Jack of All Trades, Doctor of Some

This week, our newly minted Doctor Innanen presents an essay in defence of the generalist. Once upon a time, all scientists were generalists, "natural philosophers," as they often styled themselves. Isaac Newton (pictured above examining the dispersal of light into the colours of the rainbow in John Adam Houston's illustration from 1870) was such a scientist, making contributions to mathematics, gravitation and optics, amongst other fields. But as knowledge accumulated, scientists became more and more specialized within increasingly narrow fields. Something I greatly enjoy about Planetary Science is that ours is an interdisciplinary field, borrowing and mixing from many different silos of science. 

 By Dr. Alex Innanen

We sometimes joke in PVL that when you come to the lab you will get a ton of projects thrown at you just to see what sticks. Sometimes, this will happen to you multiple times during your time here. Many of these projects stick, which is how you might end up like me – recently defending a PhD dissertation that included five (5) different projects. 

This is not always the way of doing things – you’ll often hear of PhD students with one large project or one specific area that they drill down into. Not so much in the PVL. We tend to end up more as jacks-of-all-trades. I certainly did – my dissertation ranged from martian clouds to analysing images of Newfoundland fogs to studying methane in the Canadian arctic. At least I (mostly) stuck to one planet (even my Earth-based work was used as a martian analogue). Some students in the lab end up defending on multiple planets in (or even outside of) the solar system.

For me, this gels with the way I like to work. There has been many a time when I’ve grown frustrated with the project I’m working on and have set it aside to chip away at another project. It also helps to keep things interesting. Getting bored of methane? Look at some clouds! Not the cloudy season? Plot eight Mars years’ worth of MCS temperature retrievals. 

I am like this outside of work too. I have many varied hobbies – knitting, gardening, baking, reading – that I tend to flip between depending on how I’m feeling. This is where I feel the jack of all trades, master of none adage really fits me. With all my hobbies and interests I feel like I know just enough to be dangerous. I’ll never be baking complex pastry creations or feeding myself entirely on the veggies I grow in my garden, but at least I have plenty to keep myself occupied and to relax with. 

This, I think, is where having a broad knowledge base can be useful. Even if I am not a master of all my areas of knowledge, those are still areas where I know things I may not have if I had just focused on a single area. In my work, I have a broader appreciation for and understanding of the martian atmosphere as a whole than if I had just, for instance, focused on clouds. I can also apply the deep knowledge that I do have in certain areas to others where my knowledge may be a little more surface level. This was certainly the case when I picked up Charissa’s work (linked above) analysing images of laser beams in the fog and in a laboratory setup. Because of my work looking at the scattering properties of martian clouds, I already had a lot of the baseline knowledge to pick up that project. 

But I do still have my knowledge gaps. There are things about martian clouds that I can’t tell you – for instance, I don’t really know much about the scattering properties of carbon dioxide clouds, except for in broad strokes. With methane, while I know much more now about plume variability, I don’t know a lot about methane transport within the martian atmosphere. A skill that I do feel I’ve gained from being a bit of a generalist, though, is how to find out what I need to know. Having covered such broad topics means I’ve also delved broadly into the literature and have had the opportunity to speak and work with a broad range of colleagues. I know who I’d go to if I needed to learn about methane transport in the martian atmosphere. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to answer my question, but they would likely be able to point me in the right direction. 

Part of this is certainly helped by my work on the Curiosity rover. As a member of the environmental science theme group on the rover, I’m working with other scientists who study everything from dust devils to oxygen abundance. We often share our results with each other, so I get to learn a bit of what everyone does. And I need to understand at least a bit of the science rationale behind our different observations, so that I can advocate properly for them when I’m adding them to a rover plan. 

I often joke that planetary science is five different sciences in a trench coat. Five may even be too low, with the amount of ground planetary science covers. Even just within PVL we dip into so many fields: molecular dynamics, seismology, atmospheric chemistry, astrobiology… Planetary science is a broad field, so even with my own broad background I’ve only sampled a small sliver of it. But that just means there’s plenty more out there to learn about!

Cleaning up the lab… finally!

