"This lecture is about my life, my struggle with depression and how I overcame it to discover 23 comets and have lived the rest of my life as I did. It also explores the work I did in finding connections between the night sky in literature. It is the story of a life lived under the stars."

In 2012, The Mars Science Laboratory sent the rover Curiosity to Mars where it discovered sedementary rocks that suggest Mars, like Earth, once had water. Kirsten Siebach describes to us the observations that Curiosity made and tells us a story of what life would have looked like if it had indeed thrived there.

A major milestone in America's Moon to Mars exploration is the Artemis III landing of two astronauts at the lunar south pole in 2024. The terrain there is ancient, shaped dramatically by impacting asteroids and comets, producing topography that dwarfs that of the Earth's Grand Canyon. David Kring will introduce that region and describe exploration options at the nation's seventh landing site on the Moon.