Weekly Space Hangout: March 24, 2021 – Looking for Water on the Moon with Dr. Casey Honniball

Listen on Libsyn / Subscribe to the Show


This week we are pleased to welcome Dr. Casey Honniball to the WSH. Casey is a NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) Fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and has extensive experience in observing, instrumentation, and telescope operation.

As an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, she aided in the development of a submillimeter instruments that she would later help deploy to Mt. Graham and Llano de Chajnantor Observatories and to Antarctica.

As a graduate student at the University of Hawai’i she was responsible for assembly, test, and deployment of a 3-5 µm imaging interferometer (MIDAS, Mid infrared detector of atmospheric species) used for volcanological studies and as a prototype for a small satellite instrument. She co-led a large-scale survey of the mid-IR hydration properties of lunar surface using the SpeX cross-dispersed spectrograph at the NASA InfraRed Telescope Facility (IRTF). Dr. Honniball originated the project to use the NASA/DLR Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) to search for the 6 µm molecular water signature on the lunar surface and has had two observing runs on SOFIA with 20 more hours planned. As a postdoc fellow, Dr. Honniball continues lunar observations with the IRTF and SOFIA and works to connect the 3 and 6 µm hydration bands on the Moon.

Be sure to follow Casey on Twitter to stay up to date with all of her research.

This Week’s Journalists and Their Stories

How to Support CosmoQuest

The Weekly Space Hangout is a production of CosmoQuest. Here are some specific ways you can help:

Don’t forget to like and subscribe! Plus we love being shared out to new people, so tweet, comment, review us… all the free things you can do to help bring science into people’s lives.

Leave a Reply