Sabbatical

Sabbatical isn't all laying on beaches soaking up the sunshine. Indeed, it can be one of the busiest parts of an academic's career! There is still some time for R+R, however, such as at the famous Whitehaven beach, pictured above, on the Gold Coast of Australia near Airlie Beach.

I should warn you at the start: my colleagues tell me: "John, you're doing sabbatical wrong!" But what is a sabbatical anyways? Why do many (though not all) university professors get to take one? And what purpose, if any, does it serve? As I come to the end of my first sabbatical it seemed like a good time to reflect on what I felt I did right, what I would change for my next sabbatical and to take a few minutes to answer some basic questions.

Another (methane) puzzle piece falls into place

This post is, effectively, a continuation of a previous discussion about methane but with an important added piece of the puzzle included: a solution which includes the constraint levied by the Trace Gas Orbiter. Since it's very hard to draw/visualize methane, this post like so many others, has a wonderful picture of the spacecraft that made the measurements - the curiosity rover, pictured above, with a jigsaw puzzle mask for effect! (original masking image CC 2.0 description and license here)

You might think it a bit strange, publishing two papers back to back 4 months apart on the same topic. After all, my last paper talking about methane on Mars only came out in Nature Geoscience in March and was fully published in May. And now, here my co-authors and I am again with a paper in Geophysical Research Letters talking about explanations for the seasonal cycle. Part of the story has to do with differences in time to publication for the two journals. But the bigger story is that this past year has seen a surprisingly quick evolution in our understanding of this trace gas.

The Solar System: a proving ground for interstellar spacecraft

The above picture illustrates a small spacecraft attached to a solar sail, as depicted by By Kevin Gill from Nashua, NH, United States ( Solar Sail, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42599221 ). Such Solar/Laser sails are the only technology currently proposed for travel to other solar systems in a reasonable amount of time and, as of yet, not practicable except on paper.  Of course, such "starchips," as they are known, would have to be much smaller than the spacecraft pictured above and would travel in larger numbers ("think smaller, think way more legs"). Hugh Podmore and I wondered what the advent of such a technology might mean for planetary science within our own solar system.

Late last year I finally published a fun paper that myself and Hugh Podmore, one of Prof. Regina Lee's PhD students, wrote up in the summer of 2017. It was a pure flight of intellectual fancy for which we sought and received no funding. What was the subject, you may ask: what else could you do with the starchip spacecraft that the breakthrough star-shot initiative is working towards in order to advance our knowledge of our own solar system? While some of the possibilities had been detailed in the original paper by Prof. Lubin, his ideas for how the interstellar laser array could be used to explore the solar system go big whereas we wanted to know what could be bought in terms of time and cost for going small instead.

It seems that there is a quite a bit that one could do. But what surprised us most was how quickly such spacecraft could be of use to planetary science, perhaps as early as the mid 2020s, allowing early starchip prototypes to be tested out while doing valuable science.  They could also be a democratizing force by allowing smaller space actors (such as Canada) to participate in a way that hadn't been previously imagined, due to the  relatively low cost of laser propulsion once the pushing station is set up. Finally, if you stop to think about it, there really are a lot of great uses for small, fast spacecraft. In our solar system there are things that are fiendishly difficult to do with a discovery-class NASA mission or that simply don't justify that classification's $500 million price tag. I'll get into all these interesting possibilities just below the cut.

5 years, 7 months and 25 days (Tenure)

You may think it's a bit silly, but I do have a thing for a well-made watch. I have a tradition of picking up a new one for major milestones at work (if you can call something you've done twice a tradition!). At right is the Seiko Premier Moonphase from my hiring as an Assistant Prof in 2012, the 62MAS Prospex Diver at left is the latest addition, doubling the size of the "collection." There's something about the simplicity and clarity of the latter that I appreciate now, much as I did the clockwork complexity of the former six years ago.

On the 26th of July this year, I finally got the good news from my President - I have been granted tenure! For those fans of this classic post that makes it 5 years, 7 months and 25 days since I began work at York University as an Assistant Professor. It's significantly longer than I spent as a postdoc and just a shade over the time spent in graduate school (5 years, 4 months and 7 days). I would have posted earlier, but I've been processing this news. In fact, I'm still processing. But, as is typical for this space, I'm feeling the itch to write and so I'm sharing my half-formed thoughts with you now.

