Decoding the Red Planet

Join Dr. Bo Reipurth of the Institute for Astronomy for his talk “Mars, the Red Planet, in Culture and Science” at 7 p.m. today during ‘Imiloa Astronomy Center’s next Maunakea Skies Talk.

Reipurth will summarize the changing views about Mars from antiquity to the present day. The discussion will be illustrated with many of the stunning images brought back from the missions to Mars.

Mars has a thin atmosphere with clouds, polar ice caps, volcanoes, major dry riverbeds, valleys and deserts. Its axis is tilted, so it has seasons like Earth. These similarities to Earth have caused much speculation about life on Mars, originally inspired by the (erroneous) discovery of canals on Mars, thought to be signs of an advanced civilization attempting to survive as the planet dried out.

These ideas have inspired many novels, movies and radio programs, including Orson Welles’ 1938 broadcast “The War of the Worlds,” which caused widespread panic.

Modern studies of Mars have been helped by a large number of satellites put into orbit around the planet, as well as several rovers, some of which are at the moment driving around on the Martian surface, providing detailed photos of the Red Planet’s landscapes.

“All these studies indicate that Mars was warmer and wetter in a distant past, likely with shallow oceans covering part of the surface. This has led to renewed discussion of the possibility that microbial life could have formed in the past and survived in subsurface layers,” Reipurth said.

Now, present and future space missions are charged with finding out if life still exists on Mars. Future studies will be discussed, including plans for sending men to Mars within a few decades.

As a child, one of Reipurth’s first astronomical experiences was looking at the craters of the moon and the rings of Saturn through the telescope at a public observatory in his native Copenhagen.

After that experience, he never doubted he would become an astronomer.

Reipurth received his PhD from the University of Copenhagen in 1981. After several years there as a postdoctoral researcher, he worked as a staff astronomer with the European Southern Observatory in Chile for 11 years. He then spent four years at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy(CASA) of the University of Colorado as a research professor. He joined the IfA in Honolulu in 2001 and moved to the Hilo office in 2004.

Reipurth is the co-author of “The Birth of Stars and Planets.” He also is a member of the UH NASA Astrobiology Institute Lead Team, a cross-disciplinary group studying the relationship of water in the universe to the development of life.