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It was the 25th Astrofest – and how things have changed since the first one! No one knew then if other stars had planets. Pluto was still a planet and its discoverer Clyde Tombaugh was still alive. The Rosetta mission was in the very early planning stages, and Cassini-Huygens hadn't been launched.

European Astrofest 2017


Mona Evans
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Andrea Accomazzo is the Head of the Solar and Planetary Missions Division at ESOC (European Space Operations Centre) in Darmstadt, Germany. He gave two talks at Astrofest, "Landing on Mars" and "Landing Rosetta on comet 67P".

He was closely involved in the Rosetta mission. Since many major events were broadcast live on the web, Accomazzo was one of the major players.

The first part of the ExoMars mission got the Gas Trace Orbiter into orbit, but the lander Schiaparelli needed a post mortem before the astrobiology lander got the go-ahead to be built for a 2020 launch.


Mona Evans
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Last year there was a lot of publicity about the findings that seemed to point to there being a massive planet beyond Pluto - a real 9th planet, Planet X.

Scott Sheppard, discoverer of seventy moons, spoke "Beyond Pluto - the Hunt for Planet X" explaining the evidence for its existence. Even though they haven't found it yet. There's a lot of space out there and it's a long way away.

If you want to find out more, the LA Times reports on Astronomers' findings point to a ninth planet, and it's not Pluto.


Mona Evans
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Dr. Louisa Preston is I a UK Space Agency Aurora Research Fellow, and is based at Birkbeck, University of London. She is interested in extreme environments and is the author of Goldilocks and the Water Bears: The Search for Life in the Universe.

Preston says that the water bears are her favorites. A "water bear" is properly known as a tardigrade. They're microscopic aquatic creatures - even the biggest ones are only 1.5 mm long. (Have a look at a ruler marked in centimeters and millimeters to see how tiny this is!)


Mona Evans
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Tardigrade in Moss. Tardigrades are the proper name for "water bears", a kind of extremophile, i.e., something that thrives in extreme hostile conditions. Pictured here in a color-enhanced electron micrograph is a millimeter-long tardigrade crawling on moss.
Quote:
Tardigrades are known to be able to go for decades without food or water, to survive temperatures from near absolute zero to well above the boiling point of water, to survive pressures from near zero to well above that on ocean floors, and to survive direct exposure to dangerous radiations. The far-ranging survivability of these extremophiles was tested in 2011 outside an orbiting space shuttle. Tardigrades are so durable partly because they can repair their own DNA and reduce their body water content to a few percent. Some of these miniature water-bears almost became extraterrestrials recently when they were launched toward to the Martian moon Phobos on board the Russian mission Fobos-Grunt, but stayed terrestrial when a rocket failed and the capsule remained in Earth orbit. Tardigrades are more common than humans across most of the Earth.

Astronomy Photograph of the Day

Image Credit & Copyright: Nicole Ottawa & Oliver Meckes / Eye of Science / Science Source Images


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