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.

Space from Across the Pond

 Our newest recruit, MSc Candidate Hemani Kalucha, introduces herself in this post reflecting back on what she did this past summer before joining the PVL.

By Hemani Kalucha

Last summer, I had the opportunity to work at the European Space Agency centre in Leiden, The Netherlands. There are a few charming eccentricities about this place that really define the Dutch experience. To start off, the Dutch bike everywhere. By this I mean, the town of Leiden is only a few km square, practically the size of a university campus if you will, and walking around is a game of constantly dodging the wave of ever-present bikers whizzing past you. The undeniably flat and uniform landscape here is a gift, and they use it well. 

They are also the most skilled bikers I have ever seen. The first few times my friend and I tried to bike to work, we were shamefully slow compared to the locals. At my most embarrassing, a guy with no hands on his bike handles, not looking at the road, texting on his phone, pedaled faster than me with ease. It has been surprising to learn the impressive range of a bike. Briefly, I have seen someone roll along their suitcase while biking, walk their horse while biking, carry two other people on their bike, connect two bikes to carry a wooden panel, you get the idea. 

As a result of all this biking, Holland has some of the most expensive and interesting bike paths in the world. From the few that I’ve tried out, one was a bike trail through sand dunes and a network of old war bunkers called the Atlantic Wall, one involved biking over a dam with the bright blue sea on both sides, and another used to be a NATO air base runway! The Dutch love their boats as much as they love their bikes. The maze of canals that line the streets of Leiden are forever filled with boat picnics, completely ignorant of my North American perception of a work schedule. I say this a little out of jealousy, but mostly out of respect for their approach to work life balance. 

How far can a golfer hit a drive on Mars… and the Moon?

Click Here to view an animated version of the figure above!

This week, undergrad Noah Stanton takes on a burning question in comparative planetology: how would a change of venue to another planet or Moon affect one's golf game? Read on for his deep-dive! Reminds me a little of some of the tangents I followed in my earlier years!

by Noah Stanton

Have you ever been watching golfers playing on Pebble Beach and thought, ‘What would happen if he or she took that shot on Mars or the Moon?’. I’d assume no, but I am here to tell you this important information. In order to figure out a way to model a golfer’s shot let’s start somewhere we know a little bit better, Earth. 

Modelling a golf shot involves bio-mechanics, aerodynamics, elasticity of the golf ball, etc., which is maybe outside the abilities of a mere blogpost. I will need to make some assumptions, focus on some parts of the swing, and ignore the rest. The two modeled parts of the swing will be:

1)    The initial contact and acceleration due to the club-head hitting the ball
2)    The flight of the ball after the initial contact

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.

50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing Blog Post

This week, PVL Undergraduate Researcher Ariella Sapers reflects on a significant anniversary for space exploration: the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landings. Above, a photo of a plaque like the one left on the lunar surface by Apollo 11. And yes, folks, that is Richard Nixon's signature on the bottom (to my knowledge the only politician whose name is written on a monument off the Earth) - it took the efforts of three different administrations to pull off this event.

By Ariella Sapers

With the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing just passing, I thought it was only appropriate to dedicate a blog all about the event and the celebrations that occurred here at York University!

On July 20th 1969, three brave men, Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz’’ Aldrin, and Michael Collins took a leap of faith as part of NASA’s Apollo 11 lunar mission and headed to the moon. The Apollo Lunar Module, The Eagle, landed on the moon at 20:17 UTC in which Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the surface of the moon on July 21st at 02:56 UTC. With this walk, human beings had officially walked on the surface of a planetary body that wasn’t Earth. 

The Wonderful Life as Interim Observatory Director of the Allan I. Carswell Observatory

This past year while I was in Australia, PVL PhD student Indiana Jones (I mean, Charissa Campbell - see the photo below the cut below) took on a very unusual TAing assignment in the Department of Physics. But she handled the assignment with grace, growing into the role. She returns to the lab with a new skill-set that I have no doubt will help her reach her graduate student goals.

By Charissa Campbell  

From January till July 2019 I had the great honour of being the Interim Observatory Director of the campus observatory, known as the Allan I. Carswell Observatory. The great Paul Delaney was on sabbatical for 6 months and needed a temporary replacement to maintain the observatory while he was gone. I immediately jumped on the idea when Paul asked me as not only would I gain valuable outreach and leadership experience, but it would allow me the ability to work with telescopes, always a passion of mine.

