... up to Deep-Space Exploration!

The recent successful lunar landing mission from the Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost lander carried a suite of NASA science instruments to the Moon, landing on March 2nd, 2025. The payloads operated successfully during the 14-day mission and returned valuable and rich data from the lunar surface which will improve our understanding of the lunar environment and make future landings safer. This talk will present an overview of the mission as well as past and future planned NASA missions, and discuss their importance for future space exploration and scientific development.

Space travel requires a lot of fuel: most of a rocket is just stuff that burns as you go. If you could get that fuel in space, instead of carrying it from Earth, you'd be able to go much farther. One possible source of that fuel is the Moon. However, getting it from the Moon isn't easy, and whether that's better than getting it from Earth is a complex question. Come hear a less complex answer.

The lives of space explorers are endangered by the radiation emitted by magnetic storms on the Sun and by the explosion of much larger stars called supernovae, in our galaxy and beyond. Radiation is everywhere: in the bananas we eat, in our basements, and even in the people we spend time with! Nevertheless, humanity has evolved for millions of years to be resistant to radiation levels on Earth. In deep space, the radiation is too much. How to protect our space heroes?