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.

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 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.

A Small Insight from the 2012 Canadian Space Summit

The team from Concordia shows off their award-winning university-built 3-U cube sat. We heard from this group and many others at the 2012 CSS about the possibilities for exploring our planet and our solar system with small spacecraft not unlike the one pictured above.

A few weeks ago I was participating in the 2012 Canadian Space Summit in London, Ontario (full disclosure: I am on the conference organizing committee). We had a great week full of interesting talks. The highlight speakers were my PhD Advisor, Peter Smith who spoke at the banquet and the last man (and only geologist) to walk on the moon, Harrison Schmitt - the subject of a great deal of media and the host of a separate ticketed lecture.

But one emerging theme is a problem that is particularly acute for Canada - how do we fund space exploration? Even countries with large coffers dedicated to space, like the United States, or Inter-Governmental organizations such as ESA, often run into difficulties with getting their projects funded. As a result, you might be tempted to think that the only way a smaller country like Canada can get their flag into space is by partnering with others and contributing a small piece of a bigger mission.

While this has been a winning strategy, so far, I don't think we need to limit our ambitions here. And neither did a number of presenters at the CSS. We heard several talks on an emerging field: planetary nano-spacecraft or what I might call nano-exploration.

Another conference and more bad news looming

ESA's TGO - Last ditch negotiations are expected Monday in South Africa at the International Astronautical Congress to see if this mission can be saved.

As I was crossing the Atlantic, Universe Today was reporting some details about the negotiations between ESA and NASA with respect to the ESA Exo-Mars program. From the sound of the article, barring some last ditch maneuvering at this week's IAC meeting in South Africa, Trace Gas Orbiter could be nearing the end of the road.

Getting Ready for DPS 2011

My two posters for DPS 2011. On the left is a description of the ILSR Analogue Mission Control Architecture, on the right I discuss some suggested atmospheric measurements for MSL and argue for pre-processing on-board landed spacecraft in order to improve the temporal coverage of this dataset. You can get a preview of the Analogue poster here and the Atmospheric/MSL poster here.

It's almost time for the 2011 edition of the AAS's (American Astronomical Society's) Division for Planetary Sciences Conference, better know to us in Planetary Science as DPS. Next week, those of us interested in planets will descend upon the conference centre in Nantes, France. As happens every five years or so, this conference is being held in concert with our European counterparts, the EPSC (The European Planetary Science Congress) who have shared the organizing duties. This has meant, among other things, an extended abstract process which is reminiscent of LPSC's famous 2-page behemoths. Yes, these abstracts have abstracts! But the end result of that extra work is that we all have a better idea of what will be presented by our colleagues.

Conversations at the LPSC: Dr. Michael Bland

Dr. Michael Bland surveys the landscape
in this photograph taken in 2006 in Death Valley, CA by Catherine Neish.

Tonight we move a little bit away from the Decadal survey on Astronomy.fm 's Live from York U. While the topic still comes up in reference to EJSM/JEO I focused on speaking with Dr. Michael Bland about his work studying the icy satellites of Jupiter and Saturn. Mike is a tectonics expert who looks at the geophysics and geomorphology of surface features to glean information about the interiors of these satellites. His specialty is the Jovian moon Ganymede, the largest of all satellites in our solar system and really a world in its own right with a diameter almost 400km larger than that of Mercury. Ganymede may not be the first body you think of when tectonic features come to mind. Certainly, the cracks formed on the surface by internal stresses are less dramatic than they are on Europa and less explosive than on Enceladus. But the terrain is more varied and perhaps less understood on this world.

Conversations at the LPSC: Dr. Ross Beyer

Dr. Ross Beyer has always been at home on the surface of a Planet. He's shown here at Ubehebe Crater in Death Valley, CA in this undated photo taken by Jason Barnes.

