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Schedule including this lecture.
Goddard Space Flight Center Engineering Colloquium
Date: Monday, May 15, 2000
With the Viking and Pathfinder missions, the surface of Mars was opened up to exploration. Mars is a planet of enigmas, surrounded by mystery, and enshrouded in the myths of the past and present. Whether it was once warm and very wet, much like the early Earth, is a question fundamental to many disciplines of planetary science. The most challenging question of all is whether Mars may have been the abode of Life, in any form, and how long such life may have persisted. Currently, an armada of spacecraft missions are planned for Mars. Most ambitious of all robotic missions will be to retrieve samples to bring back to Earth. But what are the technological and operational barriers to sending astronauts to Mars, and how can we overcome them? Sending humans to Mars is a two-to-three orders of magnitude greater undertaking than sending "robotic" missions, by all reasonable measures of technology, mass, and cost. Yet, with clever and efficient design, the costs of Mars missions have been reduced significantly over the past two decades. Compared to robotic spacecraft, human missions require closed-loop life support systems; large-volumetric, pressurized accommodations; more elaborate fail-safe mission success subsystems; human health maintenance capabilities; radiation shelters; and a new class of Earth-to-orbit launch vehicles. Furthermore, mission architectures for human missions can differ significantly from robotic missions for a variety of "safety-first" reasons. Of all upcoming NASA and international space missions, humans-to-Mars will be the most compelling from the public standpoint, and potentially one of the most important from the standpoints of scientific rewards and engineering challenges
Benton C. Clark is chief scientist of Flight Systems at Lockheed Martin Astronautics, has Project Scientist responsibility for Stardust and Mars Surveyor programs, and is the Director of the Advanced Planetary Studies group, where flight designs for the Discovery and Mars missions are conceived and developed. For the Cassini mission, he serves as a co-investigator for the Surface Science Package (SSP) experiment on the Huygens probe. He is also a Co-I on the Stardust and Genesis Discovery missions. Clark earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Oklahoma (Physics), the master's degree from the University of California (Physics and Nuclear Engineering) and a doctorate from Columbia University in Biophysics.
Dr. Clark was responsible for conceiving and developing the x-ray fluorescence spectrometers for the first geochemical analyses of Martian soil. He was also Co-Investigator and Project Manager for development of the light flash detector and sunshade for the Particle Impact Analyzer (PIA) experiment flown successfully on the European Space Agency's Giotto mission to Halley's Comet. In analyzing PIA data, he discovered organic particulates which he named "CHON" particles. He originally conceived the "comet pond" scenario for the origin of life. Clark currently chairs the External Advisory Committee for the NASA Center for Research and Training (NSCORT) in Exobiology at the University of California in San Diego and Salk Institute. Dr. Clark has written more than 130 publications, reports, abstracts and presentations covering instrumentation, planetary missions, exobiology and other fields of research and development. He also owns five patents.
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Barbara Pfarr
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