The Quest for Life on Mars
Dr Paulo de Souza
Research Director, CSIRO Centre for Information and Communication Technologies
16 April 2010, 12:30 pm
Theatrette, Launceston College (F Block)
The first signs of life on Mars came
from Schiaparelli’s interpretation of telescopic images from in
1877. Orson Welles, with his novel radio broadcast in 1938, caused
public panic taking interstellar war drama as fact. Intriguing images
came from NASA’s Mariner fly-by in 1966, and ten years later the Viking
orbiters sent us images of a face on Mars that increased our interest
in Mars. Later, the Martian meteorite collected in Allan Hills,
Antarctica in 1984 showed evidence pointing to fossilised bacteria: our
first encounter with a possible organism from Mars.
Finding
evidence of life on Mars would change the way we think about life on
Earth. It will radically change the way we see ourselves and our place
in the universe.
This talk is an invitation to a journey
on our quest for Life on Mars. What do we know? What is still to
be discovered? What are the limitations of our science and technology
today in confirming life on another planet?
SPEAKER PROFILE:
Paulo de Souza is a Physicist with a PhD in Natural Sciences. He is Research Director of Tasmanian ICT Centre at CSIRO, and a collaborator scientist on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers Project. He has worked in industrial research centres in Brazil and Europe, and received many international awards as a result of his research in industry. Paulo has written over 100 scientific papers, and co-authored a series of papers identified as ‘Breakthrough on the Year: 2004’ by the prestigious magazine Science.
Lecture sponsored by the Australian Institute of Physics.