Kicking off our latest series of interviews on Astronomy.fm is the SETI Institute's own Dr. Ross Beyer. He and I briefly attended the University of Arizona together before he graduated with a PhD in Planetary Science way back in 2004. Since that time, Ross has been keeping busy with significant mission involvement including working with the HiRise camera on MRO, as well as on LRO and one of the most exciting missions of the upcoming decade: New Horizons to pluto. Because of this latitude of space mission experience, which cuts across NASA's boundaries, I felt that Ross would be an excellent subject with which to discuss the recently released planetary decadal survey. I had the chance to speak with him last Thursday, and I have to thank him and my editors Michelle Parsons and Michael over at AFM for getting this interview to air so quickly! Tonight you'll get the chance to listen in at 8PM EDT / Midnight UTC over at Astronomy.fm on the "Live at York U" radio show.

I do owe Ross an apology: we didn't get to speak much about his varied experience in Planetary Science, so I plan on asking him for a full and proper interview at a later conference!

Programming Note: Over the next four weeks, we'll be bringing you interviews with young planetary scientists on the Live at York U radio program. This series, "Conversations from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference" mirrors the "Conversations from the Division for Planetary Science" series that we conducted last year. Queued up after Ross are Washington University's Dr. Michael Bland on March 21, who will speak with us about Icy Satellites, University of South Florida's Dr. Matthew Pasek on March 28, a meteorite man and astrobiologist extraordinaire, and finally the NRC's Dr. Abigail Sheffer on April 4, who will chat with us about things you can do with a Planetary Science Degree that you might not have thought possible! These last two will be appearing LIVE on air, so if you have any questions for them, you can leave those in the comments below, and I'll be sure to ask.

"Conversations from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference" runs Mondays through April 4th on Astronomy.fm 8PM EDT for the first three interviews and moving to 9PM EDT starting in April.

LPSC Notebook: Participating Scientist Programs

Now that I'm back in Toronto, it's time to clear out some of the backlog! I had a good time at LPSC, but it was a much busier schedule than DPS and ultimately was a conference with a much different feel. I'll get to that in a few posts. But today I wanted to give a brief note prior to Ross Beyer's blurb.

When you're at a conference, your work doesn't stop or go on hiatus. Indeed, when you consider networking and meeting with colleagues and collaborators you could argue that conferences represent a heavier workload. In that vein, I want to mention a task being carried out behind the scenes by many of the conference attendees. Specifically, the preparation of applications for the upcomming Participating Scientist Program (PSP) opportunity for the Mars Science Laboratory. Without a doubt, this is one of the largest opportunities in years (and perhaps one of the few this decade) for members of the "Mars Chapter" of the Planetary Science Community. As such, many of us were scurrying to put together our documents over the last week. As the Canadian Space Agency recently decided to support Canadian researchers to play along, I can count myself in that group.

Hope and a Call to Action: Planetary Decadal Survey Released

Steve Squyres (left) and Jim Green (right) answer questions Monday Night at LPSC following the unveiling of the Planetary Decadal survey. Image is a screen capture from the live feed recap (I attended in person).

I can remember when I first met Steve Squyres. It was way back in May of 2004 when I was unbelievably green and doing a two week internship on MER at the behest of my advisor, Peter Smith. I was in the microscopic imager room in Pasadena with Nicole Spanovich (now at JPL) and he stuck his head in to see what was happening. Nicole introduced us and I remember him saying hello to me. I don't remember what I said in return, but I do recall that before I could think of something clever to say, he was off again to the next instrument room.

LPSC Notebook: Trouble Ahead

An artist's conception of a submarine exploring the Europan Ocean is shown in this NASA-JPL illustration. Currently, I'm not even 30 and the chances that I will see pictures like this in my lifetime looks like they will decrease tomorrow once the planetary decadal survey is released.

Something's in the air here in the Woodlands, and it's not pleasant. I certainly got my week off to a bad start with some hotel snafus here at the 42nd LPSC that have seen me in a different room each night. I must also report that I'm a bit disappointed in the location. Basically, we're located at a pedestrian-unfriendly high-end strip mall, though I do understand that this location is cheaper and more accessible for many. Oh, and now this: leaked details of Steve Squyres' Planetary Decadal Survey as described by Space News.

