Titan’s missing river deltas and an Earthly climate connection
“I’ll never forget the moment when I first saw new Cassini data come down from Titan’s surface,” says Samuel Birch. “I was in awe at witnessing this brand new, never-seen-before bit of our solar system.” Birch explores and models the evolution of the surfaces of planets, moons, and small bodies in the outer solar system, including Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko — two very different, icy worlds investigated by the spacecraft Cassini and Rosetta. He joins MIT this summer as one of eight recipients of the 2020 Heising-Simons Foundation 51 Pegasi b Fellows bridging planetary science and astronomy, accelerating our understanding of planetary system formation and evolution, and advance new technologies for detecting Earthlike worlds. Over the years, the Heising-Simons Foundation has generously supported a growing cohort of exoplanet researchers at MIT, including Jason Dittmann, Ian Wong, Ben Rackham, Clara Sousa-Silva, and now Samuel Birch, a research associate from...