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

Science Stuff

The Mars Exploration Rover "Opportunity" continues to explore Mars!

• You can find links to projects I've worked on here and there on the net.
  • some papers available on the web
  • NASA Technical Reports Server:
    • Geoffrey A. Landis
    • more reports: G. A. Landis
  • papers available on Google scholar (good search, but includes many papers that aren't mine)
• I am a member of the science team of the Mars Exploration Rovers mission, that landed the two rovers "Spirit" and "Opportunity" on Mars-- Opportunity is currently still roving across the surface of Mars.
  • Zip Code Mars
  • I also participated in a 2003 field test of the "FIDO" rover. See me on sol 19 of operations.
• Mars Pathfinder is one of the projects I worked on.
  • find a pdf file of a talk I gave about my experiences with Pathfinder at the Workshop on Space Mechanisms. Or read some short e-mail clips I sent during Pathfinder operations.
    
  
  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.
  • My proposed Venus Airplane was featured on the "Universe Today" site.
• 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

• I was quoted in a story "Not Such a Stretch to Reach for the Stars" in the New York Times. (Reprinted several places around the web, including aerospace blog)
• An episode of NPR's "This American Life" discusses my paper on plasma shielding against interstellar dust, and includes a clip from an interview with me.
• 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

• Me at the Pathfinder science results Press Conference
• Me posing with the Pathfinder spacecraft
• Operations Readiness Test snapshots
• Me & Marvin out at JPL
• Me posing with the Pathfinder airbags
• Me posing with the Sojourner rover model (full size) (small)

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.

• Faster than Light interstellar travel (with Robert L. Forward, John G. Cramer, Gregory Benford, and Geoffrey A. Landis)
• Slower than the Light interstellar flight (with David Brin, Robert L. Forward, and Jonathan Vos Post)
• 1993 Mars Exploration forum (with Robert Zubrin, Doug Beason, and Geoffrey Landis)
• 2000 Science Forum Predictions for the Next Millennium, with too many contributors to name.

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
  • or go to my page on writing and science fiction
  • or go to my page on miscellaneous stuff, including photos, essays, views and links.
• 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.