LPSC 2011 Preview

My poster for this week's LPSC Conference. 

Come by for a chat on Tuesday Evening! 

Also, you can click here for a full-sized version with legible text!

In a few hours I will depart the snowy and windy hallows of Toronto for the warmth of Houston, TX and the annual LPSC Conference. This event is the premier meeting of the year for us Planetary Scientists involved with the study of the surfaces and atmospheres of terrestrial planets, in particular the Moon and Mars (DPS tends to skew more giant planet/satellites/extra-solar planets). This will be my first visit since my return to Canada, my first at the new Woodlands Waterway Marriott and my first since 2007. The last has been troubling me a little. I had a great run going with four straight years of attendance from 2004-2007, and as readers of my DPS Notebook entries from last year know, it was LPSC that settled the question of whether I had made the right decision to pursue a PhD in Planetary Science. But I've been away so long that I have to wonder whether the conference I return to today resembles the same gathering I last saw through the eyes of an ambitious grad student. A lot has changed in the interim with me. In the next week we'll see what has changed in the world of Martian Planetary Science.
__________
As with DPS, I will be keeping a notebook of what I see. In particular, look for a post following the long-awaited-with-baited-breath Planetary Decadal Survey (TM) presentation on Monday evening. If you can't wait for my post, fear not! The formal presentation by MER P.I. Steve Squyres, followed by a response by NASA PSD Director Jim Green will be webcast live and carried on NASA TV starting at 6:30PM EST.

I should note, however, that due to the oncoming rush of the MSL Participating Scientist Program with proposals due on March 21, I don't expect to be able to write as much as I did at DPS. Here's to hoping that the CSA likes my LOI!

Conversations at the LPSC Series: Interview Subject Green Room

Time to put this internet business to good use!

Last year I put together a 6-part interview series for the "Live at York U" program over on Astronomy.fm as part of my attendance at the DPS meeting (profiles of our interviewees are available here: Jason, Catherine,  David, Brittany, Dave and Jonathan). It was very well recieved with our listenership surging up to the 1000 level for the last live show. This Spring I hope to do it all over again at LPSC. Right now I'm trawling my memory and the internet for good interview subjects so if you will be at the conference and would like to be interviewed, leave me a comment below and I will get back to you.

Also, if you came here via twitter, this is the right post to leave your comment!

In the extremely unlikely event that I get a large response, I'm planning on keeping the list of subjects relatively short, between 4 and 6 to make things manageable. I don't know my schedule for the conference yet, but if you're available over the first weekend, it would be easier for me to add you to the schedule.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

A brief note on where and when and on what topics I will be speaking in the next little while:

1) Today, January 14, at 12:30PM in B&GS here at UWO I will be presenting today's PSURF. I'll be talking mainly about how Space Missions get put together and run - nuts and bolts sorts of things.

2) Next Friday, the 21st of January, I will be giving my "Worlds Enough and Time" talk at the University of Toronto at Mississauga for the RASC's Mississauga chapter. It will be at 8PM. The WEaT talk emphasizes all that we have learned in the last 50 years about planetary exploration and the slides from the last time I spoke on this topic are available here.

3) I've just this week been confirmed as one of the three keynote speakers at the Star Symposium which will take place at Vari Hall on March 18 at 7PM. Not sure exactly what I will talk about, but it should be fun. The Planetary Decadal Survey is getting released and discussed at this year's LPSC which runs from the 4th to the 11th of March, so there will be some exciting new stuff to talk about when I get back.

With a little luck, I'll be given talks at some upcoming conferences. If that happens I'll let you know here.

2010 In Review

Above: a photo of a fossil of the feeding arm of the Cambrian creature anomalocaris taken by the author at the Mt. Stephen Fossil Beds, British Columbia, Canada during the summer of 2010. Below: Nobu Tamura's rendering of the whole of the creature, as shown on wikipedia (email:nobu.tamura@yahoo.com www.palaeocritti.com).
Note: The whole set of images from the Walcott Quarry and Mt. Stephen Trilobite Beds can be seen here.

