin with an overview of the Voyager missions of the 1970s and 1980s that gave us up-close views of the giants planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. We will also devote one lecture to the story behind the Golden Records that each of the Voyager probes carried. Having discussed some initial discoveries by the Voyagers at Jupiter and Saturn, we will go a bit more in-depth into what we now know about these two planets and highlight what other past missions, such as Galileo and Cassini, and present missions, such as Juno, have taught us about Earth's big brothers. We will then turn our attention to the European Space Agency's Gaia mission and how it, among other things, has accurately mapped the locations of over one billion stars in our Milky Way. We will end the series with a look at the James Webb Space Telescope, including the engineering behind the most powerful space telescope ever built and what we expect to find with its incredible vision. This course will be recorded.