Raymond Francis' PSERF, January 28, 2011

Raymond Francis is a doctoral candidate at UWO and part of the CPSX family. While we both wear Iron Rings and he shares my Engineering/Science duality, he is definitely an Engineer at heart.
You can tell from the suit! 

To those of us who live in North America, we are understandably focused on NASA when it comes to the science and exploration of Space. It makes some sense - NASA was one of the first space agencies, it spends more money than any other (and five times more per capita than the next largest agency), and has a very slick marketing machine. Without a doubt, NASA generally sets the tone of the discourse and dominates when it comes to the more visible aspirational projects, such as planetary exploration and human space flight.

But there are other space agencies in the world and many countries that you might never have suspected of hosting a space agency do have one. The reason for this is simple: once you get beyond the aspirational side, exploitation of space makes direct economic sense for nearly every state actor. While the South Africans may not have a direct economic interest in putting a South African on Mars, they do have a deep and valuable interest in being able to predict the weather, create accurate topographic maps and do remote sensing that could allow resource exploitation and management. 

Dr. Paul Wiegert's PSURF, January 21, 2011

(Sorry for the delays! Fuller updates are on the way!)

Can life, or at least meteorites, travel between the stars? If so, how would we know where they had come from? Paul Wiegert addressed this question in his PSERF talk on the 21st of January, 2011

This week's PSURF Talk (a link will be posted here once it is online) dealt with a topic of eminent importance to us Astrobiologists - the concept of panspermia. What is panspermia, you might ask? Well, basically it describes a theory wherein life does not need to originate separately one each body where it is found. Life could originate at one place, at one time, in conditions that are truly extraordinary and then propagate to other worlds and other situations. If you believe the theory, then there is no need to be bounded by the conditions of the early Earth when considering life's abiotic origins. Instead, we can also consider whether life got an easier start on Mars, or inside a differentiated asteroid (this was discussed extensively at the York University Physics and Astronomy Journal Club last week; last week's CATP seminar, which I will post soon!) or even within Giant Molecular Clouds.

Of course, wherever life formed, it needs some way to get from there to here. This is where Paul Wiegert's research comes in. Paul is part of the meteor group at UWO in Physics and Astronomy. Together, this group operates a network of ground stations which examine a particular volume of sky in Southwestern Ontario for meteors. From the triangulation that the network makes possible, it is possible to back out the trajectory of the incoming particles, their speeds, and if they are big enough (fireballs) where any meteorites might land.

PSURF, January 14, 2011

This isn't a review since, well, PSURF #2 of 2011 was actually me! CPSX was kind enough to record the talk for me and you can watch it by downloading the avi from this page:

http://cpsx.uwo.ca/NewsAndEvents/recordings.html

(direct link to avi here)

The title was "The 2008 Phoenix Lander: A Scientist's Perspective on a Space Mission." My intent in the talk was to shed some light on what goes on inside of a space mission and how they are put together, rather than focusing on the science results or engineering design. 

Back to Bushnell

When I was 8 or 9 years old, I remember having an interest in astronomy and so my parents bought me a department store telescope, one christmas. While it wasn't one of the dreaded Tasco 'scopes, it was only a slight improvement: a Bushnell. It was refractor a couple of feet long with a two-inch plastic lens, two 0.85" eyepieces (15mm and 5mm) with astonishingly small apertures, a couple of plastic barlows and a star diagonal. To its credit, it did have a rudimentary viewfinder and extendable wooden legs for the altitude-azimuth platform. Unfortunately, aside from the Moon, I wasn't really able to see much of anything, despite many nights of attempts. I do remember one very bright star which I used to look at and watch how it would shimmer and change colour while close to the horizon (Based on the year and the view from my window, Stellarium suggests that this was Sirius). Given my inability to get much out of the thing, I pretty much abandoned it and let it sit idle in my room waiting for the night or two a year when my curiosity would grab at me and I would haul it out again.

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.

2011 PSURF #1: Dr. Phil Stooke

Giovanni Schiaparelli's map of Mars showing the imaginary canals (image from wikipedia)

Maps, Maps, Everywhere! That was the theme at this year's inaugural PSERF meeting at UWO given by Phil Stooke. By the way, PSERF stands for Planetary Science & Exploration Research Forum, and truth be told, I'm writing that down here not only for your benefit, but also so I can refer back later and remember what it stands for. To say that the discussions are eclectic is a bit of an understatement. This was my third meeting and so far we've had a presentation on Space Weapons, a report by CPSX's own Bhairavi Shankar on an impact cratering short course, and now a discussion of early terrestrial cartography.

