WIT X Dawn Aerospace - Inside NASA's SOFIA Telescope & Dawn's Aurora Spaceplane
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WIT X Dawn Aerospace - Inside NASA's SOFIA Telescope & Dawn's Aurora Spaceplane
Karina Leppik and Julia Sothman both worked on NASA’s SOFIA Telescope, a unique airborne observatory that was deployed to Christchurch seven times between 2013 and 2022. Over its lifetime, SOFIA studied star formations, planetary systems, the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, and more - advancing our understanding of the universe from a flying observatory.
Today, Julia is a Systems Engineer at Dawn Aerospace, working on the Aurora Spaceplane program, while Karina is a Systems Engineer for the Giant Magellan Telescope’s near-infrared spectrograph, a first-generation instrument currently under development.
In this talk, they’ll unpack what it really takes to turn ambitious scientific and aerospace concepts into working systems - the challenges, the trade-offs, and the lessons learned along the way.
Doors open 5:30pm - presentation 6:00pm. Drinks and nibbles provided. Event finishes at 7:30pm