What: Nat Geo Live 鈥� Kobie Boykins, Exploring Mars
Where: Royal Theatre
When: Wednesday, May 8, 7 p.m.
Tickets: $32.50-$44.50 at , by phone at 250-386-6121, or in person at the Royal McPherson box office
You think your job is stressful?
When mechanical engineer Kobie Boykins arrived at work Thursday, he began work on a project with a $2-billion price tag: Europa Clipper, an interplanetary orbiter mission in development at NASA.
Boykins, 44, is one of the senior engineers at NASA鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, California, and played a key role in the design of three rovers used to explore the surface of Mars. He has worked at the organization鈥檚 research and development centre since 1996, tackling projects from underwater research in Antarctica to launching a vehicle into the Aurora Borealis in Alaska.
He also played hockey at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which possibly makes him The Most Interesting Man in the World to kids who stare skyward. Boykins, raised in Nebraksa, was one of those kids once. He knew in Grade 5 he wanted to design vehicles for space. He was hired by NASA while he was still in college, and now leads large teams of engineers on missions to Jupiter and Mars.
Boykins will discuss these and other projects in Victoria on Wednesday with Exploring Mars, his multi-media presentation in the Nat Geo Live series at the Royal Theatre. 鈥淔or me, it鈥檚 telling a story where we went from a blank sheet of paper, with a concept of how we wanted to [get to Mars], and how we actually got to the surface.鈥�
The first project he worked on that made it to the surface of Mars was the robotic spacecraft Mars Pathfinder, in 1997. He was a student at the time. When the rovers he helped design made it back to the surface in 2003, 鈥渢hose were the big ones鈥� for Boykins. His next career achievement is expected to come via Europa Clipper and the mission to Jupiter set for a launch in 2023.
NASA is now committed to exploring human and robotic exploration in equal measure. Boykins believes the Europa Clipper mission is the first step for robotics, and will prove that the icy moons orbiting Jupiter have liquid oceans underneath.
鈥淚t gives me chills to think about what the possibilities are. But I have an unbelievably visceral reaction to a lifeboat.鈥�
That鈥檚 what Boykins calls the fascination with finding another planet for humans to inhabit 鈥� in effect, abandoning an irreparably damaged Earth.
鈥淎 lot of the exploration we鈥檙e doing now is to understand planetary evolution, and to see what is the effect of what we鈥檙e doing on our own planet. But I still think the most important thing is to protect the place that we are from. We will become space-bearing, and we might actually colonize other places, but we shouldn鈥檛 be thinking of other places as a lifeboat.鈥�
In the past year, a major documentary (Apollo 11) and Hollywood film (First Man) have looked into space exploration. In April, the Event Horizon Telescope captured the first images of a black hole. Interest in our solar system has not been this high in decades, and Boykins believes the end result will be a brave new frontier for our species.
鈥淒oes that mean there is other, intelligent life out there? We know that, at some point in its geological evolution, Mars had water on the surface. What occurred on Mars to get rid of that water, and could that occur on Earth? That鈥檚 where it becomes very important to you and I, as human beings.鈥�
