Geoffrey A. Landis:
Science
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Page for Geoffrey A. Landis's activities in science, engineering, space, solar energy, and technology development
me posing with the "Spirit" rover
photo by Barbara Sprungman
Writing is not my full time job. In my main job, I am a scientist at the
NASA John Glenn Research Center,where I work on Mars missions and on developing advanced concepts and technology for future space missions.
Science Stuff
The Mars Exploration Rover
"Opportunity" continues
to explore Mars!
The Spirit rover is in hibernation for the winter... we all hope and trust she will wake up and call home when the winds of Martian spring come
- You can find links to projects I've worked on here and
there on the net.
- I am a
member of the science team of the Mars
Exploration Rovers mission, two highly-capable rovers named
"Spirit" and "Opportunity" that are currently roving across the surface
of Mars.
- Mars
Pathfinder is one of the projects I worked on.
me posing with the Pathfinder "Sojourner" rover
Here's my experiment (visible at the lower right corner of the
Sojourner's solar panel) on Mars!
- I also led a Revolutionary
Aerospace systems Concepts project to make a technology-based
conceptual design for a mission to explore the surface and atmosphere
of Venus. A summary of the mission design was published in the journal Acta
Astronautica. The project (with video animation) is shown here; here is a link to an animation of the mission concept as a .mov file, and you can see my presentation (with pictures) at the VEXAG (Venus EXploration Advisory Group) on the web. You can also look at the slides from Lecture I gave about Venus exploration at MIT in 2008.
- One part of the project, a paper that I wrote with Ken
Mellott about the design of a power and cooling system for a Venus
rover, also appeared
in Acta Astronautica
- A story about the paper was recently featured in New
Scientist and was picked up by Slashdot.
- Cleveland Plain Dealer published an article about Solar
Probe plus, a mission I work on.
- I worked on MIP,
a project to demonstrate making
oxygen for rocket fuel on the surface of Mars.
- I also work on the design
of airplanes to fly in the atmosphere of Mars and Venus.
- An especially fun project was working with a bunch of
physicists and physicist/SF-writers at a NASA workshop on Faster than
Light Travel. One result of this was that we determined that cosmic
wormholes could have net negative mass. This paper was so interesting
that the University of California put out a press
release about it! I was featured in Discover
magazine article about faster than light travel; the article is
available from Findarticles.com,
and you can also read my comments
about the article.
- Another project I spent a lot of time working on is
developing was laser power beaming to power spacecraft. You can read a
brief overview.
In the News
- Talking about dust devils on MSN and in
New
Scientist
- Talking about MER in the Cleveland Plain
Dealer
- Featured in the Cleveland Plain Dealer talking about the
Solar Probe Plus
- I was widely quoted in newspapers ranging from the New
York Times to Der
Spiegel on the subject of interstellar flight in the news, as
a result of the presentations that I made at the symposium on
Interstellar Flight and Generation Starships at the February AAAS
meeting. Articles.
- News about my trip
to China
What I did on my summer vacation: some Mars Pathfinder Snapshots
Science Forum
Between 1992 and 2000, I was a participant in the "Science
Forum" of the magazine Science Fiction Age.
Here are four of the Science Forum columns that I conducted or
participated in.
This page is about my activities in science, technology, and engineering-related stuff. If you want to know more about me in general, return to:
- Geoffrey A. Landis home page
- Want to know what I'm up to lately, or just
say hi?
- Visit my
newsgroup on SFF.net and leave a message-- or drop by and
just hang out.
-
Or, if you prefer a blog, my news and chat is now available in blog form.