But first; not all of you might be familiar with the concept of tenure. Why does it exist? What does it mean? Why do I/we care? And, what is it for? Perhaps a little background is called for. At most Universities, (but notably not all) most starting appointments, what would be in Canada and the United States called an "Assistant Professorship," is in fact a limited-term contract. The deal is that you will teach, research, serve the community/university and mentor graduate students for a period of time (typically 5 years). At at the end of that time, your fellow professors (Associate and Full) will weigh in and determine whether or not you meet the standards of your profession and merit being awarded a continuing position. Deans and other Senior Administrators also get a vote on this, however, at least at York it tends to be the lower-level committees that present the largest hurdles.

A Half Century of Publishing? (or: fun with metrics)

Too much fun with metrics? This plot shows an h-value graph based on my google scholar citations (As of December, 2017). A researcher's h-value is the number of papers written by an author that have been cited at least that many times. For me, that number is 26 (if you trust google!), which is where the red and blue lines cross in the chart. In the article below, I discuss the sorts of fun an analytical person can have with metrics. But Science is about much more than just comparing these sorts of numbers. Ultimately if you enjoy what you research, and that work is useful to others, what more do you need?

(Editorial Note: I'll be lightly editing the various posts I had created over the last year and a half as I put them up, where I've made changes, these will be noted in italics in brackets).

It's taken almost as an article of faith that a successful scientific career consists of 100 peer-reviewed publications. If that's the case, then as of November (2017) I'm halfway there Breaking the 11-month logjam at 49 papers was my methane update and, as predicted in my summer post, there has been more to come with five acceptances having followed since that time, nudging my number up to 55. If everything currently in the submitted and just about to be submitted categories follow suit, it might be 60 before the end of 2018! (indeed, it's now 62)

It seems, therefore, that this is as good a time as any for some reflection. It doesn't hurt that it is currently December (2017), the official month of reflection, and that my first sabbatical was recently approved for January of 2019. First sabbaticals are a classic break in the academic race, a time after you've established yourself to take a step back and consider where (scientifically speaking) you'd like to go next. Perhaps, then, I'm just being a bit precocious here in getting started on that longer-term thinking. Though I shouldn't get too far ahead of myself since I won't hear back with finality on Tenure and Promotion for several months yet.

A Long Hiatus

It has been a year, 4 months and 10 days since I last posted, which I'm pretty sure is a record for this blog. Decidedly, it has been a very long hiatus. It's not so much that I stopped writing - very hard to do that - and indeed, I did write quite a few posts that are more or less ready to go. But in all that time, I just couldn't bring myself to hit the post button. So much second guessing about how others might read and interpret what I had to write*. Not to mention a great deal of wondering about why I should bother. Overall it just seemed to be an easier thing to simply put this conversation on hold.

While I was away, I've been busy. There's been a fair bit of stress, some unexpected challenges and a great deal of soul searching. I'd love to tell you that's all done now. But I don't think I'm quite there yet. Still, I've been feeling that it's time once again to put digital pen to digital paper, just in case this record is of any use to any of you. It's certainly been therapeutic for me, once or twice over the years! Besides, this has never been a sanitized "best life" record of my career. Frankly, I have a hard time understanding how such things are useful to anyone, including their authors.

So, in the interest of moving forward, allow me to sum up what has been going on in the last 16 months. 

There have been some definite highs in there: As of last August, I'm now a tenured professor at York and I was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada (!!!) last November - something I wouldn't have dreamed possible when last I posted (though I do know that even things we dare not dream can come true). I'm also now the director of a $7 million research network - which is thrilling and terrifying in equal measure; though I've found more confidence and encouragement than I expected when I took on the role.

However, on the other side, there have definitely been some lows. The tenure process is not an easy one and I must admit that I'm still working through some of what happened and what was said in the process. I'm told by colleagues at other Universities that this is not uncommon. I also served on a jury in a major criminal trial, something which permanently changes you in ways you don't expect. Last but far from least, my ophthalmologist likes to say that the warranty on a human being expires around the age of 40. For me, that seems to have been more like 37. I've spent 8 of the last 16 months on medication and my doctors cannot seem to figure out the problem. I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise to someone who works on the edge of a physical science that there is a huge gulf of the unexplained in medical science. Only TV medical dramas seem to tie up all the ends neatly with a diagnosis and cure within the hour; for the rest of us reality intervenes.

