Tag: Department of Earth Science and Engineering

Imperial in the news: How to put a human on Mars

Last weekend (27 and 28 July 2013) the BBC broadcast a 30-minute programme called How to put a human on Mars, exploring some of the key aspects of how a mission to Mars might look.

Dr Simon Foster (Physics) was one of five researchers at Imperial who took part. He showed how ice could be used to produce fuel for the return journey and how parachutes would be deployed to slow down and stabilise the landing craft before the astronauts could step foot on the red planet.

To demonstrate this he threw a camera off of the Queen’s Tower, attached to bin bags by string, and talked about his experience in the Imperial Podcast.

Imperial in the news: dinosaur killers

For generations, the debate has raged as to what exactly caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Following a series of varying suggestions, the latest research proposes that the widely-held belief that an asteroid collided with the earth to cause a catastrophic chain of events is wrong. Sort of.

Researchers in the USA announced earlier this month that rather than an asteroid, the impact of the Chicxulub crater in Mexico was caused by a comet. The difference between the two interstellar objects is that comets are made of ice, rock and dust whereas asteroids are made predominantly of metals.