 

 Whenever you are doing research, it's important to control the chaos. That could be keeping notes and reference papers organized, keeping track of simulations and parameters or the physical items that accumulate in any lab. This week, Kevin describes a major cleanup in our lab to keep entropy at bay for a little while longer.

by Kevin Axelrod

December 20, 2025 was finally the day. 

I have been at the PVL for over 2 years now, and while projects and some people have come and gone, one thing has always remained constant: our PVL lab room has looked like my bedroom when I was 7. Because we work in planetary sciences, we have a wide variety of equipment – from optical equipment to vacuum chamber components to flow tubing to spectrometers to regolith simulant to various chemicals. And that is before we get to all the non-science items in the lab, like books and files, as well as that big Venus globe! 

Keeping all these things organized is difficult, with so many different projects in and out of the lab. And at times, motivation to clean can ebb and flow, both for me and a lot of other people. But, on the week of December 15, just one week before I planned to leave town for the winter holiday, I decided that it was finally time to get down on it. 

It started when we needed to pack up our Martian Atmospheric Gas Evolution (MAGE) experimental breadboard spectrometer and send it back to our industrial partner, ABB. Abby and I had collected a pallet and ordered some bubble wrap and shrink film a few weeks prior, and on December 16 we put those materials to use (below). Shipping it out via LTL freight, which happened on December 19, only 2 days before I left for the holiday, was a significant step towards making the lab genuinely clean. This was not just because it had been sitting in there for a few weeks and was crowding our lab, but also in the process of shipping it out, we cleaned the lab upstairs (which belonged to a different group and was where we conducted most of our experimentation with this spectrometer).

Sending it out freed up a little bit of space on our optical table. Nonetheless, there was still a significant amount of optical equipment and other things lying out - tools strewn everywhere, old boxes/cardboard, tubing pieces from the spectrometer setup, etc. Even our chiller still contained ethylene glycol-based antifreeze from a project that occurred several months ago.  

It seemed like such a massive task that maybe we were beginning to accept the constant state of clutter. However, in many cases, constant clutter in a laboratory is a safety hazard, because it impedes the ability to conduct experiments in an organized fashion, and introduces issues like tripping and spilling hazards. So, on December 20, with my flight out of Toronto less than 24 hours away, I drank a cup of coffee, put in my earbuds, and somehow just got into the zone. I went through the lab putting away tools, taking apart optical equipment, wiping down counters, and throwing away scraps. I officially started a “Sharps” disposal box for our lab (we were starting to use glass pipettes on a regular basis) and also started and labeled waste disposal containers for the ethylene glycol. I also started a “Misc/I don’t know” box. This box is for all the things that are probably optical components, but I am not completely certain of exactly what they are or how they are used in optical setups. “Misc” is a Swiss-army knife of a lousy excuse for a box label, isn’t it? 

The lab is far from perfect so far. We still have 2 desks in the back of the room that are filled with miscellaneous computer equipment, the corner next to the door is overflowing with old poster tubes, and the floor could use a sweeping. But, when cleaning a lab, just like in conducting scientific experiments, progress is always incremental. I forgot to take a “Before” picture, but the “After” picture is at the top of this post. It will keep getting better, too.

Two final thoughts:

1. For what feels like the millionth time, our lab’s tape measure has gone missing. It might be time for another trip to our local hardware store.
2. During this day, I listened to a lot of what I would call “indie EDM” and a lot of the songs made me think of outer space.  We need to start making a PVL playlist/mixtape.

A Niche Conference?

 Being at a conference is like being thrown in the deep end; it's like drinking from a fire-hose; it's so unlike anything else in academia that water-based analogies just don't describe it accurately! It's an even more impactful experience if we're talking about your first scientific conference or your first time diving into a new field where unexpected connections can be made (e.g. discovering a new kind of Phoenix!). This week, Kevin shares his experience of attending a planetary science conference with a narrow scope: the 10th Mars Conference.

by Dr. Kevin Axelrod

Back in July of this past year (which is 2024, for those of you reading this in the future), the Planetary Volatiles Laboratory of York University traveled to Pasadena, California to attend and present at the 10th Mars Conference, hosted by Cal Tech and organized by USRA. This conference is not held every year, usually just once or twice a decade and therefore had some big-shot attendees from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and elsewhere. In total there were nearly a thousand participants.  Given that it talks about the study of a single non-Earth planet in the universe, I considered it to be niche - something that is highly specialized, highly technical, and extremely important to some but obscure to many.