So there you have it. Look to this space over the coming weeks for a number of long-delayed posts. I might even have something to say about my Sabbatical which I'm currently enjoying down in Canberra, Australia with my unbelievably gracious hosts here at the Australian National University. Not to mention some of the exciting ideas for upcoming work that have been brewing.

___

*Ahh the tenure process, is there a better crucible in which to forge self-doubt?

A small step towards solving the mystery of martian methane

What does the seasonal cycle detected in Curiosity's record of methane concentration mean? Last week, I published a paper in Nature Geoscience with eight of my colleagues that attempts to answer that question. In the spirit of what I put together for my Nature penitentes paper back in January of 2017, I've decided to summarize the work here. This work was three years in the making, but the story of how it came to pass is much less exciting than with the penitentes - simply a combination of hard work and tenacity by my colleagues and I, like all good science. You can't tell the story of my paper without knowing the story of Martian Methane. So I've put together a primer. For those of you who have been following this closely, skip down to Chapter 2.

Chapter 1: The methane story so far

Whither methane, Mars' most mysterious gas? Since it was first discovered telescopically by Michael Mumma's group in 2003, methane has captivated our interest in the red planet. And with good reason: on the Earth, most methane is produced by biology.

Could the same be true on Mars? That's a complicated question to answer. For starters, there's very little of the stuff to go around. On Earth, methane makes up just under 2 parts per million (ppmv*) of the atmosphere, whereas on Mars the values recorded by different groups place the value at between 0.5 and 50 parts per billion (ppbv*) of the much thinner atmosphere. That allows other processes to have a significant effect. For instance, serpentinization of rocks at depth can also produce enough methane to explain these values, as can seeps of methane stored during Mars' early history either as organic carbon compounds or in methane clathrates. Heck, there's even enough accretion of organic matter via Interplanetary Dust Particles each year to produce 11 ppbv if it all gets converted into methane! None of this even considers processes that remove methane from the atmosphere.

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.

State of the Blog (2016-2017)

 

The members of TEPS and our guests at the Université de Montréal in June. This year saw enormous growth in our program, something very satisfying to see as an author of the proposal and as a member of the team!

It's July and that can only mean one thing, here at HTWT: time for the annual State of the Blog update! Unlike last year, I did manage more than zero posts with 8 in all. I also kicked off a new Blog for my lab over at http://york-pvl.blogspot.ca/ which has had 33 posts describing life, research and teaching amongst my students and trainees. The content over at our new location has been rather good and some of the posts have been very popular - in all we've had about 2,600 visitors over the year, not a bad start at all.

The big news over the last year will be no surprise to our regular readers. To my utter shock and amazement I published an article in Nature. If you talked to me a year ago, I would have thought you crazy to suggest that such a thing could happen. But this business is full of surprises. I won't spill much digital ink rehashing the experience (but if you want to rehash, by all means click for my description and background commentary) other than to say that I'm pleased that I can still learn new things about the business of getting science published despite having been doing planetary for 14 years. It was also very nice to be honoured by York University as a Research Leader for 2016 as a result.

Come and Learn the Art of Exploration

The author takes a selfie with the Curiosity Rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one building over from Curiosity's Mission Control where he worked during the summer of 2012. We hope to give those who attend our event on May 27, 2017 a taste of what running a space mission like Curiosity is really like.

Last year I was fortunate to be successful in my bid to secure an Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation Early Career Researcher Award. In addition to allowing me to expand the Curiosity (Mars Science Laboratory)-related work that we do in my group, this particular award has a youth outreach component that we're about to roll out for the first time. I think we've put together a really interesting day if you want to get an idea of what it's like to do real planetary exploration. I know that my team and I are really looking forward to sharing our enthusiasm with those students who join us on Saturday, May 27!

