Michael West’s Blog

Today my main job has been to unpack the numerous boxes containing artwork for the ‘Destination: Mars’ Exhibition we have received, catalogue it and set it up in the conference centre. I have been ably assisted by Camille Desportes and Julie Jones. Camilee is an intern with the Mars Institute and also a graduate student in Space Management at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France. Julie is an artist based in Nevada who is representing the International Association of Astronomical Artists, who are presenting the exhibition. Her website is here - she does some truly amazing astronomical and space related art. You can check it out here.

I’ve also assisted NASA’s Chief Historian, Steven Dick, with preparation of a display of historical documents related to Phobos and Deimos and in particular their discovery by astronomer Asaph Hall at the US Naval Observatory in 1877. There are some really interesting documents in the collection including a facsimile of the Presidential Commission, signed by Abraham Lincoln, that Hall received upon taking up the Professorship of Mathematics at the UNO.

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So why am I here in California for two weeks? Well I am helping out with the 1st International Conference on the Exploration of Phobos and Deimos which is being run by the Mars Institute and held at NASA Ames Research Center. I’m involved because back in 2005 I worked as an intern for the Mars Institute with Dr. Pascal Lee for two months. During that time I did a review of all the literature regarding the exploration of Mars’ two moons, Phobos and Deimos, in order to support future proposals for robotic missions to these unusual objects. Since then I have continued to work with the Mars Institute (I’m on the Board of Advisors) and helped out with the PRIME mission study (see my earlier post here). As such I am giving a presentation at this conference (the PDF of the abstract is here) and assisting with various logistical things, including managing the ‘Destination: Mars’ space art exhibit.

I hope to provide some photos and reports of the happenings throughout the conference. Stay tuned!

I flew to San Francisco today to attend a conference on the exploration of Mars’ moons, Phobos and Deimos that is being held at NASA Ames Research Centre in Silicon Valley. I will be here for a bit less than two weeks, but more on what I will be doing later. On the flight over I was lucky enough to get a seat at the front of economy class which has extra leg room and because the flight was half empty the seat beside me was empty as well. It was great and I even managed to get about 7 hours sleep!

Anyway, of all the people who could have occupied the other seat in my row, there was a ancient history lecturer heading to a conference at Stanford University. We got talking and discovered that he was from Sydney University, specialises in Greek history and teachers many of the Honours students at USyd. As is often the case it didn’t take long to realise that he knows someone I know - in this case Victor Shaw, a old friend from Sydney Uni who started out doing Engineering and saw the light and switched over the Ancient History. Proof once again it is a small small world.