Events

28 MAY 2019 time 15:00
Colloquium

WHITE MARS: LIVING FAR AWAY FROM ANY FORM OF LIFE

Dr. Marco Buttu (INAF-OAC)
WHITE MARS: LIVING FAR AWAY FROM ANY FORM OF LIFE

Concordia Station is a French/Italian facility located inside Antarctica, in a plateau called Dome-C, in the middle of nowhere. A dark and cold place: no Sun from May to August, temperatures around -80 Celsius degress, no life. In this weird place there is a lack of oxygen, extremely dry air and no way to go back to the “normal world” between February and November. I lived in Concordia for 13 months, performing scientific research with other 12 collegues from Italy, France and Austria. We were the most isolated people on Earth, more than the austronauts on the International Space Station. It was like living on another planet, and that is why the European Space Agency was making bio-medical research on us, in order to understand how the human body behaves in a such extraterrestrial environment. In this talk I will introduce our studies, describe Concordia and our life there, and of course also speak about Python.