Michael Nieto, left, a Laboratory Fellow in Theoretical (T) Division, shares a light moment with speaker Charles Elachi, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Elachi is the author of more than 230 publications and three textbooks (one of which has been translated into Chinese). He holds patents in the fields of space and planetary exploration, Earth observation from space, active microwave remote sensing, electromagnetic theory and integrated optics. Approximately 150 people attended a Director's Colloquium in the Administration Building Auditorium at Technical Area 3 to hear Elachi discuss the future of space exploration. Photo by LeRoy N. Sanchez, Public Affairs
Watching the first of the Mars rover landing balloons bounce across the Martian landscape, with elated Jet Propulsion Laboratory workers cheering in the background, JPL Director Charles Elachi smiled broadly, sharing with a fascinated Laboratory audience his team's sense of accomplishment.
Elachi spoke on the future of space exploration last week in the Administration Building Auditorium at Technical Area 3. The director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and vice president of the California Institute of Technology, Elachi is a professor of electrical engineering and planetary science at Cal Tech.
Focusing on key themes, such as "are we alone?" and "what are we looking for?" Elachi summarized the first 46 years of exploration using unmanned robotic spacecraft, noting that 17 of them are from JPL, plus three major instruments such as the Spitzer and Galaxy Evolution Explorer telescopes. Elachi said two dozen more missions are in the planning stages, "and Los Alamos is involved in a significant role in a number of these missions," he said.
While Los Alamos has had strong relationships with JPL, thanks to its extensive instrumentation expertise, such as with the spectrometry equipment providing hydrogen concentration information on Mars Odyssey, the area that is now ripe for expansion is nuclear power and propulsion. With the Laboratory in a leading role for power on the potential Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO), the relationship will likely expand, he said.
The development of nuclear-powered space exploration tools will greatly broaden our capabilities, Elachi said, providing as an example the JIMO concept of being able to travel from one planet to another, circling moons as scientific interest demands and moving on to other areas of study near the huge planet. Such flexibility is impossible with current propulsion and power systems, he pointed out.
Another area of opportunity for scientific development is communications from the mission to the ground, as the signals propagating from distant missions are presently very faint and provide limited data transmission. Thanks to a network of antennae across the world, these faint signals are still providing phenomenal amounts of information, but improvements are needed, he said.
For more information about the Director's Colloquium program, go to http://stb.lanl.gov:8080/wosaserver/web?pg=/program/colloquium/index.xml online.
-- Nancy Ambrosiano