Tag Archives: John Walker

Lunar spelunking with robots at Vancouver’s (Canada) June 24, 2014 Café Scientifique

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Vancouver’s next Café Scientifique is being held in the back room of the The Railway Club (2nd floor of 579 Dunsmuir St. [at Seymour St.], Vancouver, Canada), on Tuesday, June 24,  2014 at 7:30 pm. Here’s the meeting description (from the June 18, 2014 announcement),

Our speaker for the evening will be John Walker, Rover Development Lead of the Hakuto Google Lunar X-Prize Team.  The title and abstract of his talk is:

Lunar Spelunking

Lava tubes, or caves likely exist on the surface of the moon. Based on recent images and laser distance measurements from the surface of the moon, scientists have selected candidates for further study.

Governmental space agencies and private institutions now have plans to visit these potential caves and investigate them as potential lunar habitat sites, as early as 2015.

I will present some of these candidates and my PhD research, which is supporting a Google Lunar X-Prize team’s attempt to survey one of these caves using robots.

I wasn’t able to find much about John Walker bu there is this Facebook entry noting a talk he gave at TEDxBudapest.

As for the Google Lunar XPRIZE, running a Google search yielded this on June 22, 2014 at 0945 hours PDT. It was the top finding on the search page. links to the site were provided below this definition:

The Google Lunar XPRIZE is a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video,…

You can find the Google Lunar XPRIZE website here. The Hakuto team, the only one based in Japan (I believe), has a website here. There is some English language material but the bulk would appear to be Japanese language.

Canada’s 2010 National Science and Technology Week

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Canada’s annual National Science and Technology Week is coming up shortly. This year it’s scheduled for Oct. 15 – 24, 2010 (which is really 10 days and not one week but I don’t think anyone except me cares about that). You can check here for events taking places in various provinces, including BC.

I almost missed mentioning it  this year as I haven’t seen any publicity or been sent any information about it. Maybe the promotional budget was cut?

Thanks heavens for the National Film Board and their October 2010 newsletter,

Ottawa: Screenings, animation workshops and new related exhibition at the Science and Technology Museum

Ottawa’s Science and Technology Museum is organizing a series of events for history and film buffs this month. On the weekend of October 16-17, the Museum will screen the documentary Passage, by John Walker, to coincide with the opening of its newest exhibition, “Echoes in the Ice: History, Mystery, and Frozen Corpses.”

That same weekend, the Museum will offer stop-motion animation workshops led by NFB facilitators. From storyboard to building plasticine characters, participants will learn how to animate their own stories frame by frame. $5 per person, spaces limited.

I checked out the Canada Science and Technology Museum website and found out that some of these events seem to be part of the National Science and Technology (NST) week. My proof is that the timing is right and there’s a video about the NST week on the Passage page I’ve linked to previously.

I also came across some interesting news about the museum recently on the Canadian Science Policy Centre website. Apparently the museum is trying to find a new home (from the CBC news item found on the Canadian Science Policy Centre site),

Canada’s forlorn science-and-technology museum has ordered yet another study to help it find a new home after being stuck for more than 40 years in a suburban industrial park in Ottawa.

The museum corporation advertised Monday for a $175,000 study — the fourth in the last seven years — to make a business case for the move and to “suggest a path forward.”

Every other national museum or gallery in the Ottawa area has snagged posh new digs over the last quarter century: the National Art Gallery, the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the Canadian War Museum and the National Aviation Museum.

Even the Canadian Museum of Nature, the latest recipient of federal largesse, re-opened this year after a multimillion-dollar makeover of its century-old structure.

The Canada Science and Technology Museum, on the other hand, has seen its grand vision of a new home dashed several times. The latest was an $800-million blueprint vetoed by the incoming Conservative government in 2006.

Apparently, they’d like to be in a new place by 2017 for Canada’s 150th anniversary.