Since this was nominally started as a blog about career and academic job finding, today is a good day to look back upon 2010 and examine the progress made. I've got to conclude that it has been a very good year. When the year started, I was working at York University, back again doing planetary science with friends from the Phoenix Mission after having spent a year doing terrestrial science with Environment Canada. That was already a good start and things improved from there.

Last entry from 2010's DPS Notebook

Well, as those of you who read this space may know, I've been promising one last post on my experiences at this year's DPS ever since the event ended way back in October. It's not that I haven't written one, on the contrary, I composed a capping piece on the red-eye back to Toronto. No, the question has been whether or not I'm comfortable with publicly posting my musings on that flight.

Knowing how much to share is a tough line to walk. On the one hand, you could take the "Dragnet" route and stick entirely to your stated subject: "Just the facts, ma'am." While they make useful references, such blogs are somewhat dry. They also ignore the fact that all of us who do science for a living are real people with hopes, dreams, desires and foibles. But you can't put so much of that on the webpage that you drown out the subject matter. So it's tough to balance the two.

What puts me over the top on this one (after much reflection) is that it does, honestly, express how I was feeling as the conference drew to a close. It was a happy time, and we all know how fleeting those can be. As such, I'd like to be able to look back, years from now and remember how it was that I felt. As such, I'm presenting this as a bit of a year-end piece:

Dr. Catherine Neish (Conversations at the DPS, profile 2)

A world of possibility: Dr Catherine Neish at Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, CA in 2006. Photograph by Diana Smith.

It was only recently, once I finished a dissertation on "habitability," that I finally admitted to myself that I am a bit of an Astrobiologist. Perhaps a bit of the reason I was so slow to come to that realization was that I tend to eschew the sorts of things that are in fashion and, especially a few years ago, nothing was more in fashion than Astrobiology. However, this week's Astronomy.fm interview subject, Dr. Catherine Neish, has always been an Astrobiologist and has said it loud and proud. Even during her undergrad at UBC, it was a topic of interest and led her to complete an REU at the famous Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico and to the presidency of their Astronomy club. Since that time, you could often see the SETI screen saver putting away, participating in a program to help process all the accumulated data, searching for signals from the sky.

When it comes to academics, she's no dilettante either. At the University of Arizona, Catherine held down a Julie Payette fellowship from the Canadian Government, the most prestigious fellowship on offer, and was a Galileo Circle Scholar. At the time, she specialized in laboratory experiments to simulate the prebiotic chemistry of Saturn's moon Titan (a tough task, to be sure!). Somehow, even with all of that she managed to participate in student government as the president of the U of A's graduate and professional student council. She also was the Principal Investigator of her Team-X class.

These days, she holds down a postdoctoral fellowship at NASA's Applied Physics Lab in Baltimore, MD, where she works on Lunar Science with the mini-RF team, a component of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Also, as a dual citizen, she straddles the line between the Canadian take on planetary science and that of the United States, able to move effortlessly from one to the other. As such, she offers a unique perspective on the space aspirations of both countries, which I enjoyed fleshing out during our conversation.

Catherine's Interview runs Monday, November 1st at 8PM EDT over on Astronomy.fm's "Live at York U" program. I'll be on-air to discuss further the topics from the interview, so if you'd like to ask a question, join us over at www.yorkobservatory.com. I'll happily answer any questions from the audience on the air!

DPS Notebook, Odds and Ends

Still emptying the DPS journal folks, one more to go after this one, but that one won't be about DPS per se, just general musings on the profession, conferences, etc. (something I wrote at 4AM on the plane home, so I've yet to decide whether to throw it up).

