| Event ID: | 9230 |
| Contact Name: | Robin Tucker |
| Contact Email: | robin.tucker1@yahoo.co.uk |
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| Event Web Site: | http://www. |
| Dates: | 10th October 2015 to 9th October 2015 |
| Physical Event: | |
| Type: | Private |
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| Country: | United Kingdom |
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| City: | London |
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| Event Name: | Special showing of The Martian for BIS and Schools |
| Event Description: | Greenwich Odeon cinema is hosting a special showing of The Martian for local schools and the British Interplanetary Society. After the film, the audience will have a chance to ask experts about how we might get to Mars, what we would find there and how we would survive. |
| Promotional Image: | No Image. |
| Report on the Results: | On the final day of World Space Week 2015, we were able to organise a special event thanks to a couple of lucky coincidences. First, that ‘The Martian’, Ridley Scott’s latest film was a couple of weeks into its UK run. The Martian as you’ll know from previous editions of Spaceflight is the most realistic film set in space since Apollo 13 and tells the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars. The second coincidence is that I having been working with Odeon cinemas for several months, and that Odeon has an active social responsibility programme which in particular looks to use the ‘big screen’ for educational purposes. I spotted the opportunity and agreed with them that they would donate a screening of The Martian and time afterwards for a question-and-answer panel session, and we would offer half the seats to BIS Members and half to local secondary and A-level school children. We had confirmation only at fairly short notice, but thanks to the BIS staff and a couple of active volunteer members, by 10th October we had an audience of about 60, split about evenly between BIS Members and schoolchildren, with a few parents and teachers there to chaperone. We had also assembled a great panel of experts for the Q&A: Michael Morris Franks, London lawyer with an interest in space law, but also in extraterrestrial geology and biology; Maggie Lieu, an Astrophysicist at the University of Birmingham, who was also an astronaut candidate for the ‘Mars One’ programme, until she withdrew earlier this year; Jane MacArthur, a Planetary Scientist at the University of Leicester, where she is studying meteorites from Mars and samples from NASA’s Stardust comet probe; and Jerry Stone, a well-known Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, who is also President of the Mars Society in the UK and has appeared on BBC and Sky TV as a space expert. The film, as many of you will have seen by now I’m sure, is excellent – both as a human drama, and as a portrayal of what a Mars mission in twenty or thirty years’ time could actually look like. As the ending credits rolled, we prepared the stage for the panel. I moderated the panel, first with some questions I had prepared, and then taking several from the audience. We had a wide range of age and technical knowledge in the audience, and I hope I did a reasonable job of translating some of the more complex points in to every day language. Several questions covered the difficulties of a Mars mission. The panel described well how the most difficult parts were not just the obvious ones of launch, oxygen and food, but also radiation, physical weakening in micro-gravity, and the psychological pressures of a long mission in a confined space. We talked a lot about Earth-bound analogue missions and I learned with interest that when these failed it was often due to a system failure rather than a human failure, in one case for example a fire that required evacuation. We also had an interesting discussion about what I called the ‘David Bowie question’: Is there life on Mars? With the recent discovery of water on the surface, Michael talked about the possibility of finding fossils of life on Mars. Jane talked about her studies of a small part of the 1.4 grams of Martian meteorite owned by the University of Leicester. A question from the audience penetrated to a major point: why does NASA not just put a petri dish on a probe to Mars and film it to see if bacteria grows? The point wasn’t answered directly, but the responses talked about how NASA’s robot explorers were investigating things one step at a time, and this was contrasted to the UK’s Beagle 2 attempt to probe for life more directly. This discussion enabled us to show that the robot explorers were programmed for a specific mission and hence limited to answer the next questions in a series. In contrast, human explorers, with intelligence and adaptability could react to what they learned on the spot and so progress much quicker. This linked neatly back to the film, which started with a manned scientific exploration, and concluded as a testament to the adaptability and perseverance of humans. We convey our thanks to Odeon for hosting us. At the end of the event I heard positive feedback from both BIS members and teachers from one of the schools. The teachers thought it was great how the film linked to the whole range of STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) and thought that the discussion had been at a good level and interesting for the children present. For BIS members, Stuart Eves summed it up very neatly: "It was a brilliant film, and a thoroughly interesting discussion afterwards”. |
| Attendance: | 60 |
| Attendance is Unique: | |
| Media Impressions: | 2000 |
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