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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20261013T110000
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UID:63012-1791889200-1791896400@astrobiology.com
SUMMARY:2026 NASA LIFE RCN Seminar: Dr. Emil Ruff and Dr. Carolina Fernandes Moreira de Carvalho
DESCRIPTION:Join us for the 2026 NASA LIFE RCN Seminar Series! \nTime: October 13th\, 8AM PT / 11AM ET / 5PM CET! \nThis month’s speakers are Dr. Emil Ruff and Dr. Carolina Fernandes Moreira de Carvalho! \nHere is the Zoom link: https://lnkd.in/gq473pDB \nDr. Emil Ruff is a microbial ecologist at the University of Bremen\, Germany and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole\, MA\, focusing on microbial metabolisms and interactions that impact the carbon\, sulfur\, and oxygen cycle in aquatic ecosystems. His group is particularly interested in interactions between microbes that lead to novel community functions\, often enabling these microbes to conquer new habitats. His team mainly studies ecosystems with reduced complexity\, such as natural or laboratory enrichment cultures\, microbial blooms\, or extreme habitats. \nTitle of the talk: “Dark oxygen production: Progress with an unknown process”. \nDr. Carolina Fernandes Moreira de Carvalho is a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zürich investigating dark oxygen production (DOP) and associated oxygen isotope fractionation in both environmental and laboratory systems. She specializes in experimental design\, gas handling\, and high-precision isotope-ratio mass spectrometry to quantify O isotope fractionation during O₂ production and consumption processes. \nTitle of the talk: Towards resolving O₂ isotope effects of DOP processes: catalase and chlorite dismutase.
URL:https://astrobiology.com/event/2026-nasa-life-rcn-seminar-dr-emil-ruff-and-dr-carolina-fernandes-moreira-de-carvalho/
LOCATION:Online – Webinar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/life-logo_horizontal-color-white-text.png__1240x510_q85_crop_subject_location-620254_subsampling-2-1.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20261020T130000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20261022T163000
DTSTAMP:20260921T223750Z
CREATED:20260921T223750Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260921T223750Z
UID:62558-1792501200-1792686600@astrobiology.com
SUMMARY:2026 NASA Cosmic Origins Early-Career Workshop
DESCRIPTION:Registration & Abstract Submission \nNASA’s Cosmic Origins Program is excited to invite you to the second Early Career Workshop\, designed to support and empower the next generation of astrophysics leaders and PIs. \nThe workshop aims to provide insights to early career scientists about the wide range of work done in the Cosmic Origins Program\, to explain and demonstrate the tools and opportunities available to them\, and to answer any questions they may have. \nThis workshop will take place virtually on October 20th-22nd from 1-4:30 pm Eastern. The three days will be focused on Science (Day 1)\, Missions (Day 2) and Careers (Day 3). \nDay 1: Participants will receive an overview of the science themes covered by Cosmic Origins and give early career scientists opportunities to share their research. \nDay 2: We will highlight the many NASA archives\, data analysis tools\, and upcoming proposal opportunities so that participants can see a clear path for themselves to get involved with NASA missions. \nDay 3: Participants will engage with speakers who have taken a variety of career paths that have led them to NASA science and mission work. \nThe abstract submission deadline is October 10th\, 2026 and acceptance notifications will be sent out mid-October. \nFollow the link here to attend. Note: meeting links are listed at the top of each day in the agenda: Additionally\, if you are not a current participant in the NASA Cosmic Pathfinders Program  you can follow the link here to join: https://discord.gg/DsDq5UX8TJ \nOn behalf of the Workshop Science Organizing Committee\, \nRon Gamble\nSwara Ravindranath\nPeter Kurczynski\nAvrajit Bandyopadhyay
URL:https://astrobiology.com/event/2026-nasa-cosmic-origins-early-career-workshop/
LOCATION:Online – Webinar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Cosmic-origins.png
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20261026T140000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20261026T150000
DTSTAMP:20261026T181536Z
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UID:63818-1793023200-1793026800@astrobiology.com
SUMMARY:NASA Science Leadership Town Hall Meeting