Some of you may have navigated to this post in order to get more information on the event, so this will serve as exposition. Over the course of six hours, from 9:30 AM to 3:30 PM, we hope to give you all a little taste of what science-driven mission design is like. The "science-driven" component is important because, where space exploration was at one point focused purely on pushing boundaries (what we call "footprints and flags"), the modern version has an animating purpose in mind, and that purpose is the science that is returned. Think of it as the difference between John Cabot's "Matthew" and Charles Darwin's "Beagle." We will start with how you select a landing site before describing how you go about equipping a robot for the journey and then how that robot is operated on another planet to actually accomplish science goals. In each case, it will be you and your fellow students who make the choices.

A Banner Conference

 

While twitter is going somewhat crazy over Jake's videos, especially the gravity wave one, this one is my favourite, not only for the patterns in the clouds, but also for the shadow cast on the foothills of Mt Sharp. While this development was the most unexpected success of the group at this year's LPSC, it was far from the only event that made this a conference to remember.

I've just returned from 2017's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) held this year, as every year, in the Woodlands, Texas. No matter which way you cut it, this year's conference was a tremendous success for PVL. That's not hyperbole, despite the fact that LPSC holds a special place in my own Planetary Science Education (the 2004 edition was where I realized that I wanted to be a planetary scientist) and it's an excuse to spend a week in 25C+ weather in the middle of March and meet up with old friends from graduate school.

There were a few things we knew coming in would make this year a banner year and a few surprises that heightened the experience.

A surprising, serendipitous turn of events - the making of a Nature Paper

My new favourite planet (don't tell Mars!). This post tells the story of how the Nature penitentes paper came about. A previous post described our findings in plain language. I must apologize in advance, the length really got away from me on this one. But I hope the tale which follows is instructive for other early career folks in the planetary sciences (and other disciplines) who have a flash of inspiration that leads them towards high-impact publishing and who are not already members of science teams.

If you have to blame someone, blame Geoff Languedoc*.

Penitentes on Pluto

Though not posted until after the embargo clears, I'm writing this post over the winter holidays out in Gander, NL. It's plenty cold, snowy and icy, but far too windy and humid for Penitentes to form here! The image above was captured by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera on the New Horizons Spacecraft in July of 2015. The image shows the Tartarus Dorsa region of Pluto which has been sculpted by the sun into a regular pattern of icy blades.

This post is intended to offer up a few details about my recent article that appeared online in the January 4th edition of Nature. You can navigate to the paper itself using this link and the York and NASA/APL press releases are also linked.  Because Nature articles are very information rich, I was thinking that an unpacking of my recent article might be helpful to some of my readers out there. Note that how this article came to be may be the subject of a separate but related post which I'll post once things calm down a bit. Instead, this post focuses on the content of the paper and you can read more down underneath the cut.

A Week Amongst the Alps

Combining two facets of my work - an animation of the Siding Spring Comet as seen from MSL in October of 2014 (It's the fuzzy thing which translates across the frame, keeping with the images). Recently, I had the opportunity to talk about the cometary dust that you can see here, rather than the dust in the martian atmosphere - my usual topic of study.

I've been to conferences all over the US, Canada and Western Europe. But never before have I attended an invitation-only conference. I've now had this honour, having just returned from the International Space Science Institute's Cosmic Dust Workshop, which was held in Bern, Switzerland over the past week. I was invited Andrew Schuerger, a convenor, friend and frequent collaborator of mine. Never having done this kind of conference before, I was unsure of what to expect. But I knew that regardless of how things went, that I would learn something new. Plus, Switzerland is rather pretty this time of year and the weather was nice.

The Summer of Public Speaking

.@ArcticSaxifrage starts off the morning talking about the importance of studying our own solar system @Starfest2016 pic.twitter.com/CKs6zen7KC

— York Observatory (@yorkobservatory) August 6, 2016

I won't deny it, I enjoy giving public talks about my science. Not only is it fun, but it also serves the cause of informing the public about exactly what it is that we do in planetary science and exploration and gives my research funders a good return on their investment. What more could a public servant such as myself want? I try to accomodate all the talks that are requested of me, but the summer is always easier to schedule than are other times of the year, so often you'll stand a better chance of hearing me when the weather is warm.

