Nebraska Physics and Astronomy Summit

Dan Reichart, Ph.D.

Dr. Dan Reichart joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2002, where he is now a Professor of Physics and Astronomy and has been building “Skynet”. Skynet is an ever-growing collection of fully automated, or robotic, professional-quality telescopes under the control of software developed by Reichart’s team. Currently, Skynet spans four continents and five countries, and consists of nearly twenty optical telescopes, with mirrors ranging in size from 14 inches to 1 meter in diameter, as well as a 20-meter diameter radio telescope. To date, Dr. Reichart has published over 160 journal articles, including five in Nature and Science magazines, and has raised over $12 million for his research.

David Harwood, Ph.D.

Dr. David Harwood, Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, will discuss "Repurposing Nebraska’s Cold War Infrastructure for Warm War Climate Science." Obtaining past records of Earth’s climate history of temperature and ice sheet changes is vital to our ability to improve numerical models to predict the rate and scale of future changes as our world warms. Polar Regions preserve archives of past climate history within and beneath ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica that have been accessed by UNL drillers, engineers, and scientists since the 1970s via ice coring, hot water drilling, and sediment drilling. An ambitious project is developing as part of UNL’s Grand Challenges - the Ice Coring & Education (ICE) Silo – to repurpose an abandoned Atlas-F missile silo in the Lincoln area into an ice drill testing and design center where new tools and instruments can be tested before deployment to remote field sites. Science and Technology Literacy and Climate Resilience will be a parallel focus of the ICE Silo through innovative public education and outreach. This project’s broad scope will enhance education in Nebraska and provide a one-of-a-kind research and testing facility for US and international polar scientists and engineers.