SPECIAL EPISODE

Join us for live coverage of NASA's exciting Mars 2020 Mission with Wes Stange, Science and Technology Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Cyprus and CSEO's President, George A Danos.

We will be connecting live with NASA to watch the landing of Perseverance Rover on Mars and discuss the goals of this groundbreaking mission to Mars.

You can send us real-time your questions via Facebook or YouTube during the event (in the live video comments), for our guest speakers to answer.

Nobel Prize winner on black holes, Sir Roger Penrose, is one of the world's most prominent theoretical physicists who in 1965 produced the mathematics that showed how stars collapse to form black holes. With Stephen Hawking, he showed that if Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity is correct, then there would be a singularity, a point of infinite density and space-time curvature, where time has a beginning. Penrose shared the Wolf Prize for physics with Stephen Hawking for this work on the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems.

Penrose is also known as the founding father of quantum gravity through his work on twistor theory, which addresses the geometry of space-time. He is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, and the author of several books about the nature of space, time and reality.

Dr Jonathan Eastwood is Director of the Imperial College London Space Lab, the umbrella network for all space-related research in the College. He is also a senior lecturer in the Blackett laboratory and a member of the space and atmospheric physics research group. His background includes working at the University of California, Berkeley, and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt MD where he held a National Research Council Resident Research Associateship. From 2010-2014 he held an STFC Advanced Fellowship at Imperial College London. In 2012 Jonathan was one of the receipients of the COSPAR Zeldovich Medal.

Jonathan conducts research into space weather and space plasma physics. He is particularly interested in a phenomenon known as magnetic reconnection which occurs in the boundaries between different space plasmas. As well as changing the topology of the magnetic field in space, it also rapidly releases energy stored in the magnetic field, creating jets of hot plasma. Whilst reconnection occurs in a wide variety of circumstances (e.g. solar and stellar atmospheres, accretion disks, tokamak sawtooth crashes), in the Earth's magnetosphere it causes geomagnetic storms, an example of space weather.

Space weather is on the national risk register because it represents a very significant threat to infrastructure resilience (e.g. power blackouts, loss of GPS, satellite damage). It is also a major consideration for space exploration. At Imperial Jonathan is leading the development of novel space technology for space weather monitoring and new supercomputer simulations shedding new light on the space weather risk.

Dr Marcello Coradini joined the European Space Agency in April 1987.

As Coordinator of the Solar System Missions (1987-2010), he has been in charge of planning and overseeing the Solar System missions implementation at ESA. Among the many missions he brought to fruition, it is worth mentioning Cassini/Huygens, Mars Express, Venus Express, Rosetta, BepiColombo, Solar Orbiter, etc. More recently, he led the ESA Exploration Program and contributed to the formulation and budgeting of the ExoMars 2016 & 2018 program.

He was also ESA Programs Coordinator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California until end of August 2015.

In 1991, the International Astronomical Union has named asteroid 4598 after him for his contributions to asteroidal science and exploration.

Dr Coradini is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, a recipient of the Golden Badge of the European Geophysical Union, former Director of the journal 'Planetary and Space Science', a member of the Italian Physical Society and Academician of the International Academy of Astronautics. In recent years he held the position of Executive President of the Physical Sciences Committee of the ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche, France), until August 2018. He is an adjunct professor of space system design at the University of Trento, Italy, and at the University of Genova, Italy. He authored more than 150 scientific and engineering papers, and 6 books.

He is currently Co-Founder and Executive Director of Space System Solutions and Chair of the International Council of the Cyprus Space Exploration Organisation (CSEO).

For over 30 year's Karen has worked on Mars projects/missions - from Mars Observer to Mars Global Surveryor, Exomars, Pathfinder, Mars Polar Lander, Phoenix and many more.

During 2001-2010, she was at NASA HQ managing Mars exploration programs as a Program Executive and maximizing the scientific outcome of these missions as a Program Scientist. In particular, she was instrumental for the making of Mars Observer, Mars Global Surveryor, Mars Odyssey, Mars Scout Program, Mars Sample Return, and ExoMars. In the framework of the ESA ExoMars mission she was instrumental in consolidating the US contributions to this mission.

Between 1995-2000, she warked at the University of California in Los Angeles where she managed the Mars Polar lander and the Phoenix contributions of her university, in particular creating and managing the science data centers. In that time she was also the Director of the UCLA White Mountain Research Center.

Between 1993-1995, she worked at NASA's JPL, where she was involved in the NASA Galileo mission to Jupiter managing the utilization of a number of instruments on-board that spacecraft.

SPECIAL EPISODE

Join us for live coverage of NASA's exciting Mars 2020 Mission with Wes Stange, Science and Technology Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Cyprus and CSEO's President, George A Danos.

We will be connecting live with NASA to watch the landing of Perseverance Rover on Mars and discuss the goals of this groundbreaking mission to Mars.

You can send us real-time your questions via Facebook or YouTube during the event (in the live video comments), for our guest speakers to answer.