LPI Seminar Series
Jessica Noviello, NASA Postdoctoral Management Program Fellow
The Internal Happenings of Dwarf Planet Haumea  

Date: Thursday, February 10, 2022
Time: 3:00–4:00 PM CST, 4PM ET, 12PM PT

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Since its discovery almost two decades ago, 2003 EL61 Haumea has puzzled the observing and planetary science communities. Haumea is a dwarf planet that orbits the Sun at 43 AU in the Kuiper belt. Observations from ground-based telescopes revealed Haumea’s size and shape to be a large (average radius approximately 800 kilometers) triaxial ellipsoid shape with an abnormally high rotational period of just 3.91 hours, making it the fastest spinning large body in the solar system. Later observations also revealed Haumea to have two moons and even a ring system. Its high albedo and spectral signatures suggest that its surface is covered by water ice. Unfortunately, this is almost everything known for certain about Haumea. The presentation will cover the geophysical and geochemical modeling that has been done to help answer some outstanding questions, including educated guesses about the size and composition of Haumea’s core. READ MORE »



Dr. Jessica Noviello is the NASA Postdoctoral Management Program Fellow working with the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) research coordination network in the NASA Astrobiology Program. She is an expert on ocean worlds of the solar system both past and present. Through NExSS she manages the Science Communications Working Group and leads a program designed to support the professional development of early-career scientists across all of NASA Astrobiology. If she isn’t working on something NASA-related, she might be out hiking or digging up fossils somewhere in the southwestern United States.

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