Still for those of us interested in space exploration, maps provide a useful example. In its purest sense, exploration is about "filling in the gaps." Maps also give us a good way to examine the state of knowledge at any one time. For instance, if you look between the "Cantino Planisphere" (a world map from around 1500) and compare it to "The New and Correct Map of The World" from 1700 (you can find both in the slides linked to this article) you'll see how the age of maritime exploration managed to give us a better picture of our own planet.

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:

CATP Seminar Series, Dr. Gordon Southam

Astrobiology is a big, big field and so many of its aspects remain a bit of a learning experience for me. One of the fun parts of being a fellow of the Canadian Astrobiology Training Program (CATP or "Cat-Pee" to us in the program, part of NSERC/NRCAN's CREATE program) is that we hold seminars every two weeks that are broadcast across the country. The seminars give those of us working in one part of the field a chance to see what is happening in other parts, and to learn about potential synergies with our own work. My area of focus is habitability and water cycles, and so last week's talk, given by Dr. Gordon Southam of the University of Western Ontario, a hard-core microbiologist, was quite a departure.

While I'll be the first to admit that some of the material was over my head, there were a number of interesting aspects which were a little surprising for me. I plan on using this space to discuss those aspects from this talk and from future talks. So hopefully the "CATP Seminar Series" will become a regular feature here. Don't think of it so much as a review, but instead look at it as an exploration or a discovery journal. The full list of upcomming talks can be found on the CREATE website, located here.

Dr. Southam's talk, delivered last Friday, was entitled "Biogeochemical Processes from the perspective of a Bacteria." His main take-home point was that conditions that are extreme (high temperature, pressure, salinity, pH) to you and me are normal to certain strains of bacteria. At first that statement seems a bit simplistic. After all, if bacteria have evolved to take advantage of so-called extreme conditions, then naturally those would be the environments under which they would be most "comfortable" (by which I mean their biological processes would be optimized). Thus even the term for these organisms, extremophiles, is a bit misleading.

First Impressions of CPSX: A Smart and Noble Gamble

[My new home: The Centre for Planetary Science and Exploration at the University of Western Ontario]

Before I begin, thanks to all my readers out there! It wasn't long ago that I had thought no one came by this space. But to my astonishment, sometime in the last 24 hours "HTWT" just passed a thousand page views (6-month rolling window) for the first time. I suppose I will have to write more often now - and try to encourage some dialog! I also know what you like, with my two Astrobio posts making the top 3 most viewed. Since I'm in Western partially on a CATP (Canadian Astrobiology Training Program) grant, you can look forward to more of the same in the years to come.

On to business: I want to give my first impressions of my new academic home, the Centre for Planetary Science and Exploration (CPSX) at the University of Western Ontario. To my knowledge it is the only academic organization of its kind in Canada, completely devoted to the study of other worlds and how to go about exploring them. It's a young group, only a few years old, and did not exist when I left for the US back in 2003.

An Astrobiology tempest: Arsenic Life?

Is this an SEM Image of the first known lifeform to use a different biochemistry from the rest of us?

So many interesting things to mention about the recent findings of (partially) Arsenic-based life in Mono Lake, CA. First of all there's the discovery itself, detailed in a paper by Felisa Wolfe-Simon over at Science Magazine. But there's also something to be said about the way that NASA has handled the media surrounding the discovery. Additionally, in the week since the announcement, we've had some serious backlash by bloggers, including particularly pointed remarks by fellow science blogger, and microbiologist Rosie Redfield over at RRResearch. Some seem to think that "research paper review by blog" is a good thing and a sign of the times, but is it a substitute for the peer review process? Most troubling of all are the questions being raised in some spheres about the scope of NASA's astrobiological work and the worth of the planetary sciences. After all, they argue, what's Space got to do with studying pond scum on a lake in California?

A Year at York

I've just completed my first three days at Western, and it seems like a good time to reflect back on the year of working at York. I should mention first that I will not be disappearing entirely from York. Since I will be continuing to live in Toronto, and will be periodically travelling back and forth to London, the good folks at York have been kind enough to offer me a place to hang my hat while I am in Toronto. As such, my activities with the York University Observatory will continue, though they will be scaled back compared to what they were before my move.