So, coming from an Earth-oriented atmospheric sciences background (I got my Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences, and my research focused on bioaerosols) at first, I found it very difficult to fit in.  In just about every single conversation, (including with graduate students, who are supposedly “less experienced” than a postdoc) I found myself to be the least experienced participant. Typically, the other person did 99% of the talking, and, when responding to someone, I would just say stuff like “Okay”, “Hmm… interesting”, “I see”, “Alright, sounds good”, and “Cool”. I had difficulty contributing meaningful thoughts to conversations because I simply did not know enough.

I immediately noticed something in an opening plenary given by one of the keynote speakers, someone highly experienced that I would think of as a “big-shot.” In his presentation, he discussed a measurement technique and the missions that have performed these measurements. Then, in the question session, a member of the audience playfully ridiculed him for not including a shout-out of the Phoenix lander for a similar measurement that it had performed.  He genuinely apologized, stated that he is a “big fan” of the Phoenix lander, and that its exclusion was an oversight.

Meanwhile, I sat there thinking: “Hmmm… Phoenix.  To me, Phoenix is a city in Arizona, a bird in Harry Potter, and the mascot of a professional ultimate frisbee team based in Philadelphia (above).” Don’t ask me how I somehow know that third one. 

This was one of many instances where I felt like I should have signed up to be the guy filling the water coolers instead of an actual presenter. Other scientists there seemed to know every single Mars mission like the back of their hand – something that I should study more.  People there knew all the important (and more obscure) studies, both legacy and recent.  

Niche conferences are nothing new to me: back in 2023 I attended a conference called the International Conference on Carbonaceous Particles in the Atmosphere, at Berkeley. There perhaps 150 participants (given its small size, John might call this a “workshop”, not a conference), and the title said it all.  Carbonaceous Particles in the Atmosphere was the only topic discussed.  I did my Ph.D. on bioaerosols, so my research fit in perfectly with this conference, and there were many other scientists there who were also doing work on bioaerosols.  

I talked with these people like we were equals: I knew what they were talking about and vice versa.  But, even in a “niche” conference like this, with relatively few attendees and a narrow range of subject material, there were also several presentations that struck me as completely new – things I have not researched before, worked on, heard of, or imagined.  While I vibed with a good number of presentations, there also were many presentations that were so new to me that I was completely lost by the second slide in the slide show – giving me the feeling that I was having at 10th Mars in Pasadena. Even in a conference where I have a good grasp of much of the research, there was still plenty of research that made me feel like a “newbie”.

Remembering this conference, I now realize that there may not exist a conference that is too niche. Even when narrowing down the range of topics, science is still extremely broad, and even more extremely detailed.  Because of this, I find it difficult to call myself an “expert” in a broad field like atmospheric sciences, even though I have a Ph.D in this topic.

So, 10th Mars reminded me of something critical: the most important skill in a scientific career isn’t knowing everything there is to know in a field. It is the ability to push outside of your comfort zone and learn new things. Even though you may have a Ph.D, you can never stop being a student. Even though 10th Mars was perhaps a bit uncomfortable for me (because of my relative lack of experience in the field compared to other participants), I learned more material in those four days than maybe I ever had before in a four-day span.

The message of this blog post is this: I would highly recommend all early-career scientists to not just attend conferences in your field of expertise, but conferences that are slightly (or more than slightly) outside of your area of expertise. And to be honest, middle- and late-career scientists should probably be doing the same as well. It will challenge you to learn new things, meet new collaborators, and in doing so conceptualize new ideas for research that you may never have had if you had just stayed in your typical lane – the one that you were trained in when you did your M.S. or Ph.D.  

A few final thoughts:
1.    I need to find a way to drag some other members of the PVL out to a conference with more Earth-based atmospheric sciences!  I guess the American Geophysical Union Annual Meeting in Washington DC is a good place to start (three of us were there last year!).
2.    “Phoenix” now includes the name of a NASA Mars lander from 2008 as a definition in my brain-dictionary!

