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Posted by: Astro0 Jul 10 2010, 12:06 AM

For anyone in the Canberra, Australia area...

Public Presentation
What: Postcards from Mars: The Continuing, Amazing Adventures of the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers
Who: Professor Jim Bell, professor of astronomy at Cornell University and Pancam Lead for the Mars Exploration Rovers
When: 6pm - 7.30pm, Thursday 15th July 2010
Where: CSIRO Discovery Centre, off Clunies Ross Street and Barry Drive, Canberra ACT Australia

Jim is an excellent speaker. He and Steve Squyres have been the faces for the Mars Rover mission since its beginning and were the ones responsible for the decision to put their images online for the whole world to see.

Jim describes his talk -
NASA successfully landed twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, on Mars in January 2004, in the most ambitious mission of robotic exploration ever attempted. Each rover is outfitted as a robot field geologist with an impressive array of scientific instruments--cameras, spectrometers, other sensors--designed to investigate the composition and geologic history of two distinctly-different landing sites. The sites were chosen because of their potential to reveal clues about the past history of water and climate on Mars, and thus to provide tests of the hypothesis that the planet may once have been an abode for life. Jim Bell is a Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and is the lead scientist responsible for the rovers' Pancam color imaging system. In this presentation, Prof. Bell will share his favorite images and stories from "inside" mission operations, and describe the major scientific findings made by each rover at each site during their more than six and a half Earth year (so far) adventures.