[meteorite-list] Professor Colin Pillinger lecture - Stones from the sky: A heaven-sent opportunity to talk about science

[Martin Goff]

Hi all,

Please see the link below to a webcast of Professor Colin Pillingers
lecture to the Royal Society recently.

(http://royalsociety.org/events/2012/stones-from-the-sky/)

Professor Pillinger was the recipient of the Michael Faraday prize in
recognition of his excellence in communicating science. The lecture is
called 'Stones from the sky - A heaven sent opportunity to talk about
science'  For those who dont know about Professor Pillinger, here is a
lowdown:

'Colin Pillinger is Professor of Planetary Sciences at the Open
University. His research interests include designing unique
instruments to analyse extraterrestrial samples. During his forty year
career he has made more than a thousand contributions to scientific
literature, and also found time to be one of Britain's foremost
science communicators, contributing dozens of popular articles in
newspapers and magazines as well as giving hundreds of public
lectures. After analysing a number of meteorites from Mars and finding
tantalising evidence of the existence of life there, he conceived the
Beagle 2 mission to land on the Red Planet to confirm his discoveries.
Throughout the project he filled over thirty notebooks recording the
daily happenings which form the basis of his autobiographical account
of the mission - "My life on Mars". '

Colin Pillinger is friends with Derek and Katrina Gray, the owners of
the Wold Cottage and has a particular interest in the Wold Cottage
meteorite and in Sir Edward Topham who was the owner of the land at
the time the meteorite fell. The webcast is an hour long but its worth
watching, a really good intro to the history of the study of
meteorites from a definite personality in the field.

Cheers


Martin

-- 
Martin Goff
www.msg-meteorites.co.uk
IMCA #3387