Dame Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, space engineer and presenter of TV’s the Sky at Night, has an unusual retirement plan in mind – in the unlikely event that she will ever hang up her telescope.

Speaking at GH Live, Good Housekeeping’s annual festival of food, books and celebrity talks, she told the audience that she wants to head out into space – and she’s not coming back.

“My ultimate dream is retirement to Mars,” she told GH’s special projects editor Emma Justice.

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“Sometimes when people retire, they potter around the garden and that’s what my mum does. I want to potter around Mars.”

Sounds delightful, especially when she revealed that the temperature is like Antarctica and there’s not enough oxygen in the atmosphere to breathe and everything has to be grown in biospheres.

And there’s also another snag – there’s no coming back.

“The thing is,” said Dame Maggie, “It’s really expensive to send people and bring them back so it’s a one-way trip.”

In a fascinating talk that covered everything from Dame Maggie’s dyslexia, having her very own Barbie (that’s a Barbie made of her) and whether there’s life on other planets, she spoke about her dedication to her profession, even aged 14.

“At school I was a nerd. I used to watch the Sky at Night and listen to Patrick Moore talking about what you could see if you had a telescope,” she said. “As a child we were living in a council flat, we didn’t have much money and I bought a telescope from a shop and I got it home and it had plastic lenses and it was horrible. It just didn’t work at all.

“But then I was looking through a magazine and one of the local schools had telescope making classes and I went along, and I remember knocking on the door and going in and looking around the room and the average age of everyone was about 50 and white and male and I was a 14 year-old black kid. And I started making my own telescope.”

Something tells us Dame Maggie is going to be absolutely fine retiring to Mars.