Ab astris ad terram, ad astra iterum

This week, a familiar face returns to the lab with Alex Innanen's first post as a MSc student. You may recall a few years ago she worked with us looking at images from Mars' north polar cap. That work has since been published with more outputs on the way. In the interim she chose to pursue more terrestrial projects before returning with us to the stars.

By Alex Innanen

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a graduating student must be in want of an answer to the question: “what’s next?” If I had a dime for every time I heard some variation on that question leading up to my graduation, I would have been able to finance my undergrad. I am here to tell you – it is okay to not know. It’s normal! You will figure it out and it will be fine. Feeling reassured? Or just skeptical? That’s also normal, but trust me, reader, I have plenty of experience with Not Knowing. 

When I was in my final year of my undergraduate, I was volunteering sporadically with PVL and also worrying excessively about what I was going to do once this whole school thing was over. Could I do more school? Maybe, but I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do more school in, and also I was very tired from being in school more or less constantly since the age of five. Some people don’t burn out from school – I did. This is also (say it with me) perfectly fine and normal. At any rate, I was rapidly approaching the end of the school year with very little direction. All I had was a summer job, working in the civil engineering department in a geotechnical lab until the end of August. Or so I thought… 

How to install a half-ton optical table

I suspected we might have bitten off more than we could chew when I saw the forklift head around the corner to the loading dock (below). The point was driven home for me as the suspension of the truck visibly rose once our new optical table was extracted. Nevertheless, with the help of some good friends in Lassonde, Environment & Climate Change Canada, the Petrie Machine Shop and over in Physics and Astronomy, everything managed to make it to the lab in one piece! Above, PhD Candidate Giang poses with the completed setup. We will be getting some excellent use out of this precision piece of equipment for years to come!

By Dr. Paul Godin

The PVL recently acquired a brand-new optical table; this new piece of equipment will help us with our projects for characterizing planetary surfaces and atmospheres. What makes an optical table unique is that it is incredibly stable; suppressing vibrations to minimize the impacts on experiments. One of the ways it achieves this is by weighing almost 1000 lbs. While this immense weight is great for experiments, it does make installing a table tricky, especially when it’s too large to fit through the lab door! 

More details and lots of photos beneath the cut...

From Spacetime to Space and From Plasma to Planets: The Journey to a Master’s Degree

This week, we have an innaugural post from a new student here at the PVL. Solomon Segal joins us from Queen's University and shares his journey with you below.

By Solomon Segal

The path to finding work one enjoys is never an easy one, however this should never deter people from trying! As an undergraduate student I knew I wanted to do a Master’s degree, but I also knew I could only do one if the research was captivating. This posed a dilemma seeing as my undergraduate research experiences left me with varying views in their respective fields and made me wonder what research I would truly enjoy?

If you yourself are an undergraduate student reading this and commiserate with these sentiments, then you might be interested to hearing how a student like myself ended up working in the Planetary Volatiles Lab.

As a high school student applying to various universities for physics, I wish someone had pulled me aside and told me that some physics faculties concentrate more funding to certain areas and thus many professors focus on specific fields. Granted, with my high school physics knowledge I barely knew how to solve F=ma let alone comprehend what these fields were, but it would have been nice to be aware of this fact.

Rover Exploration Challenge: The Boardgame for Outreach

As part of our work under my Early Career Researcher Award grant from the Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science, we have been developing outreach materials to share the excitement of space exploration with the public. We've previously run two events at the Ontario Science Centre and now we have created a home version. While you won't find this board game in stores, we've made the game freely available to all. Just download the template, print it out, assemble and enjoy.

by Dr. Christina Smith

So as you may have already read, we here at the PVL have put on an event known as the Rover Exploration Challenge, where members of the public take the role of scientists on a rover mission to the  unknown planet of “Arduinna”, using the “rover” to explore the planet to find out whether it is habitable. If you want to find more about the Rover Exploration Challenge event, take a look at Charissa’s blog post http://york-pvl.blogspot.com/2018/10/a-successful-rover-exploration-challenge.html

After successfully doing this challenge a few times and for a range of audiences, John posed the question of whether there was any way we could package it into something people could take home and play themselves, like a board game. I grew up playing board games with my family and friends (everything from standard kids board games all the way up to seriously long games – and yes I used to lose those a lot) so I took the lead on the conversion.

So, what’s it like researching in the PVL!?

This week Ariella reflects on her time spent with the lab over the summer as a TEPS fellow. Above, she is pictured at the Lassonde Undergraduate Research Conference alongside Noah Stanton, another of our Summer Researchers. We wish her well as she enters into her final year of her undergraduate career and sets her sights on what lies beyond!

By Ariella Sapers

Over the last 4-5 months I’ve spent my time being an undergraduate researcher for the Planetary Volatiles Laboratory at York University, which was a huge change to my previous research experience.

