An Updated Model for Methane

The gorgeous view from the Utah Valley Convention Center in Provo. Today I'm talking about what I'm not presenting here (a project conceived, executed, written up, submitted, reviewed and accepted all after the deadline for DPS abstracts!)

Greetings from the 49th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences! While a bit on the colder side, it's a gloriously sunny day here in Provo, Utah.
But I'm not here to talk about the conference. I've already submitted my talk and picked up my poster, so I've got a few minutes before the reception starts to catch up on my writing a little.

Instead, I wanted to spend some digital ink on my 50th paper (18th 1st author paper) which just came out in-press at Planetary and Space Science. While that's a milestone worth some commentary, I'd like to focus in this post on the Science itself. This particular paper is a novel one for me in that it is an update of a previous model that I had created back in 2012. In fact, a perceptive reader will notice some parallels between this paper and that of Moores and Schuerger (2012). Those are intentional. Indeed, it was our express intention to re-examine our earlier results in light of just how far research on martian methane has come over the past five years.

Exploration: an activity suitable for all audiences

The cover of the August edition of CMOS' Bulletin - the middle image hints at a medium-complexity article, an interesting art form which is more complex than a standard outreach article and less complex than a full-on scientific article. Such medium-complexity prose can be a challenge to write, but has particularly valuable potential payoffs.

Even a casual and infrequent visitor to this blog will know that I feel it's important to write for a variety of audiences. Often I'm emphasizing either a professional audience, in speaking about published research that I or my students have led (50 papers now, as of last month!), or a general outreach audience to share the enthusiasm, excitement and wonder of space exploration. If there's not enough evidence of the latter in these pages for you, allow me to direct you across to my lab's blog at york-pvl.blogspot.ca where you can hear from my students!

But there's a third audience for which I don't typically write - the deeply interested layperson or mildly interested expert. Here, I'm talking about folks who don't get a paycheque doing planetary science, but who can tell the difference between New Frontiers and New Horizons.* Combine those with practicing scientists and engineers who might work in sister (and typically terrestrial) fields like Geology, Atmospheric Science or Space Engineering who know the difference between cirrus and cumulus,** penitentes and suncups,*** or framing and push-broom cameras,**** but who are surprised to see the word 'Mars' or 'Pluto' before those familiar terms. Think the readership of Scientific American, or Physics Today here.