"A History of the Moon"

The Moon, satellite to our Earth, fascinated and inspired the very earliest civilisations as the brightest object in the night sky. Many ancient peoples worshipped the Moon as a deity and used it in the earliest forms of calendar systems. In the seventeenth century, Galileo's construction of telescopes enabled him to view the hitherto previously unseen mountains and craters on the surface of the Moon. Although knowledge of the Moon's origins and its influence on the tides developed over subsequent centuries, it was not until the lunar missions, both unmanned and then manned, in the 1950s and 1960s that its composition and many other complex features could be discovered. Over recent decades, there have been a series of lunar satellite and rover missions which have discovered many more intriguing facets of the Moon and continued to progress the knowledge of our satellite. This conference seeks to review the history of the Moon and engage with the latest lunar research on the prospects of the Moon becoming a future outpost for humans.

The programme for the day is below:

MORNING SESSION:

10.30 am WELCOME

10.40 am Professor Carolin Crawford (University of Cambridge) - Early Views of the Moon [VIDEO]

11.30 am Dr Stephen Pumfrey (Lancaster University) - `The Bright Side of the Moon': The Historical Significance of Our Tidally Locked Satellite [VIDEO]

12.20 pm Professor Philip Woodworth (National Oceanography Centre) - Associating the Moon and the Tides [VIDEO]

1.15 pm LUNCH BREAK

AFTERNOON SESSION:

2.15 pm Professor Ian Crawford (Birkbeck College London) - The Apollo Programme and Its Legacy [VIDEO]

3.05 pm Professor Bernard Foing (European Space Agency) - From Recent Probes towards a Human/Robotic Moon Village [VIDEO] (Hilde Schroeven-Deceuninck)

4 pm TEA/COFFEE BREAK

4.30 pm SUMMARY OF THE DAY'S PROCEEDINGS - Dr Mahesh Anand (The Open University) [VIDEO]

There will be a conference dinner at St Cross in the evening following the end of the conference with an after-dinner talk by Charles Barclay (Director of the Blackett Observatory, Marlborough College) on lunar eclipses.