“No event fills out the Main Hall as lectures on space.” These were the words of Técnico’s president, Prof. Arlindo Oliveira, when opening one of the sessions devoted to this topic which took place at the school in the last months of 2015.
Dava Newman, Deputy Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and Alice Bowman, Mission Operations Manager (MOM) of New Horizons – the space mission that “rediscovered” Pluto, allowing NASA to claim that the dwarf planet has water and a blueish sky – were the protagonists of the two lectures, where there was not enough room for all the people interested in hearing about Mars, Pluto or space missions.
They have several things in common, but what truly binds them is their work at NASA and their love for space exploration. New Horizons is the “offspring” of Alice Bowman, the first woman commanding a NASA mission; Dava Newman worked for a long time on the interaction of biomedical engineering with aeronautics, and is one of the main developers of suits for space activities.
For NASA’s deputy administrator, this is a crucial aspect for the future exploration of Mars – where the US Space Agency is now investing. To get there, there are a number of challenges that must be overcome and the biggest one is to ensure full independence from Earth, given the distance between the planets. “Eventually, I believe so, we’ll be an interplanetary species and we’ll live on Mars.”
To achieve this, NASA’s work is not enough: “Space exploration is a global effort that depends on a network of space-related institutions”, Newman said in his lecture. “We want all missions to be successful (…). NASA can’t explore all the technologies and options at the same time, so we must work together.”
This, however, does not prevent the agency from placing several simultaneous bets. To be sure, the next major goal is “having people on Mars” to “look for signs of life”, but at the same time the New Horizons mission spent the last ten years en route to reach Pluto and, after making the nearest approach to the dwarf planet in July last year, it continues exploring the boundaries of the solar system as we know them.
In October, on her visit to Técnico, Alice Bowman explained that a long mission like this one has its own peculiarities. “Before the launch, Pluto was a planet with three moons; after that, it was demoted to a dwarf planet and we found out that it is part of a third component of the solar system. People have asked me if we were going to abort the mission, and my answer has always been ‘of course not!’”
To conclude the lectures, the two scientists, invited by the American Corner program – a partnership between Técnico and the US Embassy in Portugal, aiming to promote diplomacy, culture, and technical and scientific information – made sure to leave some advice to the students in the audience. “Don’t mind if someone calls you crazy, and just follow your passion. Make the impossible possible”, said Dava Newman; Alice Bowman, on the other hand, addressed students in a more serious tone. “I encourage you to continue your studies; it might be difficult and challenging, but it will be worth it.”