A Triumphant Return to the Radio

It's good to be back even if no one will be throwing my return a ticker-tape parade, such as the one pictured above for the Apollo 11 lunar astronauts (as photographed by Bill Taub for NASA's human space flight gallery ). With apologies, I just couldn't resist the spaceflight reference!

After a hiatus of nearly 4 years, I have decided to make Astronomy.fm (AFM) a regular part of my life again. Those of you who are avid listeners of YorkUniverse may have detected my dulcet tones twice over the last few months. I was a 'guest' of the show before graduating to 'co-host' last month and tonight I'll be co-hosting again this time with the master himself, Paul Delaney. Over the coming months you can expect more of the same. With luck I'll be able to inject my usual dose of planetary and spacecraft know-how into the discussion. It will be fun and informative! I hope you can join us.

A New Blog: PVL

Earlier this month I welcomed a 3rd member to the arcticsaxifrage blogging family. As some of you may already know from clicking on my profile over on the right, I've got my professional blog right here as well as a second blog where I review science fiction. To that I'm adding one more, but here's the catch - largely I won't be the author!

Instead, york-pvl.blogspot.ca will talk about the work going on in my laboratory, the Planetary Volatiles Lab (PVL) here at York. As I indicate in the introductory post, the forum will be contributed by students and trainees in order to give them experience in writing for a general audience. There's good potential here for benefits all around, I think.

If you are curious what you'll find, there will be posts about our science and engineering (though don't expect us to give away our secrets pre-publication!) as well as posts on process (What is it like to write your first paper; to give your first conference talk?) and on interesting things going on in planetary, from a student perspective (i.e. what a fantastic paper in last month's Science!)

Through this new forum I hope that you will get a taste for what it is that we do, why we do it and how we do it. You'll also get to know a whole new cast of characters. However, it will be a moderated forum in which I have reviewed and lightly edited the content - so don't expect too much drama.

I hope you'll join us, and will cheer on my students, many of whom are writing this kind of content for the first time!

State of the Blog (2015-2016)

 

This past year was all about expanding my boundaries . I wrote my first sole-author paper about some simulations of water moving on the Moon (a new body of work for me, scientifically speaking) and I teamed up with Ray Jayawardhana (Dean of Science here at York) to propose a $7 Million training program that brings together planetary scientists, exoplanetary astronomers and instrument designers. The program, which was selected, is called TEPS: Technologies for Exo/Planetary Science. It's going to be an exciting six years, as we ramp it up!

It finally happened. I've gone a whole year without posting once! I could use the usual excuses - (I've been busy!) - but the fact of the matter is that I just haven't felt that itch which is satisfied only by posting. Certainly, I've had plenty to write about, as you'll see below, and I'm actually coming around to the idea that it would be good for my career to talk more about my work and what my team is up to here in this space. But motivation is key, and that capital has all been allocated elsewhere this past year.

I went a bit crazy with grant applications and did quite well. Perhaps buoyed by my six papers from last year, everything I wrote in 2015 ended up being funded. I'd love to tell you all about it, but granting agencies have the right to announce successful applications and I respect that.

My success in the funding realm has led directly to a substantial increase in group size. Last year at this time, we were 1 Undergraduate, 1 PhD, 1 MSc and 1 PDF. Today, we have 5 Undergraduates, 6 MSc students, 1 PhD and 2 PDFs. While I am feeling the growing pains of that increase, it also means that we can research so many more things simultaneously! Indeed, our projects have proliferated to the point where there isn't a body in the solar system over 900 km in diameter which isn't the subject of someone's project.

State of the Blog (2014-2015)

A Swarm of accepted Papers, including two companions describing cube-sat micro-probes at Jupiter in IJSSE (and as pictured above in a simulation from co-author Isaac DeSouza).
It has been a banner year for publications!

 
So, here we are again - another year gone and a busy one at that. The entire pulse of six papers I submitted last year were ultimately accepted which saw my list of first author papers expand to 14*. Meanwhile, the predictions made by my GRL paper about Siding Spring were verified. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you are a Mars-orbiting spacecraft) Siding Spring settled down substantially, coming in on the too quiet to be detectable for organic dusts side of the equation rather than the "Meteor Hurricane" that was predicted by early modelling. I find it fascinating that some comets flare so large while still so far away from the sun, but in that respect, Siding Spring is hardly alone.