Saturday, June 16, the Ames Area Amateur Astronomers will be holding part two of theirRobots in Space show at the Story County Conservation Center in McFarland Park.

The outreachcoordinator forAmateur Astronomers,Evan Zerby, who is also one of two speakers at the lecture, explained whatpart one entailed, as well as a few major points in Saturdays lecture.

What we covered last year was Sputnik [up to] current times,” Zerby said. “What this months lecture is about iscurrent space missions, the replacement of the Hubble Space Telescope, and Robonaut, the firsthumanoid robot.

In addition to the future missions being discussed, the failures of spacecraft will be examined.

All in all weve had hundreds of missions fail, Zerby said. Twelve of the missions to Mars havefailed.

One example of the many Mars failures is the Mars Climate Orbiter. The satellite wasdisintegrated in the atmosphere after it made calculations sending it too close to Mars surface.

The problems were caused by simple human error: The Orbiter was set to work with the metricsystem, while human operators on Earth were imputing data in imperial measurements.

Another topic of focus is the New Frontier missions, specifically the New Horizons mission,which is sending a spacecraft to Pluto. Although it was launched in 2006, it still has three moreyears to travel before flying by the dwarf planet.

It wasnt till very recently that we learned that Pluto has four moons, and possibly even a ring,Zerby said, explaining that Pluto still has many unknowns for this mission to discover.

The Hubble Telescopes predecessor, the James Webb Space Telescope, will be explained to theaudience.

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