Society monthly meeting pre-recorded without audience during the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions on 20201118.

Meeting introduction and rundown of past month and coming month events was given by the President, Dr. Peter Skilton.

The planned visiting speaker live talk wasn’t possible this month due to the pandemic restrictions. Instead, a public domain video courtesy of the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition was shown about “How to Return to the Moon and Go On to Mars”, presented in the USA by Apollo 17 astronaut and Geologist, Dr. Harrison Schmitt.

This was followed by Vice President, Mark Stephens, presenting “Sky for the Month” online, then Dr. Sky Murphy speaking about “Rocks, Bones and Tissues”.

Following that, the NASA TAG team gave a summary of the Osiris-Rex mission that sampled asteroid Bennu on October 21, 2020 before starting to bring the sample back to Earth.
Then Dr. Tim McCoy, a Geologist from the National Museum of Natural History in the USA spoke about “Astrogeology, Meteorites and Spacecraft Missions”. This was courtesy of the Smithsonian Institute.

Next, Prof. Neil Johnson, a Physicist from George Washington University gave a brief explanation as part of a Royal Institution public lecture about “How Does GPS Work”? Then amateur astronomer, Jeremy Perez from Arizona, gave an “Introduction to Astronomical Sketching”. This was followed by Dr. David Hone, a Palaeontologist from the University of London answering as part of a Royal Institution Christmas lecture, “Could You Outrun a T-Rex”?

A musical closure then followed by member Paula Miles playing the Heart classic “Magic Man”, in concert with images from the NASA Osiris-Rex mission at the end of last month.