ETH Global Lecture Series: Getting to Mars in one piece - What can go wrong and how to deal with it
Dr. Kai Goebel, Principal Scientist at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and former Area Lead for Discovery and Systems Health at NASA Ames Research Center visits ETH Zurich to talk about the challenges of a journey to Mars.
Getting to Mars in one piece:
Things that can go wrong during the journey and how to deal with it
external pageKai Goebel
Principal Scientist at external pagePalo Alto Research Center (PARC, a Xerox company), former Area Lead for Discovery and Systems Health at external pageNASA Ames Research Center
Free public lecture
Monday, 2 September 2019
ETH Zurich, Main Building, lecture hall HG F 3
17.15 - 18.30
Doors open at 17.00
Mars is the next step in humanity’s outward migration into space. While it is hundreds of times farther away than the moon, Mars has the resources needed to support life, such as carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen. Nonetheless, getting to Mars and sustaining life on Mars is difficult and dangerous. Besides the challenge of transporting significant amount of equipment, food, and water, and traveling 7 months through deadly space radiation, the journey faces significant challenges from things that can go wrong or that were not anticipated. These include malfunction of life support equipment, possible sickness or injury of crew, unanticipated conditions or events ranging from meteroids and solar flares to corrosiveness of the Martian dust. This lecture will explore some of these issues and discuss ways how to detect and mitigate them.