" Mars - Our Origin and Destiny"

                    By Kevin Nolan of the Planetary Society

Synopsis: For almost fifty years our ventures into space have been incredibly successful - sending people to the Moon, robotic reconnaissance of the Solar System and rovers to Mars, for example. But our aspirations (and the resulting challenges) of space exploration are rapidly expanding. With plans of a permanent Moon base by about 2020, deep space telescopes such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder and LISA and a human mission to Mars in 2033, space exploration must be pursued from here on in a fundamentally different way. In response, both NASA and ESA have developed and are already implementing far-reaching strategies to achieve such space exploration over the coming decades. This lecture provides an overview of those strategies, the resulting roadmaps, programs and planned missions to accomplish our goals. The lecture also explains how through ‘phased and synchronized’ priorities and milestones by both ESA and NASA; major projects such as sending to people to Mars (perhaps unachievable by any one organization) become politically, economically and socially viable.

Speaker: Kevin Nolan is lecturer in Physics at the Institute of Technology, Tallaght, Dublin. As part of ongoing PhD research, Kevin is a software developer for ESA’s ‘INTEGRAL’ multi-wavelength space observatory; and coordinator to Ireland for The Planetary Society.

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