The first thing to mention is that I was lucky enough to get a total of six interviews with early career folks at the DPS and I feel they went rather well. After speaking with my colleagues at "Live at York U" over on Astronomy.fm, we have come to a decision regarding the schedule. Things kick off with a little introduction from me on October 18th, including some clips from talks by Ray Arvidson, Bob Pappalardo, Steve Squyres and Jim Green, then we get into the meat of things:

October 25th - Dr. Jason Barnes (Idaho)

November 1st - Dr. Catherine Neish (Johns Hopkins/NASA-APL)

November 8th - Dr. David Minton (SwRI/Purdue)

November 15th - Dr. Britany Schmidt (Texas)

November 22nd - Dr. David Choi (Arizona)

November 29th - Dr. Jonathan Fortney (Santa Cruz)

Note that all interviews will run over on Astronomy.fm at 8PM Eastern, 5PM Pacific. I believe that we will be shifting with the clocks when that happens, so for listeners in Arizona, note that time change. I am also happy to report that all the interviews will run in complete form, and have only been slightly cut. So look for 20-30 mins for the interviews.

I'm planning on doing a little blurb about each of the subjects on the day their interview airs. But I will reveal this much now: in addition to planetary science we all share a connection to the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona. Some of us are still there (Choi) and most of us got our PhD's there (exception: Schmidt [UCLA]). In part I picked these people because I was familiar with them, even if I don't know them that well personally. But it is a testament to the program at LPL that I didn't have to look outside to find a wide range of expertise and planetary targets for study. We will be spanning the entire solar system both in time from its formation to the present day, and from the Earth, through the Asteroids, Jupiter, Europa, Saturn, Titan, the Ice Giants, the Kuiper belt and on to Extrasolar Planetary Systems.

Are you a Planetary Scientists and would like to be the subject of a future interview? Drop me a line in the comments! If you're located in the Greater Toronto Area or will be at next March's LPSC, we can arrange something taped, otherwise we can do a live interview. Either way we'd love to hear from you!

Other interesting tidbits (based on my #DPS2010 posts):

(1) Mars just keeps getting more warm and wet in the past - we've found exposures of the missing carbonates exposed by impact craters all over the place. The absence of carbonates was a major mystery for a long time. However, it seems that much in the same way that most of the water-altered minerals at Gusev were buried by later deposits, the carbonates are not absent, merely covered up! I was less impressed by the atmospheric modelling teams who used today's martian terrain and obliquity to describe the movement of volatiles 4 billion years in the past. While it's true that we don't know what that Mars would have looked like, it seems clear that Tharsis, at least, would not have existed. Since, in the current day, Tharsis is a major obstacle for a moving air mass and causes a great deal of atmospheric condensation through orographic cloud formation it should not be present in past models. Still, the authors did point out that it is difficult to support liquid on Mars with the faint young sun, even if you assume a very thick 5 Bar CO2 atmosphere.

(2) A consensus is emerging over lunar swirls - as someone who has done some geomorphology, I'm a sucker for an interestingly shaped surface feature. The lunar swirls have been a mystery for a long time since they were first seen in the 1960s. In an impressive series of talks in the lunar session, observations made by LRO placed brick after brick in the foundation that these are features in which variations frozen into mare lavas have been emphasized by differential space weathering. The anomalous magnetization of these features show that they deflect the solar wind. Thus, in addition to their differing magnetization they show differing albedos and a lack of solar-H implantation (so no hydrated water). However, Radar backscatter shows no difference in roughness, implying that the swirls are only skin deep (less than 15cm)!

(3) The disappearing exoplanets announcement - a great deal of excitement surrounded a talk called "Title Embargoed." After all, if we couldn't know the title ahead of time, it must have been a pretty big discovery! However, through the magic of delayed peer review, the presenters took to the stage only to announce that Nature would not permit them to speak about the work. Speculation as to what was to be reported was rampant, as were thoughts as to why the reviewers might be drawing out the process. In this highly competitive field, it could be that the reviewers are stalling until they can replicate the result. Or it could be that the discovery is itself uncertain and the authors are having difficulty satisfying the reviewers that their discovery is genuine, above the error bounds of their measurement. For an example, just take a look at the discovery (or not) of an earth-sized planet just this past week.

