We are privileged to present Dr. Jon Morse. CEO of the BoldlyGo Institute, who will discuss the possibilities of returning to the moon to build scientific facilities. 7:30 pm at the Lienhard Hall 3rd floor conference room, Pace University, Pleasantville. Free and open to the public.

The increased interest by NASA, international space agencies and private sector companies in returning to the Moon with robotic and crewed missions during the next decade and beyond opens up new possibilities for conducting scientific investigations from the lunar surface. Pros and cons will be discussed in this context regarding establishing lunar-based observatories to study the cosmos and how such facilities might work in concert with future ground-based and free-flying space-based telescopes.

Dr. Jon Morse is CEO of the BoldlyGo Institute. He has more than 20 years of leadership experience in space missions, space-focused organizations, and science and innovation policy. His academic appointments include Professor of Physics at RPI and Associate Professor of Physics & Astronomy at ASU. He served as Director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA HQ from 2007-2011, overseeing the launches of Fermi, Kepler, WISE, Hubble Space Telescope (HST) SM4 and other missions. Prior to that he served as a Senior Policy Analyst in the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy with a portfolio encompassing physical sciences and engineering at NSF, DOE, NASA and NIST. Before moving to ASU in 2003, he served as Project Scientist for the HST Cosmic Origins Spectrograph while at the University of Colorado. He is a Harvard graduate and earned his PhD from the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.