Join Kansas Cosmosphere & Space Center staff each month on Twitter for an interactive discussion with space science topic specialists. Camilla Corona SDO and Dr. C. Alex Young are this month’s special guests.
Camilla Corona SDO (@Camilla_SDO, @NASA_SDO)
Camilla Corona SDO is no ordinary rubber chicken. She is the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory's Mission Mascot and in her role she helps with Education & Public Outreach. Camilla’s goals are to educate kid and adults about the Sun, Space Weather and the Sun-Earth connection. She also focuses on getting people inspired about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math).
Through various social media outlets people can follow Camilla’s adventures, learn about space exploration and get a behind the scene look at the mission also called “Our Latest Eye on the Sun”. Furthermore, Camilla has traveled to the Edge of Space five times on various missions lead by students. Those high-altitude balloons have reached heights of 125,000 feet and carried a variety of experiments. Camilla has truly been out of this world. More information about Camilla, including all her social media outlets, can be found here.
Dr. C. Alex Young (@TheSunToday)
A little bit country, a little bit rockin roll. Well not so much country but a lotta bit geek. Alex is the Associate Director for Science in the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He has a passion for sharing his little bit of knowledge with all by overseeing and coordinating the Education and Public Outreach team for the division. He works with the EPO teams as a liason with the NASA offices of Education and Communication. In addition, he works with the division scientists to promote and support their research.
Alex has some classic tendencies of sci-fi fan/crazy cat guy. From an early age, Alex was tinkering with his parents stuff taking things apart to figure out how they worked. This curiosity continued on into high school where he built his first laser with which he won an award an international science competition. Alex received an undergraduate degree at Florida State University while working for the now defunct Super Conducting Super Collider. After taking time off to work in the mountains of New Hampshire he went to the University of New Hampshire to study Quantum Chaos Theory. He instead ended up receiving a Master and PhD in high-energy astrophysics studying cosmic gamma-ray bursts and solar gamma-ray flares.
Alex joined the NASA/ESA SOHO mission after graduate school as a Solar Astrophysicist with the Extreme-Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT). Working in this area grew his interest in image processing, which he combined with his love of statistics and data analysis. It was this with the help of some of his colleagues that led to his establishment of the Solar Image Processing Workshops or SIPWork. Over the past 7 years, Young has helped organize and run 5 workshops and edited 3 special topic Solar Physics journal volumes on Solar Image Processing. Part of what he enjoys about data analysis topics is the sharing of knowledge with the solar and astrophysics communities. This has led to his participation with the California Harvard Astrostatisics Collaboration (CHASC).
Alex's passion for sharing knowledge has also been fueled by giving public lectures, television and radio interviews for NASA/TV and participating in several Discovery Channel documentaries. To further this outreach he established thesuntoday Facebook fanpage and the complementary website, thesuntoday.org. In his spare time he enjoys running, traveling, watching movies and playing video games.
Have a question for our guests about SDO or the sun? Tweet @kscosmosphere with the hashtag #cosmochat to join the conversation!
