Thread by @tanyaofmars

Tonight at #GA2018, @elakdawalla is giving the Helen Sawyer Hogg Public Lecture on “ The Golden Age of Space Exploration.” Good crowd here!

.@elakdawalla: Pluto’s moon Charon was discovered 40 years ago this week! #GA2018

.@elakdawalla: The @NewHorizons2015 mission to Pluto is only about the size of a grand piano—needed to be small to travel quickly. #GA2018

.@elakdawalla is wearing a very cool skirt adorned with @MarsCuriosity images of Gale Crater. #GA2018

.@elakdawalla: Exploration shows us that the universe is weirder than we ever imagined. #GA2018

Audible “wows” from the audience when @elakdawalla shows the newly-images asteroid Ryugu by @haya2e_jaxa. #GA2018

.@elakdawalla: All the things that help life survive on Earth are really good at destroying evidence of what happened in the past—including life itself. #GA2018

.@elakdawalla: How amazing is it that we can take photos of a rover we built and sent to Mars with a satellite we built that is orbiting Mars? #GA2018

.@elakdawalla: “It’s hard to find evidence of 4-billion-year-old life on Earth. It’s even harder to do it on Mars.” #GA2018

.@elakdawalla: The moons of the giant planets in our Solar System are best candidates for the search for *present-day* life beyond Earth. #GA2018

More audible reactions from the audience as @elakdawalla shows stunning views of the jets of Enceladus. #GA2018

.@elakdawalla: Studying other planets helps us understand Earth. Mars gives us clues to what Earth used to be like, and Venus has clues to what we could become in the future. #GA2018

.@elakdawalla: Venus’ entire carbon budget is in its atmosphere. On Earth, we’re lucky that a lot of our carbon is locked up in rocks. #GA2018

.@elakdawalla: Studying other planets will help us understand how to better take care of our own. #GA2018

.@elakdawalla advocates for a mission to Uranus to help us better understand ice giants. 🙌 #GA2018

Thanks to @elakdawalla for the awesome shoutout to @csa_asc! #GA2018

.@elakdawalla: “Robotic exploration IS human exploration. They’re our proxies.” #GA2018

.@elakdawalla: The rovers on @haya2e_jaxa aren’t like the Mars rovers—they’re basically tiny bricks. #GA2018

.@elakdawalla: “You ask any astronaut and they’ll say, ‘Psssh, cancer risk, I WANT TO GO TO MARS.” #GA2018

.@elakdawalla: There is fear that Mars sample return won’t happen before humans get to Mars—at which point there is no way to prevent contamination. #GA2018

.@elakdawalla: There are a MILLION asteroids in the belt that we’ve seen from Earth—which means there are MANY more we haven’t seen yet. #GA2018