DESCRIPTION:NASA will host a community town hall from 2 to 3 p.m. EDT Monday\, Oct. 26\, featuring Dr. Nicola “Nicky” Fox\, associate administrator for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate\, and other NASA science leaders. Fox will provide an overview of NASA’s new Competition Model 2.0 (CM 2.0)\, followed by an opportunity for participants to ask questions. \nMembers of the science community\, academia\, media\, and the public are invited to join the virtual town hall at: \nBROKEN LINK \nhttps://events.gcc.teams.microsoft.com/event/7d9bba42-46cc-4f09-8fb5-95b57c88cf1f@7005d458-45be-48ae-8140-d43da96dd17b?source=copyLinkLegacyShareEventDialog \nCORRECT LINK \n https://teams.microsoft.com/v2/?meetingjoin=true#/l/meetup-join/19:meeting_MjgwNzNlY2UtOGU5Mi00NjU1LTkxYTItNTA4NGMzMTcxYTgw@thread.v2/0?context=%7B%22Tid%22%3A%227005d458-45be-48ae-8140-d43da96dd17b%22%2C%22Oid%22%3A%22c8523246-213e-42ec-bd56-f62fc4a0b891%22%7D&lightExperience=false \nParticipants may submit questions and vote on questions submitted by others at: \nhttps://nasa.cnf.io/sessions/eawk \nQuestions will be screened for spam and inappropriate content before appearing publicly. NASA science leaders will address as many questions as time allows. \nA recording of the town hall will be posted online following the event.
URL:https://astrobiology.com/event/nasa-science-leadership-town-hall-meeting/
LOCATION:Online – Webinar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/SMD-2026.png
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20261027T150000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20261027T170000
DTSTAMP:20261027T001158Z
CREATED:20261027T001158Z
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UID:64049-1793113200-1793120400@astrobiology.com
SUMMARY:NASA Ames Machine Learning Seminar INDUS and INDUS-SDE: Scientific Language Models for Metadata Curation and Discovery Across NASA Science Divisions
DESCRIPTION:JOIN THIS ML SEMINAR SERIES HERE \nTime: October 27th\, 12PM PDT/3PM EDT \nEveryone is invited to the monthly machine learning virtual seminar hosted by the ML-Astrobiology Initiative at NASA Ames Research Center. Previously recorded seminars can be found on the ML-Astrobiology website. \nThe speaker for this event will be Dr. Kumar Ramasubramanian from the NASA-OSDI team and University of Alabama. \nTitle: INDUS and INDUS-SDE: Scientific Language Models for Metadata Curation and Discovery Across NASA Science Divisions \nAbstract: \nScientific discovery in astrobiology depends on content drawn from planetary science\, Earth science\, biology\, and astrophysics\, each with its own terminology\, and distributed across mission websites\, data portals\, technical reports\, and publications with incomplete or inconsistent metadata. \nGeneral-purpose large language models do not resolve this fragmentation. Their answers are bounded by what their training data or retrieval layer happened to cover\, and content that was never indexed or tagged remains invisible regardless of the interface used to query it. A query for all historical Raman spectroscopy data from Mars therefore returns a plausible subset with no guarantee of completeness. \nWe present INDUS\, a family of compact encoder language models developed to address this problem at the level of the archive rather than the query. INDUS models are pretrained on NASA science text across five science divisions and are designed to curate heterogeneous scientific content at scale: assigning controlled-vocabulary keywords\, classifying documents into topical portals\, routing content to the appropriate science division\, and producing embeddings for semantic retrieval. Because they are encoders\, inference cost per document is low enough to process the full corpus continuously rather than sample from it. \nThe first generation of INDUS outperformed general-purpose and scientific baselines on NASA tasks and is deployed in NASA’s Science Discovery Engine. The second generation\, INDUS-SDE\, extends this work to the noisy\, web-sourced content that constitutes most of the archive. \nWe introduce Weighted Dynamic Masking\, a pretraining strategy that prioritizes domain-relevant terminology over structural boilerplate such as website headers\, and an extended 1024-token context window suited to full metadata records. Evaluated on approximately 600\,000 documents\, INDUS-SDE matches domain-specific models trained on substantially more in-domain data\, and its companion sentence transformer\, INDUS-SDE-ST\, supports semantic discovery over the curated corpus. \nFor astrobiology\, this yields a shared representation space in which terminology from different disciplines aligns. In this talk\, we discuss the utility of INDUS models for astrobiology\, with examples of how they can be adapted to a new vocabulary and downstream task from a set of expert-labeled examples. We describe the deployed system\, the requirements for such adaptation\, and the role of community-contributed labeled data in extending INDUS to astrobiology-focused mission development.
