Physics Colloquium with Pablo Sobron on Impossible Physics
Dr. Pablo Sobron is a St. Louis-based planetary explorer and Founder and CEO of a 5-year-old startup, Impossible Sensing. The company’s technologies bring unprecedented scientific capabilities to astrobiology missions on- and off-Earth by combining innovative optoelectronics and deep data analytics, with an interest in stabilizing and reversing climate change by exploring space. Dr. Sobron’s team goes about their mission by delivering innovations and technology breakthroughs in optical sensing. Their innovations consist of components built around proven, NASA-funded breakthroughs that they develop and put together in novel instrument architectures that offer attributes never before available. In this Colloquium, Dr. Sobron will review Impossible’s innovation approach to applied physics, from ideation to exploratory research to design, build, and test applications on Earth and other planets, with goals ranging from stabilizing climate change to exploring the ocean seafloor on Earth and ocean worlds. (Image shows an Impossible’s Raman spectrometer recording data at 6,005m asl in the Andes.)
A native of Spain, Dr. Sobron received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Valladolid, Spain, in 2008. He then came to St. Louis to work at Washington University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. Pablo has since worked as a research scientist at the SETI Institute, NASA, and the Canadian Space Agency, and founded Impossible Sensing in 2016 to promote technology transfer activities among NASA, other federal departments/agencies, research institutions, and industry at all technology readiness levels. Sobron develops sensing technologies in robotic Earth and planetary exploration, including for the Curiosity, Perseverance, and Rosalind Franklin rover missions.