Nov 3, 2012
On today’s episode
Dr. Ralf Gellert, principal investigator of the Alpha Particle
X-Ray Spectromer, or APXS, one of the primary instruments on the
Mars Curiosity rover, joins Justin Trottier at The Star Spot to
discuss how his instrument is currently assisting in the search for
signs of Martian habitability. Dr. Gellert compares Curiosity to
its predecessors, especially the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and
Opportunity on which he continues to work. He describes how
Curiosity's ten instruments together contribute to the mission
goals, ponders whether we'll ever know for sure if Mars was, or was
not, habitable, and shares his hope that the next step in Martian
exploration would be a sample return mission. Gellert
gives a feel for the complexity and scale of planetary exploration
missions, describing how government, research institutions and
private industry collaborate, and how Curiosity has become and
international project.
In Current in Space we report on the discovery of
super-luminous
supernovae out at edge of the observable universe, and provide an
update on Voyager 1 and its mission to a different edge - that of
our own solar system.
About Ralf
Gellert
Dr. Ralf Gellert is a German-born physicist who in 2005 became an
Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Guelph in
Canada. He previously worked as a research scientist at the
University of Mainz and the Max-Plank Institute for Chemistry, also
in Mainz, Germany. After leading the successful proposal to NASA,
he became the principal investigator of the Alpha Particle X-Ray
Spectrometer, or APXS instrument, one of the primary instruments
currently on board NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover. The APXS is
designed to analyze the elements of a Marsian sample through alpha
particle and X-ray bombardment.