The Crunch

There comes a point when working on any large project when you can run into roadblocks or motivation can flag. This is almost guaranteed with something as long and as challenging as a PhD. Indeed, statistics suggest that in Canada about a quarter of science and engineering PhD students do not complete their degrees within 9 years (as of 2013). Sometimes, the greatest challenge can arise just before the end in "The Crunch" to finish, as Dr. Kevin Axelrod, our new Postdoctoral Fellow attests in this week's very personal post below. But if you find yourself in this situation, don't loose hope!  As the saying goes, it's often darkest just before the dawn.

(Photo above courtesy of Dr. Axelrod: "The view from the roof of the main building of the Desert Research Institute.  I spent a lot of time up here over five years, all four seasons.  It’s that nice.")

by Dr. Kevin Axelrod

So, it’s been a pretty crazy 12 months.  In January of 2023 (one calendar year before this blog is being posted), I was lying on the couch for two straight weeks in my shared house in Reno, Nevada, recovering from leg surgery, high on hydrocodone, and needing my housemates to get food from the kitchen for me (thanks, Heather and Brie).  Not appearing in the lab at the Desert Research Institute for two full weeks, I still had not completed the experimentation for my second publication of my Ph.D. research at the University of Nevada at Reno.  I still did not have a set date for when I would defend my dissertation and graduate from school, and quite frankly I did not yet know where my life was going.  And, believe it or not, I had never heard of York University.  

I had spent the last year and a half worrying about where my research was headed and how it was going to help me take the next step in life after graduation (if I even graduated).  At this point, I was supposed to be in “the crunch” - the last year of a Ph.D. tenure in which a student is supposed to devote their life, body, mind, spirit, overall being, consciousness, life-force, qi, etc. to their research and nothing else.  Instead, for two weeks, I watched Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime (not sponsored, by the way) while eating chocolate pudding.  Not exactly the demeanor of someone who had spent the last 4.5 years of their life in graduate school and was now supposed to be in the crunch.  Of course, I could not walk and thus could not come into lab to work on my experiments, and I struggled to write anything because most of the time, I could not even sit up.  I felt stuck – I was seriously questioning whether I could graduate in August of 2023, which was a date delayed from a previous goal of May 2023, which was a date delayed from my original goal of December 2022 that I laid out in my prospectus defense.  

This was just 12 months ago.  And now, I am writing a blog for the Planetary Volatiles Laboratory, supervised by Dr. John Moores, at YorkU in Ontario.  Back in January, I would not have guessed that I would be here now. 

So, this blog is not about how cool my Ph.D. research is, a summary of an important meeting or event, or a case study of a planetary atmosphere.  This blog is about Ph.D. students in “the crunch”, who are anxious, unsure of their future, feeling consistently unprepared or inadequate, and always being very busy while still feeling like they get nothing done.    

Hopefully, that is not the case for most Ph.D. students who read this.  Hopefully, most Ph.D. students are constantly ecstatic about their research, enjoying all the once-in-a-lifetime experiences that they had dreamed about since childhood when they first watched Bill Nye the Science Guy or Mythbusters.  That was not me, however, and I know I am not the only one.  I had been working on this one singular project (bioaerosol chemistry, and more specifically pollen chemistry) for 4.5 years, and though it came with a lot of intrigue and enjoyment, I had also made many mistakes, suffered setbacks, and was disappointed with what I viewed to be a low level of progress. As a result, I was feeling very stressed and burned out – I just wanted to finally complete it and move onto new things.

After I got to the point where I could walk again, I returned to the lab with a new motivation - to get my life together.  And that involved two tasks: finishing my research on the volatility of bioaerosol constituents in the atmosphere, and also looking past my Ph.D. and finding a place where I could continue my passion for scientific research on a new project which would allow me to expand my knowledge further.  And I ended up finding such an opportunity with the PVL via a flyer that Dr. Moores posted on the American Geophysical Union website’s career listings.  

Upon my first interview with Dr. Moores, I knew right away that I wanted to join the lab – I was completely overwhelmed when he extended the offer to join.  I accepted.  It would be an exciting change of pace - a new project on the development of a functioning methane spectrometer for the Martian atmosphere (and so far, it has been a very exciting change of pace).  But, in March 2023 when I first interviewed, in the back (and front) of my head was a lingering doubt – would I actually be able to finish my Ph.D. research in time to move to Toronto and start research at YorkU in September 2023?

