The Worst Thing on Mars is Powdered Milk

Hemani Kalucha (bottom of image above) recently became the second member of our group to put in a tour of service at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, USA (the other being former PVL MSc Eric Shear). She shares her experience and some great photos below.

by Hemani Kalucha

Sitting on top of the North Ridge at 3 pm on a Saturday, I experienced, for the first time, a real “deafening silence”. I was 200 metres above the Utah desert, and I could see nothing but miles of reddish sand until the horizon in every direction. It was a peaceful moment that marked the end of our two week rotation at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), an analogue facility in the middle of the Utah desert. Our crew was made up of six members – Maria Grulich (Commander), Luis Monge (Engineer), Jess Todd (Greenhab Officer), Me (Journalist), Rawan Alshammari (Doctor), and Ghanim Aloitabi (Astronomer). Together, it was our job to live and work as astronauts on Mars. 

Putting That Space Engineering Degree To Use

Many of our projects are muti-faceted. The MAPLE project, being led by PDF Christina Smith, is no exception. Primarily tasked to couple a CW laser with an all-sky camera, this work also includes side investigations, such as the exploration of HDR imaging led by PVL MSc Trainee Alex Innanen.

by Alex Innanen

For the past… perhaps longer than I would like to admit, I have been working on building a setup for an HDR imaging system using a DMD. That’s a lot of acronyms right off the bat so let’s break that down.

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range – that is, in imaging, achieving a greater range of luminosity values. Have you ever tried to take a picture with a mix of bright light and shade? The light tends to overpower the shaded regions, and you can’t see details within them. Take this picture of my office I took with my phone: you can’t see anything inside the office because of the sheer brightness of the window. Conversely, if I try to resolve the inside of the office, the scene through the window gets washed out. HDR imaging (HDRI) techniques can help us see both!

The strength of Ancient Mars’ Greenhouse Effect

Over the past couple of years, Paul Godin has been leading an effort in my group to understand the warming potential of the ancient martian atmosphere, above he shows experimentally-derived values for CO2-CH4 CIA as measured using the Canadian Light Source. He just submitted a paper on this topic which is now under review.
 

By Dr. Paul Godin

We’ve discussed in previous blogposts about our group’s effort to better constrain the early Mars atmosphere by taking measurements at the Canadian Light Source (http://york-pvl.blogspot.com/2018/11/searching-for-liquid-water-on-mars-at.html and http://york-pvl.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-continuing-adventures-at-canadian.html). As a quick summary, geological features on the surface of present-day Mars imply that there was once liquid water on the surface. To have liquid water on the surface, a sufficiently strongly absorbing atmosphere is required to produce enough of a greenhouse effect to warm the surface above freezing temperatures. Since most ancient Mars modeling suggest that Mars did not have a dense atmosphere, the remaining possibility is that the gas composition of an ancient Mars atmosphere could be strongly absorbing. One idea was collision induced absorption (CIA) between CO2 and H2 molecules, and CO2 and CH4 molecules, could provide enough absorption to warm ancient Mars. The goal of the CLS trips was to experimentally measure this CIA effect to determine if it was as strong as predicted.

Question Time (Part 2)

Something us scientists love to do is to take questions from the public about the work that we do and the topics that we study. I know that when I give a public talk, the Q&A is almost always my favorite part. This week, Christina holds another such session after the success of her previous post on this topic.

by Dr. Christina Smith

A few months ago (or maybe longer than a few…) I did a post called “Answer me these questions… five?” where I answered questions that people had asked me on social media. Its my turn again to do a post and I thought why not reprise this topic as it was quite fun the first time!

So, without further ado…