Challenges and Excitement of Space Exploration

PASADENA, Calif. -- It's been a busy year for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with a number of recent missions serving as the first salvos of a bold space science and exploration program in the coming years. Two goals, notes Charles Elachi, JPL's director and vice president and professor of electrical engineering and planetary science at the California Institute of Technology (JPL is a NASA facility managed by Caltech), are to explore the universe and search for life in it. On Wednesday, April 28, Elachi will discuss the numerous missions that will spread throughout the solar system over the next decade in his talk, "Challenges and Excitement of Space Exploration," the last of the 2003-2004 Earnest C. Watson Lecture Series at Caltech.

In the 12-month period (summer of 2003 to summer of 2004), he notes, the most advanced space infrared telescope (the Spitzer Space Telescope ) started its mission of exploring the universe in the infrared, while the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) is mapping the sky in the ultraviolet. Two rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) continue their in situ exploration of Mars in coordination with two orbiters (Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor). At the same time, Stardust and Genesis are collecting samples from a comet's coma and the solar wind for return back to Earth (Genesis, with its solar wind sample, lands September 8; Stardust returns its comet sample in January 2006), while Cassini will start its exploration of the Saturnian system as it goes into orbit around Saturn on June 30.

Elachi's lecture will take place at 8 p.m. in Beckman Auditorium, near Michigan Avenue south of Del Mar Boulevard, on Caltech's campus in Pasadena. Seating is available on a free, no-ticket-required, first-come, first-served basis. Caltech has offered the Watson Lecture Series since 1922, when it was conceived by the late Caltech physicist Earnest Watson as a way to explain science to the local community.