One thing was for certain – the pressure was on like never before.  Pressure not just to produce manuscripts, but to start a new chapter in life.  To self-improve, if you will.  In my opinion, that was the subject of my dissertation writing, even though self-improvement is never mentioned in it.  

And, for the most part, that pressure was good for me.  It made me more focused and motivated towards my bioaerosol research.  And as my leg improved, so did the state of my dissertation.  By the end of March, I completed the experimentation for my second publication and was busy writing the manuscript for it, while simultaneously taking care of in-lab work for my third research chapter in my dissertation.  By May, I had finished the writing of the publication and was wrapping up the in-lab research.  And by July 10, I was holding my dissertation defense.

Granted, the defense was far from perfect (almost nothing ever is in academia).  The night before was my most disturbed night of “sleep” ever. The morning of, I woke up at 4:30 AM and was instantly wide awake – something that had only happened one other time in my life, which was the morning of my prospectus defense two years earlier.  I held off on coffee that morning because it would have had no effect.  My jitteriness was already at a maximum due to the nervous energy surging through me. 
I was in a state of extreme anxiety.  But, I took solace in the fact that I had given the past year, “the crunch”, my best effort – motivated by my desire to make it to my postdoctoral fellowship.  And if my best effort was not enough, then oh well.    

The defense was an absolute fever dream – I don’t even remember most of it.  But it went well, and after two and a half hours I walked out of the presentation room with the blessings of my committee.  After living in Reno for five years, I was finally going to start a new chapter in life.  Provided, of course, that I take care of a few other things before I left, such as updating some of my writing and attempting to gather some results via a secondary analysis of some of my aerosol samples because one of my previous experiments failed.

But before any of that, I had another immediate task: attending my first in-person conference as a graduate student (no thanks to you, COVID), at the International Conference for Carbonaceous Particles in the Atmosphere (ICCPA) in Berkeley, California.  After my defense, my next task was to drive for four hours (on two hours of sleep) to California.  Though I was driving at night and did not arrive at the conference hotel until 2AM, it was one of the most euphoric drives of my life.  

The next day, I finally got to enjoy an in-person conference, as a reward for passing the defense.  It was a great time – I presented a poster on my research, sat in on an absurd number of exciting platform presentation sessions, met several new people and research groups, and certainly did not skimp on the catered wine.  By all estimates, it was one of the most enjoyable excursions of my time as a graduate student.

And one month later, I stuffed all my belongings into my sedan and left Reno, driving them back to my parents’ house before jumping onto a plane two weeks later.  

I will miss Reno.  I will miss the incredible natural landscapes around Lake Tahoe.  I will miss the excitement that I had back when I first moved there in 2018 as a grad student, realizing that I was about to take part in cutting-edge research for the first time.  And I will also miss a lot of the time I spent in lab over those 5 years.  I am forever grateful that I had a great advisor, a great program director, and great co-researchers and classmates, without all of whom I would not have graduated.  I will forever cherish the research topics that I was able to take part in while at the Desert Research Institute.  But there were certainly things that I will not miss: the many times that I made mistakes in my experimentation, the many re-do’s that needed to be done, the eternal frustration of trial and error, followed by finally obtaining a set of results that I thought were interesting enough to be published (and then writing about them for several months), only to have the manuscript murdered by some very truculent reviewers.  This cycle of frustration made it feel like I was stagnating – that I was not moving forward in research or in life.  It made bioaerosol research, a topic that I intrinsically enjoy, into something that stressed me out.  It’s the part of the scientific method that they do not show on Mythbusters.

So, to any current Ph.D. student who feels the same way right now, I would say: try to think about what you want to do after your graduation, even though it can be difficult to think about.  A visualization of your “next chapter” will get you over the hump.  Scientific research has both excitement and disappointment.  A Ph.D. may sometimes seem like it has more disappointment than excitement.  But after completion, you will feel just like the Mythbusters right after they blow something up: total ecstasy.  And that feeling will fuel my motivation for further research here at YorkU - hopefully I can keep it going for a while.    

Where are all the microbes?