(4) Titan surface geology outpaces our wildest hopes - data from Radar and VIMS were presented in which wave height in the Titanian lakes was constrained both from specular glinting and backscatter. As well, the controversial proposition that the equatorial "coffee ground" sand dunes show interspersed liquid hydrocarbon seepage was debated.

(5) Faster computers make dynamical calculations better - some of the major problems in solar system formation are beginning to sort themselves out, in particular the long-standing puzzle of why Mars is so small. It seems that the solution may be that as the Giant Planets migrated inward then outward, they created a sharp edge to the disc of planetessimals which formed the inner planets. As well, the outward migration would have scattered a great deal of icy material in past the solar system's snow line, enhancing the amount of water delivered to the terrestrial planets. This is troubling from an astrobiological point of view, since to make this situation work you need two large gas giants which form early and in just the right places and then evolve until they hit a resonance with one another many millions of years down the road. How common is that type of formation? At the very least it adds another term to the drake equation.

Sagan's Lesson: Learning from the EPO Masters at the DPS

The Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, as photographed by Matthew Field in 2007 (http://www.photography.mattfield.com). A mecca for astronomers and planetary scientists old and young alike, this place embodies the contact between science and the public.

Not every presentation at the DPS is on planetary science, there is also a limited subset of posters, talks and booths which deal with education and public outreach. While this component is much less developed than it is at LPSC, which has featured an EPO session, it is present nevertheless in the exhibit hall. Some of these are education of the scientists themselves, for instance, there was a poster on the PDS, the planetary data system, which a scientist who happened to be attending and who had never used spacecraft data before would have found very informative. Others announced
new journals, such as Springer's “Planetary Science” which, no doubt intends to try and give the Division's own journal, Icarus, a run for its money. Still others advertised services and products of use to the planetary community.

But there was also material presented on how we can better go about educating our students and getting our message out to the broader public. The fact that these presentations are here at all are a testament to a famous planetary scientist named Carl Sagan who believed strongly that as scientists and recipients of public funding that it was imperative that we share our knowledge, our experience and our enthusiasm with the broader community. In his honour, the DPS each year awards the Sagan Medal to the active planetary scientist who has done the most over their lifetime to
advancing planetary science amongst the public. This year's recipient was Carolyn Porco, Voyager mission veteran and Principal Investigator for Cassini's ISS (Imaging Science Subsystem), now located at SSI (Space Science Institute) in Boulder, Colorado.

Carolyn was a friend of Carl's, and the award was originally planned to be given to her by his wife, Ann Druyan. Sadly, Ann was not able to attend, but a touching letter was read in her absence. Carolyn then took the stage in the bright lights of a camera crew, and delivered a brilliant speech. This in some respects is a testament to today's most famous scientists: they are also masters of media and minor stars in their own rights. For instance, in addition to her appearances in documentaries about Cassini, Science and Space Exploration, Carolyn was also a science advisor on
movies, including “Contact” and contributed to the portrayal of Titan in “Star Trek.”

These are all interesting interfaces where education, media and planetary science touch. But EPO is also reasonably big business. Your typical NASA Spacecraft contract since the early 2000s requires that 1% of money be spent on EPO. For a mission like Phoenix, that works out to several million dollars, and we were lucky enough to have funding for a separate media/public affairs officer (Doug Lombardi then Sara Hammond) and an education/outreach director (Carla Bitter). We had a full size mock-up
built, many very professional presentations were given, a publicity trip to Alaska for educators was held and so forth. With so much money at stake, this is an area at which we need to excel.

