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.