 

This week, our Research Associate, Dr. Haley Sapers, introduces us to the enormous hidden world of microbes all around us. Studying these organisms, the niches they inhabit, and the strategies they use to survive provide clues to the adaptability of life writ large. That, in turn, helps us to understand what kinds of planetary environments might be clement to some form of life. Above, microbes from 2.8 km below the surface of our world. (image credit: Luc Riolon, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Candidatus_Desulforudis_audaxviator.jpg CC-BY-SA-2.5)

by Dr. Haley Sapers

If I asked you where most of the life on Earth was, you would probably tell me it’s all around us. On the surface in forests and jungles, in the oceans around coral reefs and out there swimming around as whales and sharks. And you wouldn’t be wrong.

Macroflora and fauna – that is the large plants and animals that we can see with the unaided eye – have a lot of mass. Plants alone are massive. The cumulative weight of plant life on Earth accounts for a whopping 450 Gt (450 billion tons) of carbon. To put that in perspective, all of the cars in the world only weigh in at about 2.5 billion tons. And because of their large mass, plants and animals comprise most of the biomass on Earth. But mass isn’t the whole story –  the total number of all living organisms that we can see pales in comparison to the extraordinarily high numbers of microbes that inhabit the Earth.

A Phylogenetic Tree of all life on Earth showing relationships between large groups of organisms. Bacteria are in Blue, Archaea in Green and Eucaryotes appear in red.
(image by TimVickers https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Collapsed_tree_labels_simplified.png)

There are 3 domains of life; the domain we, and all plants, animals, fungi, and insects are part of is called Eukarya. Prokaryotes, or “Microbes”, as they are colloquially known, form the Bacterial and Archaeal domains. Although bacteria and archaea are both microscopic, they are as different from each other as E. coli is from us! There are about 1030 individual bacterial and archaeal cells on Earth (that’s 1 nonillion or 1 thousand billion billion billion!) To throw a few more astonishingly large numbers out there, there are only an estimated 10 to the power of 24 or 1 quadrillion stars in the Universe or a measly 10 to the power of 21 (one thousand trillion) grains of sand on all the beaches and deserts of the Earth. All those thousand billion billion billion cells weigh in at approximately 77 Gt of carbon. The ~10 to the power of 10 (10 billion) people on Earth only comprise 0.06 Gt of carbon or less than 0.1% of the weight of the microbes.

So, where are all those microbial cells?

You might be surprised to learn that you’re only half human. Of all the cells that are part of your body, about half of them are microbial. They live in our mouths, stomachs, intestines, and skin (among other places…).  Don’t be alarmed – we need all these microbes – in fact, we wouldn’t be able to get any nutrients from our food without them. But if each of the 10 billion people on Earth are home to 10 to the power of 14 microbial cells – we still only end up with 10 to the power of 24 microbes, 6 entire orders of magnitude short! In 2018, a group of scientists decided to count up all the life on Earth and figure out where most of it is. There’s a great (free) publicly available book that looks at a bunch of biological statistics authored by the same group (http://book.bionumbers.org/). 

But back to where the microbes are.  

All that macroflora and fauna that we see around us every day (us included) is in some way dependent on the sun for energy. Life on the surface of the Earth is fueled by the sun, and all life needs energy. So where else could life be? It turns out almost all of those bacterial and archaeal cells (over 95% of them) are actually living deep in the Earth’s subsurface, far, far away from the energy of sun. How is that even possible? That’s actually a really good question, and one many scientists are still trying to figure out. 

There are many different metabolic strategies, or ways for life to get energy. Getting energy from the sun, or consuming other organic matter are only two – perhaps the most common to us, but by far not the most common considering the vast diversity of life on Earth. There are bacteria, for example, that ‘breathe’ iron the same way that we breath oxygen. The iron provides a different electron dumping ground instead of oxygen in anaerobic (or oxygen-free) environments. Many of the microbial subsurface dwellers use strategies like this, gaining energy directly from rocks in a metabolic process known as chemoautolithotrophy (chemo = chemical, auto = self, litho = rock or the self production of chemical energy from rocks). They’re literally living geo-electrical circuits! 

In fact, these seemingly strange metabolisms may have been the first to evolve on Earth (much before photosynthesis, or the ability to harvest energy from sunlight). The very first life on Earth may have been similar to the microbes that now live deep in the Earth’s surface. Because of the diverse energy harvesting strategies that subsurface microbes use and the evidence to suggest that these are some of the earliest metabolisms to have evolved, it’s possible that the subsurface of other planets such as Mars are also habitable in the same way. Who knows – maybe there are even microorganisms living off rocks in the deep subsurface of Mars today!

