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…

Black holes don’t suck!

One of the advantages I feel we have to offer at the PVL is the diversity of experience of our individual members. I purposely recruit Astronomers, Engineers, Geologists, Physicists, Atmospheric Scientists or really anyone who has the interest and is holding a piece of the puzzle we call planetary science. Last weekend, Christina Smith spent some time going back to her roots as part of a panel hosted by a good friend of the lab, Jesse Rogerson of the Ingenium in Ottawa.

By Dr. Christina Smith

I may or may not have mentioned this in a previous blog post, but prior to joining the Planetary Volatiles Laboratory at YorkU, my research was in stellar astrophysics (my PhD and a short post-doc), primarily studying what small dying stars were made of and surrounded by (they have a tendency to shed bits of themselves all over the place). In fact prior to that, I dabbled in theoretical particle physics for a while (my undergraduate Masters’ project – simulating interactions of top quarks at the Large Hadron Collider to try and infer something about the physics of extra dimensions) but that’s a story for another day...

Anyway, a few weeks ago I was approached to be part of a Royal Canadian Institute of Science panel discussing back holes, which though not related to what I do now, is something I am familiar with in the grand scheme of stellar evolution from my PhD and short post-doc. Specifically, they wanted someone nerdy enough to talk about black holes as they are portrayed in popular culture. I am definitely nerdy enough and this was a really cool and interesting topic to talk about (and gave an excellent excuse for a lot of evenings spent in front of my TV binge watching sci-fi movies and TV shows).

I also figured this was a good topic to chat about – a tad outside the norm but I figured that was ok. So, before I delve into the world of black holes in popular culture, I’m going to digress a little into Black Holes 101.

The Rover Exploration Challenge Outreach Program – Want to participate?

Over the past two summers, the PVL has run a youth outreach event at the Ontario Science Centre as part of our work with the Government of Ontario's Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science (now part of the Ministry of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade). Leading the charge has been PhD Candidate, Charissa Campbell. Today we make those materials broadly available, as we had previously done with the associated board game.

By Charissa Campbell

Every summer our research group demonstrates the Rover Exploration Challenge at the Ontario Science Centre. Over the course of a day, participants plan observations for a simulated rover to achieve certain goals for their respective science group. With the plentiful experience in mission operations within our lab we were able to successfully create this outreach program to educate anyone on the true conditions needed to maintain and do science with a rover on another planet.

A new opportunity rose this year for the Challenge when we were invited to showcase it at the Space Educators Institute (SEI) at Western University. SEI educates Ontario science teachers on astronomy related topics. This was the perfect opportunity for us to take our Challenge further and apply it in classrooms. We were able to modify the program so teachers could take the Challenge back to the class and educate their students on rover mission operations. Since this package has been set-up to be shared easily, we wanted to try to extend the offer to anyone that is interested. This blog post will explain how you could run the Rover Exploration Challenge for friends, families or in a classroom.

On the supersonic meteorology of exoplanets

 

As Giang Nguyen gets deeper into his PhD, the atmospheric conditions he is analyzing just keep getting more and more extreme! Above, the subject of his latest project: looking at winds on a ultra-short period planet which orbits incredibly close to its parent star.

By Giang Nguyen

As I progress with my PhD research hoping to graduate in a couple of years, I delve deeper and deeper into the field of exoplanets. No longer working on Mars, I now model the atmospheres of distant planets as well as hypothetical planets yet to be discovered. Continuing my work from my internship in the UK where I started with modelling the thin SO2 atmosphere of Io, I now expand my model to analyze icy-Earths and lava planets.

For the icy-Earth cases, I inferred what kind of atmosphere would arise from a water dominated world with sub-freezing surface temperatures (50 K - 270 K). With an atmosphere generated from the sublimation of ice/frost at the surface on the dayside, this creates a pressure gradient which causes the wind to blow from the dayside to the nightside. To give an example, one water-vapour dominant atmosphere has a maximum pressure of 0.45 kPa (0.4% of the Earth’s atmosphere) where winds reach up to 950 m/s. With winds going much faster than Mach 1 and there’s precipitation too! It’s rather exciting to think that somewhere in the universe there’s a blizzard blowing at twice the speed of sound.