9th Appleton Space Conference - RAL Space

Here is a collection of tweets from the 9th Appleton Space Conference, held at RAL Space on Thursday 5th December 2013. Details of the conference programme and attendees can be found here.

9th Appleton Space Conference - HRH Prince Andrew Duke of York

"We need students to get involved in science and engineering, we have a problem with growth in space industry and needing to bring more people into this. Its important to communicate the excitement of science and technology.
.

Where are you going to get the next generation of young people from? Unless you encourage some forms of outreach programmes, I know all of you do it, but there seems to be a missing link somewhere – that’s really the point I’d like to make today.

I’ve been inspired from the point that I was actually prevented from doing Physics at school. I was forced into general science when I wanted to go and od Physics. I then went to the Navy, had a certain amount of “your” technology delivered to me either in my aircraft or in my ship, but it’s the growth of the applications in the 21^st century that means we need to encourage more and more young people to make use of these applications and get the word out there.

I go round schools, support a number of different schools, universities, technology colleges, academies, private schools, as a matter of course. But its how to get some of the applications into their programme.

CaSE Science & Engineering Cross Party Debate

Here is a collection of tweets from this debate.

Alan Bean, Apollo 12 Lunar Module Pilot

Thanks to an amazing effort by all involved with Space Lectures, Alan Bean was in Pontefract on Saturday 12th October 2013 to give a talk about his experiences as a Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 12, which made him the fourth man to walk on the Moon.

Alan Bean and myself, SpaceFest IV

On this 4 day trip to the UK, Space Lectures arranged for Alan Bean to captivate 600 school children at Birkdale School, and he also visited two other schools.

Alan Bean at Birkdale School, Sheffield (credit: @Space_Lectures)

Many people gathered for dinner with Alan Bean on Friday night, and were able to have a couple of minutes with him as he graciously signed autographs.

The Saturday talk started with a 5 minute video highlighting key Apollo moments.

"Space Lectures is proud to introduce the fourth man on the Moon, Captain Alan Bean!"

Alan: "Thank you very much for coming today. Nice to be with you here in the UK. I love this weather, I come from Houston Texas, where its hot. I don't even think of this as rain, this is just a little sprinkle. Nice to be with you in paradise and in the garden of Eden, but I'll say more about that later."

Royal Astronomical Society: EChO Meeting

Here is a collection of tweets from this meeting, focussing on the ESA M3 candidate mission EChO (Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory).

Sudbury Field School 2013

Here is a collection of tweets from this NASA/CLRN Field School at the 1.8 billion year old Sudbury basin site.

NewSpace Entrepreneurs at EPSC 2013

[DRAFT - PHOTOS & FURTHER INFO TO COME]

This briefing brought together Planetary Scientists with NewSpace Entrepreneurs to examine timescales, opportunities for different stakeholders and commercial reward from private space companies and the opportunities that exist for planetary scientists in looking at the feasibility of these ventures to open up a new frontier.

James Carpenter from the European Space Agency, chaired the session, citing the benefits this could bring to planetary science and how exciting it is to see new ventures emerge over the last few years.

“There have been initiatives from various quarters, building on work done by governmental agencies in the last decades to try to make space an economical place to go and explore. If this can be realised, this can yield some real benefits, for economics, for science, really open up space as a frontier, which personally as an enthusiast I find very exciting.”

Ice Worlds! Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition

I spent two days volunteering on the "Ice Worlds" stand, masterminded by Geraint Jones of MSSL (Mullard Space Science Laboratory) in collaboration with scientists from UCL (University College London), University of Kent and Imperial College London.

"The plumes of Enceladus"
(Photo credit: Todd Howard)

"Moon, Mars and the Search for Life in the Universe", Prof Ian Crawford

Here is a collection of tweets from this event.

SpaceFest V! The Apollo Panel

This morning, live from Tucson, we are about to enjoy the Apollo panel, a highlight of the annual SpaceFest event.

On the panel, we have:

Walt Cunningham (Apollo 7) (WC)

Jim McDivitt (Gemini 4, Apollo 9) (JM)

Richard Gordon (Gemini 11, Apollo 12) (RG)

Fred Haise (Apollo 13) (FH)

Ed Mitchell (Apollo 14) (EM)
Prof Brian Cox (moderator) (BC)
Bruce McCandless (Capcom during Apollo, first untethered space walk) (BM)

WC: Want to thank you all for being here and giving us the opportunity to meet up as old friends. Perhaps we can take you back to the reality of space exploration this morning. When you look back at Apollo, Apollo was truly man’s greatest adventure.