I’m used to staring at stars in my previous research projects - but now, it was all about Mars! For starters, I did not realize the amount of incredible Mars research that is done in this lab ... and worldwide. I was very naive before I started - as my head had always been stuck in astrophysics research – so I didn’t realize the cool research that’s conducted in the Planetary Sciences! Before this, the only experience I had was a Planets and Planetary Systems course taught at York University by Dr. John Moores, which is what intrigued me in the first place.

This research experience didn’t just let me work in a cool lab ... I got to attend two conferences throughout the summer. The first was the TEPS conference. This conference was the Technologies for (Exo) Planetary Sciences which allowed all award holders to come for a three-day conference. TEPS is an NSERC CREATE Program that allows undergrads, masters, PHD and Post Docs to be trainees. I was lucky enough to have received one of these awards which officially made me a TEPS Trainee! This meant I got to attend the TEPS conference and meet a lot of Planetary Scientists. The vast amount of research being conducted on Mars, exoplanets and the moon is incredible. It also showed me what masters students and PhD students are working on - since I’m close to graduating, it was nice to see the endeavours of graduate students.  

Life within Ice

A beautiful shot of micro-penitentes on Mt Rainier near Seattle, WA as photographed by Mark Sanderson in 2006 ( CC3.0, license and original file and description here ). What I love about this image is the lack of anything familiar that could indicate the scale of the features - aside from the notes from the photographer. They could be cm across or km! This is a familiar feeling from looking at images that come back from spacecraft that challenge our preconceptions. Today, PhD student Giang reflects on his recently published work trying to understand whether such textures could arise on Mars and if so, how big would they be and in what directions would they be orientated? Such models are needed to help us interpret what we see.

By Giang Nguyen

Perhaps it’s a mental coping mechanism from the summer heat, but I’ve been thinking a lot about ice. The behaviour of water ice across the solar system is studied by many people in the PVL group, and I am no exception. I’ve been looking at how water affects the atmosphere since my undergrad where I studied terrestrial weather systems. Later, the work for my Master’s consisted of surveying the icy conditions of the Martian north polar cap to look for surface-atmosphere interaction. Finally, with my PhD well on its way, I’ve been tasked with studying the atmospheric conditions of possible icy worlds beyond our solar system.

As you might guess, water is somewhat an important volatile for the propagation of life on Earth. Since there isn’t another planetary body within the solar system that is like Earth, it is helpful to look at the most extreme conditions Earth has to offer for clues. From my introductory paragraph, you’re probably thinking that I’m going to talk about Earth’s arctic polar conditions but that won’t be the case. The geography of interest here is actually high-altitude deserts, chiefly the Atacama desert located within South America’s Andes mountains.

Seasonally Shadowed Regions on the Moon: Adding Greater Intrigue to the Lunar Poles

This week, Jacob Kloos, a PhD Student here at PVL discusses exciting new research he has just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Planets. In his work, Jake found that the famous permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) are surrounded by seasonally shadowed regions (SSRs) which turn out to have important implications for the lunar water exosphere and the amount of water available in different locations at different times of the year - they're not what you would expect! Above, one of the key findings of the research: maps of the lunar poles showing these SSRs.

By Jacob Kloos

Over the past few decades, the north and south polar regions of Earth’s moon have garnered much attention within the field of planetary science. In addition to becoming prime targets for robotic and human exploration, the lunar poles have also been the subject of an increasing number of scientific studies. What makes these areas so intriguing for science and exploration? The answer lies in their unique illumination environments.

Unlike the Earth which rotates on an axis tilted 23.5 degrees from the ecliptic normal, the spin axis of the Moon is tilted only 1.5 degrees, ensuring that the Sun is always near the horizon for an observer at one of the poles. The low axial tilt of the Moon, coupled with its heavily heavily cratered surface, produce complex illumination patterns at high latitudes, giving rise to extremes in both sunlight and shadow: areas that are high in elevation may experience near-continuous sunlight, while some low-lying basins are in permanent shadow. Although no regions on the Moon (or indeed in the solar system) have yet been discovered which can claim the ethereal title of “peaks of eternal light,” some regions, like the rim of Shackleton crater near the South Pole, remain bathed in sunlight for 80-90% of the year. Such areas are attractive sites to send a solar-powered rover.

The permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), which are in many cases directly adjacent to the near-continuously illuminated regions, are not only interesting from an exploration perspective, but also from a scientific perspective. As a direct consequence of not receiving direct sunlight, and because the Moon lacks a substantial atmosphere to sequester and transport heat, permanently shadowed regions are among the coldest places in the solar system, enabling them to trap and store volatiles such as water across geologic periods of time. These volatile deposits constitute a valuable resource for scientific study as they would be well preserved and largely protected from chemical weathering; as such they could provide valuable insight into the delivery of water to the inner solar system - in particular to the Earth-Moon system. As for exploration, water could be extracted in-situ by future explorers, and could provide a source of potable drinking water, breathable air or perhaps even rocket fuel if broken down into its constituent components.