(don't forget to read Part 1 and Part 2)
Snow White’s chance for redemption finally came last year. I got an email from Adam Burgasser, an astronomer at UC San Diego, best known for his studies of brown dwarfs in the local universe (less well known, but perhaps more relevant in this case, is that I was his Ph.D. advisor a decade ago). Adam had just moved from MIT where he had helped design a new instrument for the Magellan telescope in Chile – the FIRE spectrograph -- perfectly suited for studying brown dwarfs. An instrument perfectly suited for studying brown dwarf turns out, by coincidence, to also be ideal for studying the surfaces of objects in the Kuiper belt. Adam wanted to take this new instrument on a quick test drive on something interesting in the outer solar system. He emailed me asking if there were any bright objects in the Kuiper belt worth observing. My instant response: YES!
Snow White’s chance for redemption finally came last year. I got an email from Adam Burgasser, an astronomer at UC San Diego, best known for his studies of brown dwarfs in the local universe (less well known, but perhaps more relevant in this case, is that I was his Ph.D. advisor a decade ago). Adam had just moved from MIT where he had helped design a new instrument for the Magellan telescope in Chile – the FIRE spectrograph -- perfectly suited for studying brown dwarfs. An instrument perfectly suited for studying brown dwarf turns out, by coincidence, to also be ideal for studying the surfaces of objects in the Kuiper belt. Adam wanted to take this new instrument on a quick test drive on something interesting in the outer solar system. He emailed me asking if there were any bright objects in the Kuiper belt worth observing. My instant response: YES!