Uploaded December 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago
RAS April Public Talk - Dr Naomi Rowe-Gurney
Our Solar System from JWST: The first two years
6pm
JWST, the largest space telescope ever made, was successfully launched on Christmas Day of 2021. Almost two years later, it has completed its commissioning phase and started sending back ground-breaking science, not just from distant stars and galaxies but also from our own Solar System. This includes investigation into the potential of ocean worlds, climate monitoring of the giant planets, and exploration of the full menagerie of asteroids and comets. In this talk, I will introduce the JWST, its capabilities for the Solar System and take you on a tour of the ground-breaking science that this huge observatory has already done.
About our speaker
Dr. Naomi Rowe-Gurney (she/her) is an Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) support officer at the Royal Astronomical Society helping with a number of projects in the astronomy sector. She is also a Research Development Manager for the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. She just completed a contract as a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, working on the JWST. She was a research coordinator for the JWST Solar System Team and her own research focused on the atmospheres of the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune. Naomi also led a Hubble Space Telescope program designed to support ice giant JWST observations. She obtained her PhD in 2021 from the University of Leicester. Throughout her PhD and postdoc, Naomi has used her past experience as a teacher to partake in significant science communication work and considerable equity, diversity and inclusion work promoting science to underrepresented groups.
RAS April Public Talk - Dr Naomi Rowe-Gurney
Our Solar System from JWST: The first two years
6pm
JWST, the largest space telescope ever made, was successfully launched on Christmas Day of 2021. Almost two years later, it has completed its commissioning phase and started sending back ground-breaking science, not just from distant stars and galaxies but also from our own Solar System. This includes investigation into the potential of ocean worlds, climate monitoring of the giant planets, and exploration of the full menagerie of asteroids and comets. In this talk, I will introduce the JWST, its capabilities for the Solar System and take you on a tour of the ground-breaking science that this huge observatory has already done.
About our speaker
Dr. Naomi Rowe-Gurney (she/her) is an Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) support officer at the Royal Astronomical Society helping with a number of projects in the astronomy sector. She is also a Research Development Manager for the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. She just completed a contract as a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, working on the JWST. She was a research coordinator for the JWST Solar System Team and her own research focused on the atmospheres of the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune. Naomi also led a Hubble Space Telescope program designed to support ice giant JWST observations. She obtained her PhD in 2021 from the University of Leicester. Throughout her PhD and postdoc, Naomi has used her past experience as a teacher to partake in significant science communication work and considerable equity, diversity and inclusion work promoting science to underrepresented groups.
