My research covers a wide array of topics which share the common theme of understanding the origin and evolution of planetary systems. Students could be involved in either theoretical or observational research topics, including topics such as:
1. Large-scale numerical studies of Solar System dynamics
-- A. Planet formation
-- B. Celestial mechanics, orbital stability
-- C. Dynamics of small bodies (meteoroids, asteroids, comets)
-- D. Impact history of planetary surfaces in the Solar System
-- E. Exobiology : Interplanetary transfer of bacteria in meteorites
2. Observational studies of small bodies of our solar system.
-- A. The satellites systems of the giant planets
-- B. The Kuiper Belt (the
Canada France
Ecliptic Plane Survey )
-- C. Main belt asteroids (especially the soon-to-be launched
NEOSSat ) space telescope.
Left :
In the UBC planetary sciences laboratory
of the Physics and Astronomy department, with
postdoctoral research fellow Lynne Allen, looking
at images of a newly-discovered moon of Jupiter.
Left:
A close-up of some of the
LeVerrier beowulf cluster,
built by Aspen Systems, Inc.
The cluster consists of 76 Opteron
2.2 GHz 64-bit CPUs, and 25
dual quad-core Intel CPUs.
LeVerrier is optimised for very CPU-instensive
calculations.
Also visible are one of the cluster's
14-Terabytes of
SCSI-IDE RAID arrays, used for the
storage and processing of the imaging
data from the
Canada France Ecliptic Plane survey.
The cluster runs a Linux operating system
and uses torque-PBS as a scheduler.
The cluster has been in continuous more than
96% of the time
since its installaion in August 2003.
Users interested in
using LeVerrier may contact Gladman.
Brett Gladman's home page
for information on how to contact me.
UBC Astronomy Graduate Home Page
if you are browsing the faculty pages.