WILLIAMSPORT, PA – Lycoming College will host a lecture by NASA Astrophysicist Dr. Caroline Kilbourne Stahle on September 23 as a part of the Fall Symposium on SPACE: a Revolution in Perspective. Stahle will discuss the "Challenges and Opportunities in Making Things Work in Space." The presentation is at 7:30 p.m. in the Barclay Lecture Hall (G-11) of the Heim Building and is free and open to the public.

Astronauts are not the only people involved in space exploration. Most space investigation is actually done by machines that communicate with humans on earth.

X-ray astronomy is one way to see deep into space. As a member of the X-ray astrophysics team at the Goddard Space Flight Center, Dr. Stahle builds very small devices which help to study some of the largest things in the Universe. Since 93% of ordinary matter in the universe radiates x-rays, x-ray detectors above the Earth’s atmosphere can trace the hot universe, tell us about energetic phenomena, and identify what makes up the cosmos.

Dr. Stahle went to graduate school at Stanford University upon graduation from Princeton. In graduate school, Stahle worked with researchers on an advanced x-ray detector, the microcalorimeter. When she graduated from Stanford with her PhD, the Goddard group asked her to work with them, and she's been at NASA since 1995.

Dr. Stahle’s presentation is one of several events that are part of the semester-long symposium. For more information, consult the website at http://www.lycoming.edu/symposium.

The symposium will be held in the Heim building, room G-11 at 7:30. It is free to the public.

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