Tim Peake assigned to the ISS in 2015!

Reception to celebrate ESA astronaut Tim Peake on behalf of the UK Space Agency at the Houses of Parliament

I was excited to receive an invitation three days in advance of this reception on Monday 20th May and wondered with intrigue as to what the "ESA Astronaut announcement" would be. I leapt out of bed on the Sunday morning when the news broke on Twitter that Tim had been assigned to a five month mission in 2015, as by my previous calculations and hearsay on various forums, I had thought 2016 was the earliest he could hope for.  A few hours later I had verified the content of the embargoed press release - Tim really was assigned to the November 2015 launch!

Thomas Reiter, David Willetts, Tim Peake and David Parker
© Max Alexander 2013 Max Alexander/UK Space Agency

Our posters at EGU!

Our first poster on Wednesday evening was from the Mars Analogue mission run in Morocco by the Austrian Space Forum.  Ania Losiak had masterminded a mapping process for our science team which underpinned all the planning for the mission and became our main database of experimental results, as well as being an experiment in itself that we can compare what was planned to what actually happened, which we hope to be able to improve in future analogue missions.

Ania Losiak, our poster and me

Liquid water on Mars today?

Diedrich Moehlmann, DLR, set out to convince us that liquid water can and does temporarily exist between two surfaces such as two grains of rock in the upper surface of Mars today and to indicate where it may be found.

The puzzle for astrobiologists is that they know liquid water must have been plentiful in the past on Mars, but at present times we have only confirmed water ice and atmospheric water vapour. Water vapour can reach saturation in the current atmosphere of Mars, which makes it favourable for it to be bound to a surface. The Mars Phoenix lander found direct indication for liquid droplets on Mars.

Water in the upper surface of present Mars, shown by hydrogen enriched 

soil which is indicated by deep blue in this false-colour map of Mars

Credit: NASA/Feldman (Neutron spectrometer, Mars Odyssey)

Monday at EGU

Monday morning saw huge advance queues eagerly awaiting the 8am registration opening. Planetary sessions started about Mercury, though notably the first speaker had withdrawn to the new NASA policy of no conference travel expenses following sequestration. This is to be a theme of the conference, though in some cases other co-authors have managed to step in on behalf of absent colleagues.

John Grotzinger, Sushil Atreya, Sylvestre Maurice, Javier Gómez-Elvira, Igor Mitrofanov

The much anticipated event of the day was the MSL Curiosity press conference at 11am, with John Grotzinger and colleagues delivering the latest discoveries from this amazing mobile laboratory on Mars.

Meteorites at the Natural History Museum, Vienna

The Natural History Museum boasts the oldest meteorite collection in the world, with the first two pieces entering the collection in 1778. It pre-dates the study of meteoritics and is one of the largest collections.

This 300kg meteorite Knyahinya, greets you as you enter the room, from a witnessed fall in 1866 in the Ukraine Carpathians. For a long time this frgament was the largest known stony meteorite.

Knyahinya

Fantastic informational displays and interactive "is this a meteorite?" stands keep it interesting for the family, for example with a magnifier you can move along over a whole range of different types of meteorite with the corresponding information appearing on screen as you move it.

Pieces of the Moon

EGU General Assembly 2013

The European Geosciences Union General Assembly takes place from 7-13th April 2013.  Over 11,000 attendees are registered at this largest meeting for geoscientists in Europe, I'm honoured to have my blog featured on their official blog roll.

I look forward to covering the Mars and lunar session, starting with the MSL press conference this morning at 11am (CET) together with a smattering of volcanology and geology over the week.

If you are here, don't forget to download the EGU app, which makes it much easier to browse the mammoth programme and flag up what you want to attend, as well as having a dedicated inbuilt Twitter feed tracking the hashtag #EGU2013.

If you want to take a breather at some point, I can highly recommend the Natural History Museum. Show your EGU2013 pass to get a discount (5 euro entry fee) and don't miss room five with the 900kg meteorite - see my next blog post! Amazing collection of meteorites including Mars and lunar samples.

Big Bang Fair! - London Excel

The national Big Bang Fair at the London Excel Centre lasts 4 days, in UK Science and Engineering week, and has over 70,000 visitors attend the four day event.  I was helping visitors identify meteorites from Earth rocks and investigate crater sizes by practical demonstrations on the UKSEDS stand, while also doing some shifts with the Kennedy Space Centre stand, where they had air-rockets which could be launched to the ceiling, with safety strings keeping them in place.

