SDAA Program Meeting

San Diego Astronomy Association (SDAA) sponsors speakers on a wide range of astronomy topics on the third Wednesday of every month at the Mission Trails Regional Park Visitors Center. The Program meeting begins at 7:00 PM. Each attendee receives one free door prize ticket. After announcements and a small amount of business, the audience is treated to the featured presentation. At the close of the meeting the door prizes are presented.  The event is open to the public. The Mission Trails Regional Park Visitors Center is at One Fr. Junipero Serra Trail, San Diego CA 92119.  Call the park at 619-668-3281 for more information or visit http://www.mtrp.org.

Please contact Michael Vander Vorst if you have an questions, comments, or ideas for the Program Meetings.

Speaker: Salem Emara 

Topic: The Dawn Mission

This talk will give an update on the Dawn mission. Dawn belongs to NASA’s Discovery Program.  Dawn is a NASA active mission to visit the asteroid belt. During the mission Dawn will visit two celestial bodies starting with Vesta, before heading to gather more data at a second, Ceres. Dawn's goal is to characterize the conditions and processes of the solar system's earliest epoch by investigating in detail two of the largest protoplanets remaining intact since their formations. Ceres and Vesta reside in the extensive zone between Mars and Jupiter together with many other smaller bodies, called the asteroid belt. This mission is very important to answering questions such as the source of water on earth, or the origin of organic matter.

Salem Emara lives and works in San Diego. Currently he is staff digital design engineer with Qualcomm camera HW team leading low-end camera and next gen multimedia systems. During his 20-year career in engineering he lead and delivered multiple ground-breaking technologies and projects. His interests are signal processing, digital imaging, astronomy, and physics. His passion is to promote science and technology to young audience and science interest groups