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).

AGU managed to take advantage of being held in Washington and coordinated with the Smithsonian museums (Air and Space, African American History and Culture, Natural History, and American History) to have them all open after hours one night for conference attendees. I chose to visit the National Air and Space Museum, which is filled with full scale replicas of highlights of air and space travel throughout history.

 Lobby of the National Air and Space Museum.

But of course, the purpose of a scientifc conference isn’t just to enjoy the location, but to share ideas and research. Under the Planetary Sciences section, sessions were held on a variety of topics such as planetary surfaces and atmospheres, exo-planetary detections, laboratory analogues, comets, and future mission concepts. But there were also topical sessions, such as a session on lunar science which celebrated 50 years since the first Apolo mission, and another session focused on OSIRIS-Rex and its recent arrival at asteroids Ryugu and Bennu. AGU is such a large conference, that they also run a poster session at the same time as the oral presentations, so theres always something to see and learn. The posters are taken down at the end of each day and new ones are put up, so it’s important to visit the poster hall at least once a day.

For this conference, I was presenting a poster of our preliminary results from our research trip to the Canadian Light Source (http://york-pvl.blogspot.com/2018/11/searching-for-liquid-water-on-mars-at.html). This research sought to test a prediction made about the greenhouse effect caused by CO2-H2 and CO2-CH4 molecular complexes that may have aided in warming the surface of acient Mars. This work was well received by the attendees I talked to since it helps take a step towards solving the mystery of ancient Mars’ atmosphere. Our results so far confrim that there is absorption by the complexes which gets stronger at colder temperatures as perdicted, however the absorption strength appears to only be half as strong as predicted. 

Presenting my poster on collision-induced absorption of CO2-H2 and CO2-CH4 molecular complexes. 

There is still more work to be done on this project; in fact, we’re returning to the CLS at the end of February to take more measurements and expect to present our final results at the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston at the end of March.