News

The 13th Australian Space Science Conference (ASSC) will be held in Sydney next week at the University of NSW, beginning Monday, 30th September.  This will be the seventh ASSC jointly sponsored and organised by the National Committee for Space and Radio Science (NCSS) and the National Space Society of Australia (NSSA), with the support of the Australian Space Research Institute (ASRI) The ASSC is intended to be the primary annual meeting for Australian research relating to space science. It welcomes space scientists, engineers, educators, and workers in Industry and Government.  This year the ASSC will be run in association with the Mars Society of Australia, and will include a session stream on Mars related topics.

Find out more and register at the ASSC Homepage.

The Mars Society is pleased to announce that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the International Network for Terrestrial Research and Monitoring in the Arctic (EU-INTERACT) to use the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS) on Devon Island in northern Canada, approximately 900 miles from the North Pole, as one of the network’s field stations. FMARS is a unique Mars analog research station established by the Mars Society in July 2000 to serve as a key element in support of various studies of technologies, strategies, architectural design and human factors involved in proposed human missions to the Red...

Now that the initial public reaction to Dennis Tito’s press release about his  Inspiration Mars plan has died down, it’s time to take a good look at the nuts and bolts of this idea. In case you missed it, Tito and a group of aerospace manufactures and NASA scientists are proposing to send two people on a 1.4 year Mars flyby in 2018, using a combination of off-the-shelf hardware but with some needed development.  

The detailed work, presented in a paper to IEEE Aerospace conference in March, shows that these people are serious, and have spotted an unusual (these 1.4-year solutions only appear every 15 years) opportunity for a remarkable adventure. It’s early days, of course, but I have mixed feelings about the mission as it stands. On the...

MSA wishes the greatest success to the TasMars expedition, which has just commenced at the Mars Desert research Station. The TasMars crew is the 123rd to work at MDRS and includes members of Mars Society Australia and Mars Society New Zealand with colleagues from NASA Ames Research Centre. 

Crew commander is MSA director David Willson, he is joined by Emma and engineer from Melbourne, Melanine Newfield, a biologist from New Zealand, and Dr Jennifer Blank, a geologist from NASA ARC.  Other researchers will visit the crew during their two week stay.

The TasMars mission is a follow on to the very successful KiwiMars mission in 2012. Like KiwiMars, it has a joint Australian-NZ crew with additional participation from crew members from the US.  The...