The Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow will host four lectures on the Arctic and Antarctica. Anyone can attend by registering on the museum’s website and obtaining a free ticket on the mos.ru website. Every lecture will also be streamed online.

The lectures are part of the Time of Trailblazers educational program about the Earth. Outstanding geophysicists and geographers, travelers and documentary film makers will address audiences. In all, 12 free lectures are scheduled for Thursdays, every third week of the month, before the year is out.

The first Arctic lecture is scheduled for February 16. Traveler Vadim Mamontov who organizes tours to the North Pole will talk about his trips to the Russian Arctic, the specifics of visiting the extreme north, and he will offer tips on how to embrace the uninviting climate.

The next lecture is set for March 16, with journalist and documentary film maker Olga Stefanova being the main speaker. Stefanova, who has taken part in seven expeditions to the South Pole, even spent the winter in Antarctica. She produced four documentaries about the coldest icy continent. Stefanova will talk about how to survive there. She will discuss the working and living conditions of polar explorers and how documentary films are shot during the eternal winter.

On April 13, aviator and space technology tester Dmitry Stepanyuk will describe how to prepare for difficult ordeals, how to travel around the world and how to launch a balloon for studying the Earth from the Arctic. Stepanyuk has tried to enroll in the cosmonaut squad three times and has trained for space missions.  

Geophysicist Ruslan Zhostkov, Chief Research Associate with the Schmidt Institute of Physics of the Earth, will meet with the museum’s visitors on May 18. He will discuss the steamship Chelyuskin that sank in 1934 and the specifics of the structure of Arctic soils. In 2020, Zhostkov made an important discovery when locating a fissure in the terrestrial crust on the bottom of Yenisei Bay. The scientist received a prize from the Russian Geographical Society for his work.

Vladimir Minligareyev, Deputy Director for Research at the Academician Fyodorov Institute of Applied Physics, will discuss methods for compiling solar weather forecasts and for near-Earth space. The scientist will talk about his own contribution to establishing a new profession called space meteorology. The lecture is tentatively scheduled for June 15.

The program of lectures will be posted on the museum’s website and on social media networks.