This year’s IPENZ Pickering Lecture series, ‘Exploring the Unknown – to Mars and Beyond’, included an additional afternoon presentation to a broadly representative and highly receptive Auckland schools audience.

The guest lecturer was Dr Elachi, Director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and leader of the recent mission to Mars of a rover called Curiosity, who looked at “some of the challenges and excitement of space exploration, why do we explore, what have we learned so far, and what are our plans for the future”.

After being reminded that its 50 years since the start of the quest to explore space with robots, the students were taken through Dr Elachi’s eight-year journey to get the robotic space rover Curiosity from the surface of Earth to the surface of our sister planet Mars – a task he described as “like if I hit a golf ball from Los Angeles towards New Zealand, the golf ball has to land straight in the cup … and to make it a little more challenging, the cup is moving.”

In outlining the nature of the project, and the mixture of knowledge and skills required within  his team, Dr Elachi was able to clearly illustrate the curriculum linkages within the Maths, Science and Technology that many of the students were studying in their school programmes.

He explained that part of the attraction of aiming to explore Mars was the similarity in geology between it and our planet Earth. It was a project which couldn’t partially succeed – it would be “a 100% success or a 100% fail”.

A key part of the journey was what he described as the “seven minutes of terror” – the time taken to slow the craft down from 20,900kph to 3.2kph to land safely on the surface of Mars, where if just one thing doesn’t work right, “it’s game over”.

The robotic rover landed safely in what he called “an unprecedented technological tour-de-force”, and has since worked completely successfully in moving over five kilometres across the surface of the planet.

Possible next stages for the project were discussed: looking at the possibility that life existed on Mars, preparations for the task of bringing samples back for more detailed analysis and planning for the journey of humans to the planet and back.

Dr Elachi finished with a the projection of two slides – one showing the footprint of Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the moon, and the other showing tracks made by  Curiosity as it moved across the surface of Mars. The first slide had been one that inspired him as a young student – he challenged the young students in the audience to gain inspiration from the second slide and work towards seeing a picture of  a first human footprint on another planet. 

Find out more:

• Radio New Zealand Nine to Noon interview 24 March 2014: www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/20140324
• YouTube video of the complete Wellington lecture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcmjV-HIAmU

The Pickering public lecture series, is an initiative of The Institution of Professional Engineers (IPENZ) to stimulate interest in engineering matters in the community. The series is named in honour of Dr William Pickering, a Wellington-born engineer and scientist who played a leading role in the early development of the United States space programme.
This year lectures were hosted by the Wellington, Canterbury, Waikato, and Auckland  regional Branches of IPENZ.