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.

Troubling Times in NASA R&A

UPDATE: NASA PSD Responds to the concerns raised by many within the Planetary Science Community!

I can still recall the shock and the dismay within the planetary science community when it was revealed in the President's request for 2013 that funding for Planetary Science in the US would fall by about $300 million, or about 20%. Certainly, those of us in the community foresaw declining mission selection rates. In particular, the Mars program was expected to be deferred by removing the money which was originally to be reinvested once MSL's funding profile dropped off. Additionally, horizons for the Discovery and New Frontiers programs have been pushed out significantly and there are no flagships in the works this decade aside from the still undefined Mars 2020 Mission.

Traditionally, the NASA Research and Analysis (R&A) program has filled in the gaps between missions, preventing the cyclic loss of talent and information that occurs between flight opportunities. This was seed capital used to foster the continued training of graduate students, postdocs, professors and soft money researchers as they looked deeper into already-acquired data. Thus, the program also did good work by enhancing the science return of missions past.

But with sequestration on the horizon, the PSD is forced to play conservatively and, correspondingly selection rates for R&A proposals have plummeted to the 10% level. Where before proposals ranked as low as good (3/5) might be chosen for funding, there are reports of rankings of very good to excellent (4.5/5) being denied. The effect of this change has been documented by the Planetary Science Institute's Mark V. Sykes and you can read the testimonials here. If we look at the "budget wedge" for planetary science presented at the 2011 LPSC conference we can get a better idea of one reason why selection rates have necessarily declined:

The 2011 Fiscal Planning Wedge for the Planetary Decadal Survey. The empty white space beneath the heavy black line was thought to be the space we were planning. We were wrong. The request for 2013 nearly follows the colored bars down to below $1.2 billion forcing either no new starts or heavy reductions. We're only now finding out what that number means. Sequestration forces additional cuts.

Words just cannot describe this...

So I won't even try. 

Mars Science Laboratory is shown here in this picture I took at the parking lot of OFB-1 (our shelter in case of a launch failure), near the VAB at Kennedy Space Centre and 6 miles from pad 41 at 10:02:09.2 AM on Saturday, November 26, 2011, 9 seconds after the main engines of the Atlas-V started it on its way to Mars. Best of luck, little rover - our thoughts, prayers and hopes go with you.

Marking Time in an Astronaut's Playground

On today's tour we got the briefest glimpse from the coach of MSL sitting across the bay on pad 41. We're all suited up and ready to go!

I knew that I would only be able to stay in Florida for two days, so I picked the 25th and 26th in the hopes that the launch would occur within one of the first two windows. However, with the battery failure in the Atlas-541 abort system, the launch was pushed back one day to the 26th. This opened up a hole which SMD graciously filled by adding a Kennedy Space Centre tour to our schedule. We got to go to some interesting places that the public doesn't always get to see and we were pre-cleared for the launch and issued special MSL VIP badges. You can take a look at some of the pictures I took (now updated with images from launch day!) along the way today.

Getting Ready for the Cape

MSL Arrives at Launch Complex 41 inside its 5m fairing just before dawn on November 3. In the days ahead, this fairing will be mounted atop an Atlas-V 541 EELV for a launch to Mars no earlier than November 25. 

After some consideration, I've decided to bite the bullet, take a chance and head on down to Cape Canaveral next week to help see off Mars Science Lab (MSL). Better known as the Curiosity Rover, MSL is an exciting mission to Mars that will take a close-up look at the km-thick layered deposits inside Gale Crater. It's an exciting place to try for and the rover team is looking forward to a successful launch, landing and the scientific results that will be returned. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the spectacular night launch of Phoenix in 2008. So this will be my first launch, assuming that delays don't push the launch back until after I need to fly home.  While I have some idea what to expect from video and images, I have no idea what the experience will be like in person.

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.

What does JWST mean to Mars?

Some of the best images of Mars obtained using the Hubble Space Telescope. JWST could give us methane maps of the planet that approach this spatial resolution, but what are the costs for planetary science?

For those who thought that PSD's (NASA Planetary Science Directorate) budget woes came to a close along with the debt-ceiling increase, the bad news just keeps rolling in. Let's take a few minutes and analyze what consequences the recent dealings with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will have on our exploration of Mars.