Water Exploration in the Solar System: The Restless Hunt for Life
Speaker:
Essam Heggy
12 Sep 2017
8:00 PM
Great Hall, Memorial Union
Essam Heggy is a planetary scientist at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering and a Rosetta co-investigator at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He will discuss methods being used to explore possible subsurface aquifers and ice deposits on Mars as well as NASA’s and the European Space Agency's future plans to probe subsurface water on the red planet and Jupiter’s icy moons. Heggy is currently a member of several science teams conducting experiments on board the ESA’s Mars Express Orbiter and Rosetta Mission; the Chandrayaan-1, India’s first lunar mission; and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Essam Heggy obtained both a Master's and PhD in astronomy and astrophysics, with a major in space and planetary sciences, with distinguished honors from the Sorbonne-UPMC Paris University in France.
Before Joining USC, he was a research scientist in the Radar Science Group at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Visiting Associate in Geology at the California Institute of Technology; (tenured) associated professor of geophysics at the Institute of Earth Physics in Paris, France, and a visiting scientist at the NASA Johnson Space Center and the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas.
Heggy is currently a member of the science team of the MARSIS instrument aboard the Mars Express Orbiter, the Mini-SAR experiment aboard Chandrayaan-1, the Mini-RF experiment on board the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the CONSERT radar experiment on board the Rosetta mission. He is also a contributing scientist to several proposed planetary and terrestrial radar imaging and soundings experiments and participated in several NASA radar mission concept design.