Why do scientists get things wrong?

By Dr. Christina Smith

It occurred to me over the last couple of weeks that lots of people have found the changing information and guidelines, recommendations, and findings on COVID-19 to be surprising, sometimes frustrating, and perhaps don’t understand why things can change so rapidly. I’ve heard things like “why should I trust this information if its different to last week’s?” I’m not an epidemiologist or any kind of bio-anything scientist so that’s the only thing I’ll be saying about COVID-19. But, it dawned on me that perhaps it isn’t completely clear that people at the forefront of any field in science are really piecing together bits of information and evidence the best way they can to try and figure out what is happening. With time and enough information the explanations (often – not always) become more and more in agreement but with newer problems and smaller amounts of information, the findings that people come up with can vary wildly.

Intro to Infection Modelling

Like everyone else, the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed how our group operates and interacts. However, we've been luckier than others in our operations since relatively few projects that are currently active require access to the university experimental facilities which are now closed. 

Everyone has a different way of coping with the anxiety and stress that an unprecedented event like this one produces. For many scientists, there is a certain comfort in information. Sometimes the act of defining, modeling, classifying can make you feel as if you have more control over an uncontrollable situation and, at least, you might gain insight that might be actionable. 

The next two articles on this blog, submitted by the Postdocs, discuss the pandemic. The first, below, tries to consider the modeling of these systems. The second tries to grapple with the things that scientists get "wrong," by laying bare how piecing together a real-world puzzle from incomplete information can sometimes lead to dramatic shifts in our understanding of how these systems operate. In times like these, the public often turns to scientists for advice and it's important to remember that none of us has a crystal ball.

Wherever you are, I hope you are as safe and secure as you can be and are managing the physical and mental toll. No matter your circumstances you aren't alone in this.

by Dr. Paul Godin

With the COVID-19 pandemic drastically impacting our day-to-day lives, I thought it worth examining how epidemiologist model infections and how social distancing can “flatten the curve”.  (Note, this idea was inspired by Peter Taylor, who provided the initial matlab code to run the simulations)

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.

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...

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.

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.

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 :)

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).

Searching for Liquid Water on Mars at the Canadian Light Source

 

PVL is branching out in time! Not content to limit ourselves to today's Volatile Reserves on Mars, two members of the group, PDF Paul Godin and PhD Candidate Charissa Campbell headed out to Saskatchewan to examine the ancient atmosphere. In the image above, Paul Godin (York), Tyler Wizenberg (U of T), and Charissa Campbell (York) are pictured in front of the Canadian Light Source.

 by Dr. Paul Godin

A recent paper by Wordsworth et al. (https://doi.org/10.1002/2016GL071766) suggested that the greenhouse effect on ancient Mars could be stronger than previously thought due to a phenomenon called collision induced absorption (CIA). CIA is when molecules in a gas collide with each other and for a brief moment form a two-molecule complex that has its own absorption features. 

Wordsworth’s paper made a computation prediction of what the CIA for the Martian atmosphere would look like, but experimental verification of their prediction is still required. CIA is a weak absorption feature and requires spectroscopy set-ups that have long path-lengths or can handle high pressures to detect it. One method to achieve a long path length is known as a multi-pass White cell; in this set-up mirrors are placed at both ends of the cell and a beam of light is bounced back and forth between them (as shown in Figure 1), allowing for more time for the light to interact with the gas.

When you tweet and the Universe tweets back...

Engagement with the public is an important activity for us here at PVL. Many would think about this largely as a one-way street with scientists preparing materials for public consumption, such as a presentation, a documentary or a book. But it's always a richer experience when you're having a two-way conversation, as Christina describes in this week's Blog post. Sometimes the level of engagement displayed by that response can be surprising! Note that the photo above is a word cloud she made from some of the jobs respondents are currently doing (sizes randomly assigned).

By Dr. Christina L. Smith

 

One of the things I think is important as a scientist is making sure that not only the scientific community knows of your work (and general existance) but also that the wider public is able to engage with you and your research, when appropriate of course. As my previous posts (i.e. poetry in science and the Rover Exploration Challenge) show I particularly enjoy getting involved in public engagement in a variety of formats!

