5 June 2025 – Club Meeting Presentation
— Thursday night, 7:00 – 8:30 p.m.
This free speaker presentation will be offered in-person at the
UNC-Asheville Reuter Center and virtually online. Registration is not required; use this Zoom link to watch the presentation remotely.
Although parking for this meeting at the Reuter Center is free, you must register your vehicle with a visitor “daily” permit at this link. Once registration is complete, visitors will not need to print or display a permit; the new system utilizes camera-based License Plate Recognition technology. All vehicles must park front-end in, so that the license plate is visible.
An Astronomy Guest Speaker Series Event – a collaboration of the Astronomy Club of Asheville and UNC-Asheville
Cryovolcanism: The Coolest Geological Process
– presented by
Jessica Noviello, Ph.D.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Many planetary bodies in the Solar System show evidence of cryovolcanism, which is the eruption of water, ice, and dissolved volatiles onto a body’s surface. Details about how cryovolcanism works and how it might work on different bodies, however, are open questions in planetary science. The New Horizons mission to the Pluto system returned the first images of Pluto and its moons, the largest of which is Charon. Charon’s surface shows evidence of cryovolcanic resurfacing, but the presence of discrepancies between observations and computer models raises major questions about the moon’s history. In this talk, Dr. Noviello will explain the basics of cryovolcanism, lead you on a tour of cryovolcanoes of the Solar System, and present on why Charon might provide the best opportunity to study a major but enigmatic geological process.