Missions to Main Belt Asteroids and Sky in September

Talk by John Davies. We will also have the Sky in September from Alan Pickup.

Missions to main belt asteroids, past and future. A historical review plus an overview of Dawn at Vesta and Ceres, and a preview of Lucy and Psyche.

Until he retired in September last year John was an astronomer at the UKATC, originally known as the Royal Observatory Edinburgh. His final role there was as co-ordinator for a European medium sized telescope network. He has also been a support scientist at the UK Infrared Telescope in Hawaii, worked on astronomy satellites such as IRAS, ROSAT and ISO and before that worked as a flight test engineer on the Tornado fighter aircraft. His research interests were comets (he discovered six) and asteroids including those beyond Pluto in the Kuiper belt. Minor planet 9064 is named Johndavies after him.He presently helps at the Tweedale Astronomy Society based in Peebles and the Penicuik Air Cadets . He makes a lot of model rockets.