Talk
Preparing to Become an Interstellar Civilization

Bio
Les Johnson is a physicist, author, and former Chief Technologist at the NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center. While at NASA, Les was developing the next generation of space technologies, from advanced space propulsion and power to human life-support systems. Les served as the Principal Investigator for spaceflight demonstrations of solar sails, tethers, and more. Les is a member of the International Academy of Astronautics, the British Interplanetary Society, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and MENSA—and is the Program Chair of the Interstellar Research Group. His science fiction books include Crisis at Proxima, The Ross 248 Project, and more. Les’s popular science book, A Traveler’s Guide to the Stars (Princeton Press 2022) is now available in 7 languages. Les is also the co-editor of a 3-volume technical monograph series detailing the complex technical and social problems associated with future interstellar travel (Elsevier).

Talk
The Search for Habitable Worlds in the Jupiter System: The Europa Clipper Mission

Bio
Paolo Tortora is a Professor of Aerospace Engineering with 25 years of experience on small satellites and innovative spacecraft subsystems, including the ground segment, and planetary exploration focusing on radio science experiments with deep space missions. He is (and has been) involved as a Co-Investigator on several deep space missions including the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens to the Saturn system, the ESA BepiColombo mission to Mercury, the NASA Juno mission to Jupiter, the ESA JUICE (JUpiter ICy moons Explorer) mission to the Jupiter system, the NASA DART mission to impact the binary asteroid Didymos, the ESA Hera mission to the binary asteroid Didymos (post-impact survey), and the NASA Europa Clipper to Europa. Also, he has been involved in three nanosat deep space missions flown by NASA and ASI (Italian Space Agency): Mars Cube One (MarCO), LICIACube and Argomoon. Prof. Tortora is Editor-in-Chief for the Astronautics & Space Science Section of MDPI’s Aerospace.

Talk
Magnetic Shielding for Space (Re-)Entry and Exploration

Bio
Dr. Andrea Lani (Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences, MSc in aerospace engineering) is research/team manager at KU Leuven's Center for mathematical Plasma Astrophysics, an AIAA member, co-author of 100+ scientific papers and previously was a senior researcher at Von Karman Institute, a postdoc at NASA/Stanford Center for Turbulence Research and a NATO Science & Technology technical member. For 20+ years, he has lead the development of models/software to simulate hypersonic flows around space vehicles and space weather as co-designer of the COOLFluiD (Computational Object-Oriented Libraries for Fluid Dynamics) and ESA VSWMC (Virtual Space Weather Modelling Center) platforms. He has been the PI of MEESST, a large EU project (10 organizations, 6 countries, 30+ scientists/engineers) developing the first high-temperature superconductor-based magnetic shielding demonstrator for space re-entry.