URL:https://astrobiology.com/event/nasa-ames-machine-learning-seminar-indus-and-indus-sde-scientific-language-models-for-metadata-curation-and-discovery-across-nasa-science-divisions/
LOCATION:Online – Webinar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/NASA-Ames-AIML-Seminar-Series-Machine-Learning.png
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20261028T113000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20261028T123000
DTSTAMP:20261027T012300Z
CREATED:20261027T012210Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20261027T012300Z
UID:64056-1793187000-1793190600@astrobiology.com
SUMMARY:Reddit AMA With Mars ESCAPADE Team
DESCRIPTION:The AMA is an opportunity to ask about an upcoming milestone — a powered gravity assist around Earth in early November. It’s the first such attempt for any NASA mission. \nAs the twin ESCAPADE spacecraft prepare to make their final pass close to Earth in early November\, three members of the UC Berkeley team leading the NASA mission will answer questions from the public in a one-hour Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Reddit. \nScheduled for 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. PDT Wednesday\, Oct. 28\, on the u/UCBerkeley channel\, it is also an opportunity for reporters to ask questions about the mission’s status and the first powered flyby of Earth by a deep space mission — combining Earth’s gravity with an engine burn — to slingshot a NASA mission to Mars. Questions can be submitted now in advance of the AMA. \nThe Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers mission is led by Robert Lillis of Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. The mission’s two identical spacecraft\, Blue and Gold\, were launched by NASA on Nov. 13\, 2025\, and are designed to study the magnetic field of Mars and its interaction with the solar wind to understand how and when the planet lost its atmosphere. \nWhat the scientists learn will also help plan future crewed missions to Mars. \nThe November loop around Earth combined with an engine burn will propel the spacecraft into a transfer orbit to Mars\, with expected arrival in September 2027. The burns\, scheduled for Nov. 7 and 9 for Blue and Gold\, respectively\, mark a crucial test of a new trajectory to Mars. This is the first time NASA has launched a spacecraft to Mars outside the normal window for an efficient trip\, which opens up for only a few weeks every 26 months. Instead\, the ESCAPADE spacecraft were sent into a loitering orbit near Earth until the ideal launch window arrived\, then positioned to slingshot around Earth while firing their engines toward the Red Planet. \nNo other spacecraft has ever come in from deep space and successfully executed a powered burn around Earth toward deep space \nThe participants are: \n\nRobert Lillis\, ESCAPADE’s Principal Investigator and associate director for planetary science at Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. He leads the mission’s science and overall direction\, setting goals for what the team hopes to learn about Mars.\nPhyllis Whittlesey\, ESCAPADE’s scientific lead for the electron electrostatic analyzer instrument and SSL’s associate director of solar and heliophysics. She works on the instruments that will measure Mars’ space environment\, and she will analyze the data they collect about Mars and its atmosphere.\nBrett Bonelli\, ESCAPADE’s deputy mission operations manager and an SSL engineer. He focuses on monitoring the health of the spacecraft\, sending commands from computer consoles in SSL’s Mission Operations Center\, or MOC\, and responding to anomalies.\n\nOnce the Blue and Gold spacecraft slip into orbit around the Red Planet in late 2027\, they will give scientists their first stereo view of Mars’ magnetosphere and map the ionosphere and space environment\, providing crucial information about Mars’ evolution over the past 4.5 billion years. While the mission’s science instruments\, deployable booms and data processing system were built by SSL scientists and their partners\, the ESCAPADE spacecraft were built by Rocket Lab USA\, headquartered in Long Beach\, California.
URL:https://astrobiology.com/event/reddit-ama-with-mars-escapade-team/
LOCATION:Online – Webinar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/ESCAPADE.png
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