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 Planetary sessions started about Mercury, though notably the first speaker had withdrawn to the new NASA policy of no conference travel expenses following sequestration.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.