The observatory houses two telescopes, a 40 cm and 60 cm. This size describes the diameter of the primary mirror in the telescope. The bigger the mirror, the brighter are the objects that you observe, allowing you to see dimmer things that are often farther away. We’ve been lucky enough to be able to get a new telescope with a 1 m mirror, the largest on a Canadian campus (https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/university-new-telescope-research-1.4287794). It was supposed to be installed December 2018 (before Paul left on sabbatical), but was unfortunately delayed. This is common with important piece of equipment, especially of the astronomy related kind. I will admit that I was a little relieved that the 1 m was delayed until Paul got back as I would have been significantly busier as the telescope would have been in high demand for tours, media, etc. Keep an eye out for when the new telescope is ready! For more information on the different events the observatory does, feel free to check out their website: http://observatory.info.yorku.ca

Dr. Godin’s TEPS Internship or How I learned to stop Physicsing and Love Micro-Biology

PVL PDF Paul Godin recently returned from his TEPS internship at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. It was a productive trip and he made many friends along the way, including the character over his shoulder to the right in the picture above.

By Dr. Paul Godin

Many members of the PVL receive funding from the Technologies for Exo-planetary Science (TEPS) NSERC CREATE program (http://teps.science.yorku.ca/). TEPS is more than just funding for the group, it also provides opportunities for go on international research internships. This past spring, I was accepted for an internship at the Space Life Sciences Lab (SLSL) at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The SLSL was originally built as a collaboration between NASA and the University of Florida to conduct biology-based experiments relevant to the space program. However, about 10 years ago NASA sold off their portion of the building to Space Florida, a state government agency responsible for promoting the space sector in Florida; the University of Florida portion remains. My internship was under one of these University of Florida professors, Dr. Andrew C. Schuerger. 

Andy’s lab focuses on planetary protection, which is insuring that missions to other planets don’t accidentally contaminate those worlds with terrestrial microbes. As such Andy’s lab conducts experiments testing the limits of bacterial survivability in extreme environments. The centerpiece of his lab is a state-of-the-art Mars simulation chamber, capable of recreating the temperature, atmosphere, and UV light conditions on Mars.

The Mars Global Dust Storm of 2018: how dusty was it really?

This past year we've been treated to a once-in-five-years event, a Global Dust Storm on Mars. Curiosity has had a front row seat and PVL PDF Christina has been right there, through it all: designing observations, acquiring images and analyzing them to see just how dusty everything gets in Gale. The TLDR? very very very dusty.

by Dr. Christina L. Smith

Some of the members of the Planetary Volatiles Laboratory are also members of the Science Operations Team via Prof. Moores’ Participating Scientist proposal (thanks NASA and the Canadian Space Agency!). As part of that we get to participate in operations roles (aka be part of the team that plans what the rover does on any given day – which is super cool in case you were wondering :) ). But also we get to use the data that comes back and, if the science case warrants it, propose new observations.

For me, that means monitoring the dust using images that we take using two different cameras. One is Curiosity’s Navigation Cameras (we call it “Navcam”) - not technically one of the science instruments as they are primarily for navigational and engineering uses. But, luckily for us, these cameras are also scientifically calibrated so we can happily use them for science! The other camera I use data from is Curiosity’s Mast Camera (we call it “Mastcam” - sense a theme here?) and that one is a colour imager so we get more information about the colour than with Navcam’s images as Navcam’s images are taken only in the reddish region of visible light. But Navcam is more sensitive than Mastcam, so they complement each other really nicely.

Is Pluto in Danger?

Spring is in the air. Aside from cherry blossoms, new leaves on the trees and rising temperatures (perhaps in some places, but apparently not Toronto), that means that we have new students in the lab. One of those new students is Ariella Sapers and she is starting off her work with us by diving right in with this article on Pluto. As you'll see from her article, it's definitely not springtime for Pluto. The image she has chosen, shown above (Credit: NASA, ESA and G. Bacon (STScI)) the artist gives a a distinctively cold cast to their view of this dwarf planet and it's large moon Charon from the surface of one of the outer-lying moons.

By Ariella Sapers

I’m one of the many people that strongly believe Pluto needs to become a planet again. Even though the three characteristics that define a planet  (is in orbit around the Sun, has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape), and has cleared its orbital pathway) make logical sense, there is no real logic needed for the Pluto lovers out there who are mad with this decision. Ever since Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, it has been a beloved member of our Solar System. That is until 2006 when Pluto officially was demoted to a “Dwarf Planet,” due to the fact that it does not clear its orbital pathway. With that being said, there are mysteries and wonders about Pluto that are still being discovered to this day.

