Getting the Amazing Opportunity to do Outreach with the Ontario Science Center

As part of our work on the Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science's ERA program, we've been developing innovative ways to communicate rover operations to the public. Earlier this month we tried out a test of one of our events at the Ontario Science Center. Leading the charge was PVL MSc Charissa Campbell.

by Charissa Campbell

In my opinion, science outreach is one of the most important aspects of any public program. You get to teach people of all ages and can even encourage them to pursue science as a career. So, when our research group first discussed putting together an outreach program for high school students that would be like mission operations for a Martian rover, I was immediately on-board. Some of us are currently members of Curiosity’s mission operations team (including myself) so it was great to take that knowledge and adapt it. I’ve personally engaged in outreach programs in the past and still do on a regular basis with my young siblings, so I was excited to also be a part of this, especially in more of a leadership role. 

If you are curious about our May 2017 outreach program, you can check out Brittney’s great blog post: http://york-pvl.blogspot.ca/2017/05/analog-rover-missions-more-than-just.html. This was only the first of two successful runs in 2017 with varying levels of complexity. We knew changes had to be made from the first run, so we decided to broaden the roles and meetings to ensure participants didn’t get lost in the complexity. This did not, however, fix all of the issues from the first run.  Instead, we now had the opposite problem: the roles had become too broad. In the end, we identified the major problems with the program and made edits averaging the first and second run. Now in 2018, we have successfully completed a third run with volunteers at the Ontario Science Centre.

How to make your own moon

In the first installment of 2018, our resident experimental PDF discusses retrofitting our planetary simulation cryovacuum chamber to simulate a nearby environment: that found in the permanently shadowed regions of our own moon. An image of our first run can be seen above.

By Dr. Paul Godin

One of the experiments happening at the PVL is called the Aniu Investigation, which has the goal of testing to see if frost could be detected in shadowed regions of the moon using reflected starlight (Lyman-alpha radiation, 121 nm). Unfortunately, the moon is quite far away from York University and expensive to get to, so we’ll need to simulate the moon in the lab.

To build a moon in the lab we’ll need the following “ingredients”:

1.     A stainless-steel vacuum chamber.

2.     A vacuum pump.

3.     Liquid nitrogen.

4.     A “cold finger” heat exchanger

5.     Simulated lunar regolith

6.     A UV lamp.

Once we have all the above we can start building our moon. First, is to attach the vacuum pump to the vacuum chamber. The pump will remove the air from the chamber, allowing us to simulate the vacuum of space. Pumping out the air also has some other benefits from an experimental side; the lack of air in the chamber increases its thermal stability since there’s no longer a medium in which heat can be conducted/convected through the chamber. This means that temperature fluctuations in the lab are unlikely to be felt inside the chamber. A second benefit is air absorbs Lyman-alpha radiation quite strongly, meaning if we left the air inside the chamber the “starlight” would be absorbed before it even hit the surface of our moon.