Beyond this component were some activities which were not, on the surface, meant to be educational but from which I learned some immediately applicable lessons. There were trips to two world famous locations. The first was the Griffith Observatory, which despite the name was never a research observatory, but instead was directly intended by its founder, Griffith J. Griffith as a place where the public could come and learn about astronomy and get the chance to use the smaller telescopes. While
the urban sprawl of Los Angeles has severely restricted what is observable from Griffith, its educational aspect is top notch. I was lucky enough to attend two planetarium shows and take a look through one of their Schmidt-Cassegrains at the Wild Duck Cluster. I was particularly impressed by their use of live presenters. While they didn't demand audience participation (in fact it was more of a performance) they were seamlessly able to show us how the stars looked at different places on the Earth by using Norse Mythology and "The Lord of the Rings" to grab the audience.

I also must admit that I'm a bit of a sucker for Art-Deco architecture, so how could I resist? A colleague who accompanied me to the observatory described my reaction as "a kid in a candy store."

Next was the final activity of the conference for me, a visit to the largest telescope in the world from 1948-1975 and in North America through 1998 (an interesting piece of trivia, at 6m the LZT is the largest telescope on Canadian soil and the largest liquid-mirror telescope in the world). Mount Palomar is easily worth the trip to the mountains inland of San Diego. The structure is amazing; a 200" (5m) mirror is cradled within a 500-ton RA/Dec rig and balanced on a gigantic horseshoe. Heck, the secondary mirror is 42" wide! They were even kind enough to move the dome around for us, with my group poised on the edge! Since I help to give tours at the York Observatory, it was useful to pick up a few tricks of the trade from the docents who have been working at this amazing piece of technology for decades.

An interesting note: both Griffith and Palomar are steeped in history and chance. Griffith almost didn't happen as the City of Los Angeles originally did not wish to accept the gift of such a distant site (at the time LA was a small town of 100,000 residents, now you might describe Griffith as almost being downtown). At Palomar, the epic pouring of the mirror (it took months to cool) at Corning in New York in 1936 had to wait for the end of WWII for installation. Originally, the operator occupied a cage near the prime focus, high above the floor, where glass slides would be installed. Of course, some folks decided to put their own heads at prime focus and one described it as the most religious moment of his life. Fascinating stuff!

Belated report on NASA Night

Sorry for the wait, folks, but I've been slammed with work and such for the past few days and am only now getting to posting some of my conference notes! This one deals with the NASA night that was held during the conference. I'll also have at least one more posting and a wrap posting in a day or two (I hope!) which deals with the random collection of other notes I made. So without further ado, I give you NASA Night at the DPS!

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The NASA logo, affectionately called the Meatball by the community.

Tuesday night was the annual NASA night here at DPS. Basically, it's a town-hall style meeting in which NASA, through the planetary science director, updates the community on what has been happening over the last year, what issues are outstanding. After that they take a number of questions from the community. One of the real treats of last night was a half-hour session devoted to an update on the Planetary Science Decadal survey, given by the chair, Steve Squyres.

Squyres revealed that the first draft of the Decadal Survey has in fact been submitted to the NRC, just this past week. This draft will next undergo peer review and should be available for release by the end of February 2011 and will be presented formally in march at LPSC (The Lunar and Planetary Science Conference). Now while Squyres could not reveal the contents of the report at this stage, he was able to speak in broad strokes about what we should expect. First of all, this decadal survey had an additional constraint compared to previous decadal surveys. Not only was the committee tasked with identifying the best science to be done, but they were asked to determine the cost of doing that science and to use that cost estimate as a factor in ranking what should be done. The result may be less of a guideline, as previous decadal surveys have been, and more of a concrete and implementable plan.

To that end, the survey committee sought out a great deal of mission assessment (millions of dollars worth) and then had the numbers checked over independently by Aerospace Corporation. There are exceptions. First of all, the smallest missions, the Discovery-class, will not be ranked as these are meant to respond to opportunities and discoveries as the decade goes on. As well, the survey committee was asked to not interfere with the current New Frontiers selection process, and so the three surviving candidates - OSIRIS, SAGE and MoonRise - were not evaluated. It should be interesting to see what makes its way into the final report. You could certainly tell that Squyres was excited and wished he could just go ahead and spill the beans right then and there.