As we know, New Horizons flew by Pluto July 14th 2015 making it the first spacecraft ever to explore Pluto. I couldn’t have been the only one who woke up extra early to watch this flyby happen and I couldn’t have been the only one amazed by the images that we received on Earth. These images were breathtaking: being able to see an object 4.67 billion miles away from Earth in detail was quite an accomplishment for the New Horizons team. It was a huge leap for science as we would now be able to understand and learn more about Pluto’s atmosphere. 

The Continuing Adventures at the Canadian Light Source

This past February, a team from PVL once again descended on the Canadian Light Source (CLS), pictured above, to learn more about the conditions that prevailed in the atmosphere of early Mars and maybe even to learn something that could help current-day orbiters understand their results.

By Charissa Campbell

Recently, some of the PVL team traveled back to the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon to perform more experiments at the Canadian Light Source (CLS). Our first trip was discussed by project lead, Dr. Paul Godin in a previous PVL blog post (http://york-pvl.blogspot.com/2018/11/searching-for-liquid-water-on-mars-at.html). Unfortunately our U of T member (Tyler Wizenberg) could not attend this trip because he was traveling to the arctic for experiments at the same time. To fill his shoes, PVL PhD candidate Giang Nguyen tagged along.

For some background information, the purpose of these experiments is to better understand how liquid water could have existed on the surface of early Mars. Currently, Mars atmospheric models have not been able to show the surface temperature rising above 0°C. However, abundant evidence of erosion by water has been seen from orbit and there are surface geological experiments pointing towards liquid water having been present on the surface (https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4398). 

If water erosion is evident then there must be another explanation for warming in the ancient Martian atmosphere that current atmospheric models cannot explain. This is where our experiment comes in: looking at the collision-induced absorption (CIA) of greenhouse gases to test a theory from Wordsworth et al. (https://doi.org/10.1002/2016GL071766) that these gases might provide additional atmospheric absorption not currently included in models that would allow surface temperatures to rise. If our experiments agree with Wordsworth's models, it may be another piece to the puzzle towards understanding water and early Mars.

Answer me, these questions... five?

I can tell you that as Scientists, we get plenty of questions from all over, in fact learning how to field such questions and to get someone an answer (even if you don't already know!) is a big part of the job. This week, Christina, pictured above, takes some time away from her mission control work to answer some common questions in this space.

By Dr. Christina Smith

This time for my blog post, I thought I’d try a slightly different tack to usual. I often find that I get questions when in social situations about science-y or space-y or astronomy-y... things. So, I thought I’d open up the floor on social media to Solar System questions which I would then answer (or attempt to answer) in this blog post. And here we go!

P.S. In the discussion below, I have taken lots of information from papers and sources rather than pulling the information out of my own brain so the references are there in brackets and refer to the full links at the end in case you want to take a gander!

P.P.S. this was quite fun to do and I might do it again, so if you have any questions add them in the comments :)

Dive into the Deep Space Network

This week, MSc student Brittney Cooper examines the Deep Space Network, a key asset for Planetary Science. Above, you can see a screenshot of the live DSN page, on what we now know to be the penultimate planned attempt to contact Opportunity – a tip of the hat to an amazing rover mission and its team. 

by Brittney Cooper

I know I’m quite behind the times with this but I recently stumbled upon the live Deep Space Network (DSN) page called “DSN NOW,” and I’ve been mildly obsessed with it ever since, keeping the page open as a permanent tab in my browser. Getting to see cool things happen in real time definitely is part of the appeal, but my involvement in MSL mission operations has also allowed me to develop a deeper appreciation for this kind of thing… definitely more than I ever had before. 

Being a part of MSL mission planning has you navigating and working around communications passes when satellites orbit overhead the rover, meaning that mission scientists have to manage the data volumes of observations so that necessary data can be down for the next planning day, and the lower priority stuff can trickle down later on.

AGU 100th Fall Meeting

 The pause in blog posts here is entirely my fault - I've been on sabbatical travelling in the South Pacific and have a backlog of three to post, so look for even more tales of trials, tribulations and triumphs from the members of PVL in the coming days! We kick off the new year with Dr. Paul Godin's trip to the 2018 AUGFM. Above is Paul's photo of the AGU 100 sign at that Meeting.

by Dr. Paul Godin

The fall meeting of the American geophysical union (AGU) is one of the largest scientific conferences in the world, attracting over 10,000 attendees. This year they celebrated their 100th meeting; and it was my first time attending. The fall meeting was traditionally held in San Francisco, but due to on going renovations of the San Francisco Moscone Convention Centre, the meeting has been moving around America. AGU 100 was held in Washington D.C., so while I didn’t get to enjoy the warmth of San Francisco, I did get to enjoy visiting the American Capitol (luckily the meeting was before the shutdown, so everything was open for tourists at that time).