Rough guide to Pluto-watching with Bill McKinnon
New Horizons will fly through the Pluto system on July 14 at an angle of 46 degrees to the plane of the dwarf planet’s orbit, then turn to use sunlight reflected from Charon, Pluto’s biggest moon, to image areas of Pluto now in continuous darkness. Your host for the WashU Pluto watching party will be Bill McKinnon, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, who will be commenting from mission headquarters at the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.
McKinnon receives Geological Society award
Bill McKinnon, PhD, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, received the 2014 G.K. Gilbert Award from the Geological Society of America. The award recognizes outstanding contributions to the solution of a fundamental problem of planetary geology.
A Q&A with planetary scientist Bill McKinnon
Bill McKinnon, PhD, professor of earth and planetary
sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, lists as his top research
interests the icy satellites of the outer solar system and the physics of
impact cratering. But he isn’t picky. If anything unusual and exciting is going
on anywhere in the solar system, he wants to know about it.