A couple of months ago, I was invited to give a presentation at a “Future Women in STEM” (STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) day held at York University, talking about my personal experience as a woman in STEM. I realised that, although there were a large number of very interesting presentations and activities on the agenda, mine was the only one revolving around someone’s personal experience in a science field. I’m also very aware that STEM careers are far, far broader than my own personal experience.

A Somewhat Spontaneous Science Flash

Lately, Christina has been supporting the European & Pacific Divisions of the PVL with a series of four presentations at the IPM and EPSC conferences in Berlin, Germany and the MSL Science Team Meeting in Pasadena, California. Despite this heavy workload, she was able to take time to put together an entry into the EPSC Science Flash competition. While she didn't walk away with one of the grand prizes, twitter gave her an honourable mention for her engaging presentation! Details below.

by Dr. Christina Smith

At some conferences there are events held that host talks that are a little different to the standard conference-style oral presentation. I recently attended the European Planetary Sciences Congress in Berlin, and at this conference the Europlanet Early Career Network hosted Science Flash 2018.  Science Flash is a competition in which researchers are challenged to present their research in three minutes using only a single slide and doing it in an interesting or unusual way. I discovered the competition on the first day of the conference and decided to give it go less than three days later!

My unusual method for presenting my research was inspired by rhyming stories I used to read as a child. I wanted to present my work as if it were a rhyming children’s story whilst also giving accurate information and background to one of the projects I’ve been working on. So, what follows is what I said word for word and my slide is the picture you see above – and yes I did put a crown on Curiosity!

Rover Exploration Challenge at the Ontario Science Centre (July 28th and 29th 2018)

PVL is running a rover mission control simulation at the Ontario Science Center on July 28th and 29th. Everyone is invited to come, visit and participate as we explore a mystery planet! For more information, over to Dr. Christina Smith.
(Image taken from: https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/mars-curiosity/en/ )

by Dr. Christina L. Smith

You may (or may not) have noticed that Mars is looking a little brighter than usual at the moment. And from July 27^th-30^th it will actually be the brightest it has been since 2003! Mars is currently approaching opposition where the Sun, the Earth, and Mars are all in alignment. This happens roughly every 26 months and this one will happen on July 27^th. Closely related to this is the closest approach of Mars to Earth – this time it happens four days later on July 31^st. To celebrate Mars’ proximity and opposition, a number of events are happening around Toronto (and beyond) this week to let you observe and learn about Mars and just generally bask in the glory of The Red Planet’s awesomeness.

As part of this, some members of the Planetary Volatiles Laboratory are putting on an event at the Ontario Science Centre this coming weekend (July 28^th and 29^th) called the Rover Exploration Challenge. This is a drop in event where participants can experience what it’s like to be part of a team trying to explore another planet. They’ll be divided up into three science groups, each of whom have a different set of science goals to achieve in a limited amount of Rover Science Time. Every Rover Day, lasting about half an hour, a different team will come in and will be given a Mission Briefing to show them what kind of science they can do. Afterwards, Science Leads will take them through everything we know so far relating to their science goals – what we know, what we don’t know, what they can do to help complete the mission.

The first decision the Mission Team will need to make is whether they want the rover to drive. Each drive allows the rover to explore a new area, but the rover can’t go back to explore a place it’s already been so they have to make sure they have done everything they might want to do before moving on!  Different Science Groups have different goals, which may influence whether or not they want to drive and in this team, democracy rules so if the majority says a drive is “Go!” then that’s what will happen. So if one group needs to stay put or needs to drive, they need to persuade the other science teams that that’s what they should vote for.

After the drive decision, the different Science Groups need to decide what they want to study and when during the Rover Day. There’s atmospheric measurements, water tests, ground tests, and imaging available to take with the rover, and different sites could be very different from one another so it’s important to test these at different locations along the Rover’s Exploration Path. After they’ve decided what they want the rover to do and put it into the Rover Plan, it’s time to check the plan, upload it to the rover, and wait for the results to come back. But there’s always an element of risk when using the rover: observations could fail, drives could fault, or the whole rover could shut down...