Tuesday, June 27, 2006, 7:30 p.m.

IfA Manoa Auditorium
  (2680 Woodlawn Drive, Honolulu)

Open to the public
Free admission and parking

Asteroids and comets are the leftovers of the original building blocks that formed the planets. Like detectives who use bone chips and splattered blood to determine how a murder was committed, we will use the orbits, sizes, shapes, and composition of comets and asteroids, together with numerical models, to probe how planets and small body populations have evolved over the last 4.6 billion years.

Bill Bottke received his PhD in planetary science from the University of Arizona in 1995, where he studied the collisional and dynamical evolution of asteroids. After postdoctoral fellowships at the California Institute of Technology and Cornell University, he joined the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado in 2000. When he is not chasing after his three daughters, he works to understand the formation and evolution of planetary bodies in the solar system. He is currently the Section Manager of the Planetary Science group at SwRI.