Maryland's Place in Space 50th Anniversary Expo

Several JCET and GEST faculty members will be representing UMBC at the Baltimore Convention Center this Saturday, May 30th, as part of Maryland's Place in Space Expo. This free event will be held from 10am - 4pm. Additional information regarding this and related events can be found at http://mdplaceinspace.jhuapl.edu.

LARES, the LAser RElativity Satellite, a 14-inch diameter spherical satellite with a mass of 853 lbs., will be launched in late 2010, and will become the densest object in our solar system. Dr. Erricos C. Pavlis has been selected by NASA to be the US PI for the Italian Space Agency's (ASI) LARES satellite mission. He and his team will join their Italian counterpart led by Ignazio Ciufolini, University of Salento at Lecce, to form the International Science Team for LARES. The spacecraft has been been completed this fall (2009), and an analysis center is also being completed for the reduction of the tracking data once the satellite is launched. The satellite's surface will be studded with 92 prisms that will reflect incident light towards the incoming direction. In order to test Einstein's theory of General Relativity (GR), LARES' surface will be shot with laser pulses by ground-based laser tracking stations to measure the distance with mm-accuracy and determine its precise orbit. Validating GR through various tests will help us better understand how our world works and will eventually lead to an understanding of the nature of dark matter and the unification of various theories in physics. (Note, some information has been updated as of 11/20/09.)

David Lary's paper titled Machine Learning and Bias Correction of MODIS Aerosol Optical Depth has been accepted for publication by IEEE Trans. on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

are featured in an article in Scientific American, 7 May 2009, which also includes an accompanying Slide Show.