Public Lecture – David Southwood, Director of Science & Robotics at the European Space Agency
Posted on February 25th, 2009 in General
Astronomy Ireland is hosting a lecture with David Southwood, Director of Science & Robotics at the European Space Agency, on Monday 16 March at 8pm in the Edward Burke Theatre in Trinity College
Awarded a gold medal for his work by the Council of European Aerospace Societies in 2007, Professor David Southwood, Director of Science and Robotics at ESA, has pushed Europe beyond the frontier of space exploration. Professor Southwood is responsible for some of the most advanced robotics projects currently being undertaken in space science. Some of these include:
Hubble Space Telescope – the first of the space-based Great Observatories that allowed us to peer back in time to when the first galaxies were created.
The James Webb Space Telescope – the successor to HST, which will probe the formation of galaxies, stars, planets and the origins of life.
ExoMars – a project that will send a rover to Mars to drill into the Martian surface to search for life.
Mars Express – the ESA’s first mission to another planet in the Solar System.
Venus Express – the follow-up mission to Mars Express.
GAIA – a mission to build the most accurate 3D map of the Milky Way ever created.
Planck – this telescope will map the Cosmic Microwave Background and may find out how the Universe began expanding.
Herschel Space Observatory – a European far-infrared space telescope to be launched in April 2009.
Rosetta – a robotic spacecraft launched in 2004 to investigate two asteroids, and to put a lander on the surface of Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
Cassini-Huygens – the famous craft that flew to Saturn and landed on Titan, its largest moon, teaching us not only about the outer Solar System but also about our own home planet.
LISA Pathfinder – a fundamental research mission that will put Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to the test like never before, probing the Universe for gravitational waves.
