Revealing Saturn’s deep interior for the first time with Cassini

David Stevenson is the Marvin L. Goldberger Professor of Planetary Science at the California Institute of Technology and is an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. A native of New Zealand, his early work was in the condensed matter physics of planetary interiors, especially giant planets, but his wide ranging career has included contributions to the interpretation of planetary magnetic fields, the formation of planetary cores, melt migration, the origin of the Moon and numerous aspects of planetary and satellite formation, evolution and structure. He was involved in the Cassini mission and is a Co-Investigator and group leader in the Juno mission, currently in orbit at Jupiter. Awards include Fellowship in the Royal Society (London), membership of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), the Urey Prize (American Astronomical Society) and Hess Medal (American Geophysical Union).

Professor Emma Bunce is a planetary scientist working at the University of Leicester. She is involved in multiple high-profile space missions exploring our solar system including Cassini at Saturn, Juno at Jupiter, BepiColombo at Mercury, and the future JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) mission to Ganymede. She uses the data from these missions to answer fundamental questions about these diverse solar system objects. She is the PI on the Mercury Imaging X-ray Spectrometer, part of the BepiColombo payload which launched to Mercury in October 2018. She played a key role in the definition of and proposal for the JUICE mission, and will be working on two of the instrument teams from that mission when it arrives in the Jupiter system in 2030. She has published over 100 scientific papers on solar system science, and has received multiple awards in recognition of her work. Most recently she was awarded the RAS Chapman Medal for her research on the gas giant planets.

Professor Michele Dougherty FRS is Professor of Space Physics at Imperial College London. She is the Principal Investigator of the magnetic field instruments on board the NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens mission (which is in orbit around the Saturn system) and the ESA JUICE mission (to Jupiter and one of its moons, Ganymede) which will be launched in 2022. She was awarded the 2007 Institute of Physics Chree medal and the 2008 Royal Society Hughes medal for leadership on the Cassini mission and the discovery of a dynamic atmosphere at one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus. She is presently Chair of the UK Space Agency’s Science Programme Advisory Committee.

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Biography not yet available

Yohai Kaspi is a professor of atmospheric dynamics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Prof. Kaspi obtained a BSc in Physics and Mathematics at the Hebrew University (2000), a MSc in Physics at the Weizmann Institute (2002) and a PhD in Planetary atmospheric dynamics at MIT (2008). Following a postdoc at Caltech he joined the Weizmann Institute as a faculty member in 2011. His research spans both terrestrial atmospheric dynamics with focus on extratropical storm tracks and climate change and planetary atmospheric dynamics with focus on the giant planets. He is an author of more than 60 scientific papers on topics including, jet dynamics, storm tracks, climate change, gravity science, exoplanets, giant planet atmospheric dynamics and geostrophic turbulence. He is a member the Juno and JUICE missions science teams to Jupiter. 

Dr Hao Cao is a Research Associate at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. Prior to joining Harvard University in 2017, Dr Cao spent three years at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as a postdoctoral scholar. Dr Cao completed his PhD at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2014 and his undergraduate studies at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2009. The overarching goal of Dr Cao’s research is to understand the interior structure, dynamics, and evolution of planetary bodies. Dr Cao’s research experience encompasses space magnetometer data analysis, numerical magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) modeling of planetary dynamos, and theoretical calculation of planetary gravity fields. Dr Cao is a Co-Investigator of the JUICE MAG team, a member of the Juno Interior Working Group, a Cassini Participating Scientist, and a member of the Cassini magnetometer (MAG) team.

Chris is an astronomer interested in the way planets and stars are put together and live out their lives. His Ph.D. research focuses on the interiors of Jupiter and Saturn, building simulations of their structure and evolution to help interpret the wealth of observations made as part of campaigns like NASA’s Cassini mission. This includes leveraging the unique Cassini ring wave dataset to understand the way Saturn oscillates, revealing the planet’s interior seismologically.

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Biography not yet available

Chris Jones has research interests in planetary dynamos, planetary atmospheres and solar physics. He has worked on fluid processes in planetary and stellar interiors, including thermal and compositional convection, particularly in the presence of rotation and magnetic fields. He was awarded the Petrus Peregrinus Medal of the European Geosciences Union in 2009 for this work. Recently he has worked on anelastic dynamo models, zonal flows in giant planets and waves in planetary interiors. He has published over 120 papers in these areas, mostly in major international journals. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union. He was an organiser (with Steve Tobias) of the KITP programme on dynamo theory in Santa Barbara, and is a co-organiser of the forthcoming Isaac Newton institute program on Frontiers in Dynamo Theory: From the Earth to the Stars to be held in 2020. He is an associate editor of Geophysical and Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics, and was Editor-in-Chief of Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors from 2011-2018.

My main research interest is dynamics of planetary interiors. This involves using fast computers to simulate fluid dynamics (weather) in planetary atmospheres and magnetic field generation deep within planetary interiors. Work on planetary dynamos has implications for the dynamical evolution of all of the solar system planets, particularly Mercury, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and other large bodies, as well as planets outside the solar system (exoplanets). My undergraduate degree is in physics from the University of California, Berkeley. My PhD is from Johns Hopkins University. I had postdoctoral fellowships in Göttingen, Germany, and at University of California, Los Angeles. I am now an Associate Professor at the University of Alberta.    

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Ravit Helled is a Planetary Scientist and a Professor for Theoretical Astrophysics at the Institute for Computational Science, Center for Theoretical Astrophysics & Cosmology, University of Zurich. Professor Helled received her PhD from Tel-Aviv University in 2008 on the topic "The Formation of Jupiter". Ravit was a postdoc and senior researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles (2007-2011), and then a professor at Tel Aviv University (2011-2016). Her scientific work concentrates on planet formation and evolution, planetary interiors, and extrasolar planets. Ravit Helled is involved in space exploration and is a science team member of various ESA and NASA space missions. She is a frequent invited speaker at international conferences, and often serves on committees and various science panels.

I am CNRS Research Director at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, in Nice France, specializing in the study of the interiors of giant planets, and the formation and evolution of exoplanets. I obtained my PhD in 1994 from the Université Paris 7. I am CoI of the Juno mission currently in orbit around Jupiter and PI of ASTEP, a telescope installed in Antarctica to observe transiting exoplanets. In 2018, with colleagues L Iess, Y Kaspi and the Juno team, I helped to determine the depth of Jupiter’s zonal flow, something that will help us to understand Jupiter’s deep atmosphere. I am currently working on determining Jupiter’s interior composition from the analysis of Juno’s gravity data.