Following the decadal survey update, Jim Green, the planetary science director at NASA Headquarters described the highlights of the year past and the year yet to come. Two items stuck out in my mind. First, there is a real bonanza of activity taking place over the next 600 days or so, something that NASA is describing as the Year of the Solar System. Given its length, it's a Mars Year, as Green pointed out. It also has a website, http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/, and a new educational software package named “eyes on the solar system” which was demoed here at DPS and will go live at the end of the month. Over the course of this time, we've got the release of the decadal survey, the arrival of Messenger at Mercury, and the launch of three spacecraft over four months in 2011 (GRAIL [moon], Juno [jupiter] and MSL [mars]).

The second item is the difficulty that NASA is having in getting the Pu-238 that is required for NASA to run planetary missions beyond Mars. As we get further and further out in the solar system, the amount of solar flux available to power spacecraft gets less and less, so much so that by the time you get out to the orbit of Jupiter, where the flux is less than 4% of what it is at Earth, it is especially impractical for spacecraft to be solar powered, although Juno intends to try it.

Instead, spacecraft are powered by the radioactive decay of Pu-238. This material is packaged as alloy at far from weapons-grade concentrations in a series of aeroshells which are intended to survive a launch-pad accident. Meanwhile, the heat given off by the radioactive decay is harnessed as a power source, classically using a thermocouple run in reverse, to produce an RTG, or radioisotope thermoelectric generator.

But the total amount of Pu-238 is limited, and it has been more than 30 years since Pu-238 was last produced by the United States. As such, the stock of material has been steadily diminishing, despite purchases from the russians, so that currently there is insufficient plutonium to power all the NASA missions that are on the books. This includes efforts to extend the lifetime of the current stock by utilizing more efficient heat utilization methods, such as sterling cycles (SRGs) which are much more efficient and thus require less plutonium. There have also been efforts to front-load the usage (since the stock naturally decays away and less is left on the shelf each day) by offering incentives in the recent Discovery AO to teams proposing SRG power sources. A large fraction of the 28 propsers reportedly took them up on the offer.

This is an issue of particular concern to the DPS, which has less of a Mars-component than other planetary science conferences, and the division membership has been writing letters to congress about the issue for several years. This year, there was a positive sign in that the approvals bills for NASA and the DOE (Department of Energy) both talked about the desire for DOE to restart Pu-238 production. NASA was even given approval to spend 15 million dollars on its share of this program.

However, the approval of administration budgets by congress is a complicated process with an approval and appropriational level. That is to say that NASA may be “approved” to carry out activities, but the money required to do them may not be “appropriated.” Sure enough, in the appropriations bill for the DOE, language on the restart of plutonium stated that since NASA was the only public user of Pu-238, it should have to shoulder the entire cost burden, some 90 million dollars all told. So unfortunately, it doesn't look like much is going to happen on this issue this year.

As a final note, an old classmate of mine at LPL, Terry Hurford, was announced as one of the new names at NASA HQ. He will be a program scientist in the OPR (Outer Planets Research) division of the NASA R&A Program, and largely takes over for Curt Neibur who becomes project scientist for EJSM.

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Following NASA night many of us took off for an important "AG" meeting. The AGs are Assessment Groups and many of the popular destinations in the solar system have one to help prioritize our exploration and science activities. For instance, I get a great deal of mail from MEPAG, the Mars Exploration Program Assessment Group. The AGs have their international counterparts too, the WGs. For Mars that would be IMEWG, the International Mars Exploration Working Group. However, the AG I was headed for was much more social in nature. The BWEAG, or Beer and Wine Exploration Assessment Group, was conceived and chaired by Andy Rivkin. It reminds us that conferences are not just a place to listen to talks, but to interact socially with your peers and discuss what you learned that day. Many a new collaboration has been formed at places like meetings of the BWEAG. To my knowledge, there is not yet an IBWWG, but just in case Andy comes up with one, you read it here first!