The four-day International Mars Society Convention brings together leading scientists, engineers, aerospace industry representatives, government policymakers and journalists to talk about the latest scientific discoveries, technological advances and political-economic developments that could help pave the way for a human mission to the planet Mars.
The Conference Flyer lists the wide variety of sessions with something for anyone with an interest in Mars, regardless of technical or non-technical background:
From a technical point of view, we are much closer today to sending humans to Mars than we were to sending men to the Moon in 1961, and we were there eight years later.
Go to the conference to understand the justification for that statement.
1. Monday, May 28, 2018; 2-3:30 pm PDT (4-5:30 pm CDT, 5-6:30 pm EDT): No show today due to Memorial Day Holiday.
2. Tuesday, May 29, 2018: 7-8:30 pm PDT; 9-10:30 pm CDT; 10-11:30 pm EDT: We welcome back journalist Alan Boyle of Geekwire to talk space news and development, ISDC 2018 and the Jeff Bezos ISDC keynote talk.
3. Wednesday, May 30, 2018: Hotel Mars. See Upcoming Show Menu and the website newsletter for details. Hotel Mars is pre-recorded by John Batchelor. It is archived on The Space Show site after John posts it on his website.
5. Sunday, June 3, 2018: 12-1:30 pm PDT; 2-3:30 pm CDT; 3-4:30 pm EDT. We welcome Dr. Brendan Cunningham about warehousing communication satellites to hold onto frequency allocations.
This extraordinary view of Jupiter was captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on the outbound leg of its 12th close flyby of the gas giant planet.
This extraordinary view of Jupiter was captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on the outbound leg of its 12th close flyby of the gas giant planet.
This new perspective of Jupiter from the south makes the Great Red Spot appear as though it is in northern territory. This view is unique to Juno and demonstrates how different our view is when we step off the Earth and experience the true nature of our three-dimensional universe.
Juno took the images used to produce this color-enhanced image on April 1 between 3:04 a.m. PDT (6:04 a.m. EDT) and 3:36 a.m. PDT (6:36 a.m. EDT). At the time the images were taken, the spacecraft was between 10,768 miles (17,329 kilometers) to 42,849 miles (68,959 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the planet at a southern latitude spanning 34.01 to 71.43 degrees.
Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran created this image using data from the spacecraft’s JunoCam imager. The view is a composite of several separate JunoCam images that were re-projected, blended, and healed.
JunoCam’s raw images are available for the public to peruse and process into image products at: www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam
In July 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto, revealing its surface to our view for the first time. In this program, Drs. Stern and Grinspoon give us an insider’s view of how this complex mission came to be and what it discovered at the edge of our solar system. Their new book (like the talk and with the same title) tells the full story of the mission, its ground-breaking discoveries at Pluto, and where it’s going next. Here is new science, straight from the source, with great insight into what it’s like to be part of a pioneering planetary mission.
… the process for redefining planet was deeply flawed and widely criticized even by those who accepted the outcome. At the 2006 IAU conference, which was held in Prague, the few scientists remaining at the very end of the week-long meeting (less than 4 percent of the world’s astronomers and even a smaller percentage of the world’s planetary scientists) ratified a hastily drawn definition that contains obvious flaws. For one thing, it defines a planet as an object orbiting around our sun — thereby disqualifying the planets around other stars, ignoring the exoplanet revolution, and decreeing that essentially all the planets in the universe are not, in fact, planets.
Even within our solar system, the IAU scientists defined “planet” in a strange way, declaring that if an orbiting world has “cleared its zone,” or thrown its weight around enough to eject all other nearby objects, it is a planet. Otherwise it is not. This criterion is imprecise and leaves many borderline cases, but what’s worse is that they chose a definition that discounts the actual physical properties of a potential planet, electing instead to define “planet” in terms of the other objects that are — or are not — orbiting nearby. This leads to many bizarre and absurd conclusions. For example, it would mean that Earth was not a planet for its first 500 million years of history, because it orbited among a swarm of debris until that time, and also that if you took Earth today and moved it somewhere else, say out to the asteroid belt, it would cease being a planet.
We have Space Mike at the @ISDC 2018 Expo and Jared at the @RTMCAstroExpo 2018 Astronomy Expo! Jared sits down with Martin Carey and Travis Holmes to talk about citizen astronomy.
Launches and news topics covered:
Launches: Long March 4C Launches Queqiao Lunar Relay Antares launches Cygnus OA-9 mission to ISS Falcon 9 Launches Iridium-6 and GRACE-FO
Space News: Grande-sized black holes More former GXLP teams have announced future landing plans RocketLab “It’s Business Time” update
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