The Search for Life: A Story Told by Past, Present, Future NASA Science Missions

Guest Speaker
Megan Ansdell
Program Officer

Join us for a free, ʻohana-friendly public astronomy talk with kamaʻaina Megan Ansdell, NASA Program Officer, on Thursday, May 29 at 6:30 p.m. at the Gates Performing Arts Center at Hawaiʻi Preparatory Academy in Waimea. Doors open at 6:00 p.m.

In this talk, we will embark on the search for life beyond Earth in a journey through NASA’s groundbreaking space science missions. We will start in our own Solar System—from the early glimpses of Venus’ scorching surface, to “following the water” on Mars, and out to the subsurface oceans of the moons of the giant planets. We will then explore beyond our solar system, with the space observatories that have revolutionized our understanding of planets around stars other than our Sun—known as exoplanets—from some of the first exoplanet detections with the Hubble Space Telescope, to the foundational exoplanet demographics provided by the Kepler mission, to the most detailed characterizations of exoplanet atmospheres by the James Webb Space Telescope. Looking to the future, we will highlight how NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory aims be the first space telescope capable of searching for “biosignatures” on Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars, shedding light on how common life is in our region of the galaxy, in major step toward answering the question: “Are we alone?”

About Megan:

Megan Ansdell is a Program Officer in the Planetary Science Division (PSD) and the Astrophysics Division (APD) at NASA Headquarters. For APD, she serves as the Program Scientist for the Great Observatory Maturation Program (GOMAP) and the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). For PSD, she serves as the Planetary Protection Lead for the Mars Sample Return (MSR) Program and the Sample Receiving Project (SRP) as well as the Lead for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML). In 2023, Megan was awarded the NASA Early Career Achievement Medal.

Before joining NASA in 2020, Megan was a Flatiron Research Fellow at the Flatiron Institute in New York City, where she held a joint position with the Center for Computational Astrophysics and Center for Computational Mathematics. In this role, she developed machine learning algorithms and other computational methods for studying young stars and their protoplanetary disks. Before this, Megan was a Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Center for Integrative Planetary Sciences, where she applied deep learning models to exoplanet transit classification with NASA’s Frontier Development Lab and conducted demographic studies of protoplanetary disks using data from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and NASA’s Kepler/K2 mission.

Megan grew up in Kāneʻohe on O‘ahu. She obtained her PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Hawaii in 2017 with a thesis on demographic studies of protoplanetary disks, which won the International Astronomical Union’s PhD Prize for Planetary Systems and Bioastronomy in 2017 as well as the University of Hawaii’s Doctoral Student Excellence in Research Award in 2016. Before her PhD, Megan earned a master’s degree in International Science and Technology Policy from the George Washington University in Washington, DC, where she researched and advocated for international cooperation in human space exploration; her thesis on language protocols for international human spaceflight won the 2011 Sacknoff Prize for Space History. Megan has also obtained a master’s degree in Space Studies from the International Space University in France and a bachelor’s degree in Astrophysics from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

The Public Astronomy Talks at Keck Observatory are graciously sponsored by the Rob and Terry Ryan Foundation.