Dr Geraint Jones
With the exception of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, the satellites of the two largest planets in the solar system are dominated by water ice. Far from being dull, heavily cratered frozen bodies, these moons are fascinating, diverse worlds reflecting the varying influences of their sizes, composition, and tides. We’ll survey these varied bodies, including Titan and its thick atmosphere, Ganymede and its magnetic field, erupting Enceladus, and Europa and its suspected activity. The latest results on Saturn’s moons from the Cassini-Huygens mission will be reported, as well as plans for the European Space Agency’s JUICE and NASA’s Europa missions to the Jupiter system.
Dr Geraint Jones is Head of the Planetary Science group at UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory, and Director of the Centre for Planetary Sciences at UCL/Birkbeck. Following a PhD in cometary science at MSSL, he worked at Imperial College London, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, before returning to MSSL in 2007. His research concentrates on comet and solar wind science, and the interactions between planetary magnetospheres and the moons that orbit within them. He is a member of the Cassini-Huygens CAPS and MIMI and the JUICE JANUS instrument teams, and leads MSSL’s hardware contribution to the JUICE PEP instrument. Geraint also a science writer and is behind the new webcomic, astrojots.com
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