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)