Dallas Campbell and me

Jon McBride and me

We met Dallas Campbell, star of Supersized Earth and other documentaries including a particularly great programme about the Voyager spacecraft, as well as shuttle astronaut Jon McBride, who flew as pilot on Challenger for mission STS-41-G back in 1984. He was very gracious about signing autographs for the long lines of young people, excited to meet an astronaut.

"Characterising Exoplanets", Royal Society

The Royal Society held a two day discussion meeting on "Characterising exoplanets: detection, formation, interiors, atmospheres and habitability" on 11-12 March 2013.  I was only able to attend the end of the second day, though luckily this included two of the speakers I most wanted to hear. Having recently enjoyed Professor Charles Cockell's astrobiology online Coursera course, I was delighted to meet him briefly afterwards.

Professor Charles Cockell

Dr Ignas Snellen from Leiden University mourned the fact that with the Terrestrial Planet Finder and Darwin missions having been cancelled, it is unlikely there will be a dedicated space telescope to search for biomarker gases in exoplanet atmospheres within his lifetime.  He reviewed the exciting results from ground-based telescopes and extrapolated to what may be obtained with the planned E-ELT in terms of better data in the future.

ISSET Astronaut Leadership Experience

Amazing weekend in the Lake District, with the International Space School Educational Trust, Ken Ham (Space Shuttle astronaut, Pilot STS-124, Commander STS-132), Michelle Ham (NASA Astronaut Trainer) and our incredibly helpful guides Chris and Steve, from mobileadventure.co.uk

Further detailed updates to come, but for now here is my "stepping off the cliff" moment on the first afternoon, on the zip line challenge! Thanks to Peter Andrews for the video.

Some photos from the weekend can be seen here.

STEM ambassador

I completed my registration as a STEM ambassador today, to help promote Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths to school age audiences. I look forward to helping out at both the UKSEDS (UK Students for Exploration & Development of Space) and the Kennedy Space Visitors Centre stands at the national Big Bang Fair at the London Excel centre, 14-17th March 2013.

"Frontier Mars" - Society VisViva

My team mate from Alpbach, Ingo Gerth, and his friend Roy Bijster who I met at SpaceUp EU, have set up Vis Viva, a society for space professionals where they are based in Delft, Holland.

Their first event was streamed live online today and the recording can be viewed here.  Their guests were Dr Susana Direito, discussing detection of life on Mars, the amazing Dr Adam Steltzner talking about the engineering of the entry, descent and landing of MSL 'Curiosity' via Skype from NASA JPL, and Professor Bernard Foing, expert of Mars analogue research, which particularly interested me given my involvement with the Austrian Space Forum Mars analogue mission this year.

#SimulateMars - Austrian Space Forum

From 7th to 16th February 2013, I volunteered as part of the Remote Science Support team for the Austrian Space Forum's Mars simulation mission, being carried out in Morocco for the entire month of February. My experiment MEDIAN was being operated by the field team of 10 people, and I was involved with the in-house mapping and geological projects, as well as helping to co-ordinate data from the field being sent out to remote experiment teams. Around 18 experiments were conducted and over 100 people from 23 different countries were involved in the mission.

MEDIAN in Morocco (c) OeWF (Katja Zanella-Kux)

Tim Peake & Space Boffins at the British Interplanetary Society

I was delighted to be invited to be on the popular "Space Boffins" podcast this month, especially when I found out the other guest was to be the UK's first ESA astronaut, Tim Peake!

Tim Peake, Ralph Timberlake, Jane MacArthur
Photo credit: Richard Hollingham

UK Planetary Forum Meeting

This "10th Annual Early Career Researcher's Meeting" took place at the Natural History Museum, London, where 15 early career scientists presented their latest work in 20 minute presentations.

I got involved by presenting my team's Alpbach work in the UKPF poster session, showing our Uranus mission proposal, and enjoyed an interesting afternoon meeting PhD students and finding out more about other peoples work at different institutions.

Mark Thompson - book launch

I was honored when a good friend invited me to Mark Thompson's book launch, held at the Royal Astronomical Society.  It was a pleasure to meet Mark, who is from Norwich like me, and it was a lovely evening. His book is now available from Amazon.

Mark Thompson, Stargazing Live