Charles Elachi, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA, set out the program for the institution for the next few years. He briefly traced the history of NASA over the last 50 years and concluded by saying that from the first spacecraft in 1958, there are now over 70 NASA spacecraft in space.

Focusing on the results of the Mars robotic missions, he said that the planet offered interesting comparisons with Earth in terms of landmass and geology.

A question he asked was: Did water ever exist on Mars? The missions have, by exploring the stratigraphy of crater walls indicated that there were indeed oceans four billion years ago — so now the key questions is “where have they gone?”

Water ice has been found and an area of great current interest is whether there are sufficient quantities to support some form of life.

Advances in robotic exploration had, he said, resulted in the ability of increasingly large surface rovers, some the size of a car. He said that by around 2020, NASA in cooperation with the European Space Agency would be using these large machines, hoping to retrieve samples from the Martian surface and return them to Earth for analysis.

It was not only Mars, he said, but also Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Titan that hinted at the presence of water and the possibility of life. They would very probably be objects of future missions.

Elachi said that search for Earth-like planets and life in the solar system could be turned earthward. The use of ground-penetrating radar to locate water and other extremely accurate measuring systems can lead to a greater understanding of our home planet and be used to predict approaching disaster such as earthquakes or floods.

A delegate interjected from the floor saying that he understood from personal involvement that some two-thirds of expenditure within NASA was on earth science, suggesting that it is unfair to think that all of NASA’s work is space directed. For example, he said, it was NASA that discovered climate change.

Throughout the presentations, the themes of multidisciplinary approach and international cooperation reinforced the “one small planet” discussions of the previous day. Professor Charbel Farhat, chair of aeronautics at Stanford University, introduced an engaging set of reasons offered by students wanting to specialize in space studies. He said that science was a major reason, but that the main reasons were aims to better understand where we come from, discover whether we are alone and climate. The prime given reason was that the study of space “offered unlimited possibilities.”

Saying that it is essential to capture the interest of the young, he demonstrated how far space had penetrated culture. A Google survey, according to the Augustine Report, has established that 79 percent of responders wanted to keep the International Space Station functioning. He took this as a positive sign that enquiry and wonder are still at a high level in the rising generation.

Answering the challenge of space as an unnecessary expense, he said that in 1958 space programs were 100 percent government funded. By 2010 that had dropped; programs are now 71 percent supported by commercial services (telecoms satellites for example) and the commercial infrastructure that supports them.

Taking up the lower expense of spaceflight to the taxpayer, Director of NASA’s Ames Space Research Center Pete Worden admitted to being the originator of the corporate exhortation — “better, faster, cheaper.” In charge of the development and launching of small satellites, he said that “small satellites can answer big questions” at much reduced costs. He gave the example of the Keppler mission which has succeeded in finding Earth-like planets that are possible candidates for supporting life. It was, he said, a small satellite, costing just $78 million, that had found water in the shadow of a moon crater proving conclusively that water exists on the moon. A typical large satellite launch could easily cost $100 million.

Nano-satellites, very small and inexpensive devices that can actually hitch a free ride on bigger launch vehicles by occupying vacant space, “will allow substantial international cooperation” as countries with restricted budgets or fledgling space programs would be able to engage in space sciences.

Worden also described the development of modular satellites that used standard modules each with a specific function and that could be assembled relatively cheaply in different configurations to customer needs.

It was, however, professor Peter Michelson, director of the WW Hanson Experimental Physics Laboratory at Stanford and leader of the Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope mission, who sounded a word of caution. From his experience, he said, a major challenge with international cooperation in space programs is the cooperation and coordination between agencies and that it is essential that there is a shared ownership of interest, well-defined areas of responsibility and an understanding that all parties share the successes and, especially, problems. The success of the Fermi mission showed that it could be achieved, however.

It took Gregory Schmidt, deputy director of the Ames NASA Research Center, to refocus the conference on our own near-Earth object — the moon.

“Not only is it a great educational tool — because you can see it — but it has all sorts of things to offer,” he told delegates. Not least among these is that it originally formed when a Mars-size object hit the Earth early in its formation and so is a repository of the Earth’s early geology, but because of its lack of atmosphere is a record of meteor and asteroid impact stretching back to the time of the Earth’s formation.

Of particular interest, he said, was the far side of the moon. Radio telescopes on Earth are hampered by interference on the electromagnetic spectrum from electronic devices. “The far side of the moon, precisely because it has none of this, would be the ideal place to set up a radio telescope to probe into the heart of the universe,” he said.

It fell to Haitem Al-Twaijry, director of Space Research at KACST, to intrigue the audience with a high-profile media concern. His detailed and learned presentation on asteroids and the history of major impacts on Earth left none in doubt of their life-threatening potential. He said that they are also potential sources of huge wealth — for example one estimate put the potential value in minerals of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter at $100 billion for every inhabitant of Earth. The only real problem is accessing it.

Al-Twaijry described some of the methods of diverting the approach of asteroids that will cross the Earth’s orbit and present a possibility of collision. Explosives, gravity tractors and physical impact to canon them into other orbits all featured in his presentation.

But the abiding memory of the day was his detailed review of one proposed technique. Paint the asteroid black on the equatorial line. This, science says, will increase radiation and push the asteroid gradually onto a new trajectory.

With a conclusion of the conference’s official business sessions, the evening saw an open discussion with students led by Prince Sultan bin Salman on the participation of the Kingdom in the International Space Program.