Solar system exploration advocate Emily Lakdawalla will present a lecture titled \u201cThe Golden Age of Solar System Exploration\u201d on Oct. 10 at 7 p.m. as part of this year\u2019s Honors Colloquium at the 溏心vlog免费B站. The lecture will be held at Edwards Hall, 64 Upper College Road, Kingston.<\/p>\n
An award-winning science communicator and educator, Lakdawalla is senior editor with The Planetary Society based in Pasadena, Calif. Since 2001, she has written about the active and past scientific missions into the solar system for The Planetary Society’s website, planetary.org, and helped the public to become active participants in space exploration.<\/p>\n
These experiences led to her first book, titled\u00a0The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job, that is\u00a0due out from Springer-Praxis in 2018.\u00a0A second book,\u00a0Curiosity and Its Science Mission: A Mars Rover Goes to Work,\u00a0will follow in 2019.<\/p>\n
On July 12, 2014, she was honored by the International Astronomical Union when it formally named Asteroid 274860 \u00a0“Emilylakdawalla.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lakdawalla earned her bachelor\u2019s degree in geology from Amherst College and a master\u2019s degree in planetary geology from Brown University.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is a true pleasure to host such a widely known speaker, with such extensive knowledge regarding planetary sciences and exploration, as part of the Honors Colloquium,\u201d said Dawn Cardace, a colloquium coordinator and associate professor of geosciences in the College of Environment and Life Sciences. \u201cWhether it\u2019s blog posts or more formal talks, I have been regularly impressed by her contributions. This will be a one-of-a-kind seminar.\u201d<\/p>\n
In advance of her presentation, 溏心vlog免费B站 Communications and Marketing reached out to Lakdawalla for a preview of her talk.<\/em><\/p>\n What sparked your interest in solar system exploration? <\/strong><\/p>\n I’ve always been interested in science in general \u2013\u2013 I never wanted to specialize. I recall loving a book of Voyager photos from Jupiter and Saturn, enjoying all of the different names and faces of their moons. But I was a huge dinosaur fan as well. As a freshman in college, I took the introductory geology course and found a science that incorporated biology, chemistry, and physics, as well as history and art, and I fell in love. It was in 1997, while I was teaching fifth and sixth grade science, that it occurred to me to wonder whether you could study geology on other planets. I went to Brown University to do that, and have been a planetary scientist ever since.<\/p>\n In your opinion, are we currently in the Golden Age of Solar System exploration or has it passed?<\/strong><\/p>\n With more than 20 spacecraft actively exploring the solar system, we are definitely in a Golden Age, but we’re in a late stage. We’ve lost a couple of our most distant, greatest missions in the last year (Rosetta and Cassini). Our reach is beginning to contract as we mostly study Mars and near-Earth asteroids now, with only a few spacecraft at other places. The good news is that there are many new participants in deep space exploration, countries like China and India, and private entities beginning to set their sights beyond Earth. They can’t currently go farther than Mars, but that will change. I’m hoping that we’ll see NASA return to Venus and to the giant planets beyond Jupiter in my lifetime.<\/p>\n Should we be doing more human flights, or more in general, to explore outer space?<\/strong><\/p>\n I think it’s interesting to put humans in space \u2013\u2013 there isn’t yet a machine substitute for human ingenuity and flexible thinking \u2013\u2013 but humans bring challenges and expense, and huge operational inefficiency. I’m excited to see the ways in which technology will permit humans and robots to work together in space exploration in the future. The most efficient thing will always be to put machine bodies in the extreme environments, and take advantage of human minds to run them, keeping the human bodies in safer, more stable environments. Robotic exploration actually is human exploration when you look at it that way \u2013\u2013 every robot on Mars is an avatar for hundreds of scientists and engineers who stay comfortably on Earth. There are a lot of improvements to be made in the efficiency of robotic operations. We can also explore teleoperation of robots on the surface by humans in an orbiting station. It’s exciting to think about walking Mars in a space suit, with boots crunching the dust, but it’ll be far more efficient to experience Mars through a robot body, using its cameras as our eyes, feeling it through robot appendages and wheels.<\/p>\n Do you think a human trip to Mars is possible in our lifetime? If so, how?<\/strong><\/p>\n