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.

A big day for Planetary

 The last approach image taken by New Horizons before closest approach. As the planetary community waits with bated breath for tonight's downlink, we consider this sparkling new image - the best view yet of the furthest object from our sun yet observed by spacecraft. Pluto, a world in its own right, no matter what label we put on it.

Like many of my colleagues, I got up early this morning to witness an event billed as the "completion of our initial reconnaissance of the solar system." Just before 8 in the morning, Eastern Daylight Time, the New Horizons spacecraft - our very first New Frontiers mission - made its closest approach to the (now) Dwarf Planet Pluto.

From an outsider's perspective, I can imagine that one of the most puzzling aspects of this event was the very non-event of it. Sure there were scads of folks with tiny American flags counting down and cheering at the Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, MD. The NASA brass was there too - Charlie Bolton, the Administrator himself, was giving interviews along with the other principals and there was a media circus of lights and cameras.

But really, the action was rather remote. There was no confirmation of success via satellite, no breathtaking images poping up on the screen. Despite the atmosphere feeling much more like a spacecraft landing than a pure flyby, it stands in stark contrast to the three landing events in which I have participated, even Huygens landing on Saturn's moon Titan.

And how could it not? Pluto, out beyond the orbit of Neptune is over 4.5 hours away by radio wave, and, no doubt, the team doesn't wish to waste precious minutes near close encounter slewing the spacecraft away from its prize to transmit what they have seen so far back to earth. Even if they did it would be after noon when they arrived. Later still as, certainly, after all this time, New Horizons will have sufficient discipline programmed in to collect togther the best of the best before sending back home for us tonight.

Thus the true celebration will take place later today in a worldwide event called Plutopalooza. I will be participating in the York University Astronomy Club's edition. This morning's event was instead more about having a picture of cheering scientists to go with the morning press, and also a meetup for the true believers. Perish the thought, but we don't yet know how things went. While there is joy, and perhaps a bit of relief that the time of encounter has finally arrived - I can tell you from experience that it is tinged with a hint of sick anticipation still. That won't be dispelled until tonight.

But as we wait for word from the spacecraft, we have a beautiful new picture to wonder at. Anticipating the need to fill that data vacuum, the team held back their best approach image which I have reproduced at the top of this post. It shows the feature now famous around the world as "the Heart" and a surprising range of coloration across the surface. It is almost as if the dwarf planet is streaked with paint. But the coloring agent here are different volatiles - likely some nitrogen, methane, ammonia and other trace compounds.

Unfortunately for a planetary scientist like myself, we already know that the atmosphere will be thin. Pluto is several decades beyond perihelion now and is headed out towards the far part of its orbit. But what remains on the surface was likely forged, at least in part, during those 'warmer and wetter times.' In fact, the red coloration led to Bolden describing Pluto as "the other red planet."

But all references to Mars aside, Pluto is indeed its own world with its own fascinating geology. The image above doesn't give the whole picture, but it is clear enough for us to know that the close encounter images will reveal many different processes operating on the body and competing with each other to leave their mark on its surface.

We had a hint of this. Neptue's moon Triton (pictured below) is thought to be a captured Kuiper Belt Object, and was far more active and more varied than had been suspected from previous telescopic observation. Here there were frostier areas littered across its vaguely reddish surface and the enigmatic cantaloupe terrain (at upper left) which might be tectonic. Dark streaks cut across the surface of the body, the remnants of nitrogen geysers erupting out into space driven by a solid state greenhouse effect. Could this perhaps be the source of the darker "Whale" terrain to the left of Pluto's "Heart?" Both bodies have a bit of a mottled or scalloped appearance, especially in the interfaces between different terrain types. This is also seen in other sublimation driven landscapes, such as on Comets and the "Swiss-cheese" terrain of the Martian southern polar cap.

Not surprisingly, there are also differences between Pluto and Triton. While they share a similar coloration, likely as the result of similar processing and similar composition, in other ways they are unalike. The bluish-greenish frostiness near the terminator on Triton does not have a clear analog, at least not in images captured thus far. For its part, Pluto also has significantly more dark terrain on its surface and more crater-like features. For much more than that, we will have to await this evening.

New Horizons is the first of the New Frontiers Missions (Juno is NF2 and Osiris-Rex is NF3). Meant to be more responsive than a Flagship, yet better funded and more complex than a Discovery-Class mission, it's impressive what we've seen so far and I can't wait to see what's yet to come from this new class of exploration mission.

Oh, and for those of you just coming upon the field - not to worry about that "completing the reconnaissance of the solar system" remark, there will be plenty of exploring left to do. Mariner 4, the first fly-by of Mars, revealed only a moon-like cratered highland. This is certainly not how we think of that planet today. Mariner 10 saw less than half of Mercury's surface - a map that was not completed until 30 years later by Messenger.

Even after New Horizons, a good chunk of Pluto remains in darkness. While we're unlikely to be back within the next few decades, perhaps even within my lifetime, who knows what mysteries might be lurking there? That's the thrill of planetary, and it's days like today where we finally fill in the map a little bit more which makes this area of such great interest to me.

Onwards and Outwards

 

Above: Steven Oleson's concept of a Titan submersible combines two of my favorite ideas for future space exploration in our solar system. Below, the polar layered terrain of Mars as revealed by HiRise is a record of past climate just waiting to be read. The story it tells has significance not just for Mars, but perhaps for the Earth as well.

Spurred on by Slate.com reporter Matthew Francis, I have recently got to thinking about where in the solar system I would most like to send a space mission if budget were no object. My comments with Matthew made it into an article in Slate which was also picked up by the National Post here in Canada. But there's only so much you can say in a newspaper or magazine article. 

Instead, exploring this topic this seems like excellent material for this space, and you can find my own personal top four below the cut. By the way, I can't forget adding a thank-you to JPL Engineer Keri Bean, currently working with the Dawn mission (though she has shown an affinity for Mars in the past), who recommended me to Matthew in the first place!

A New Term with New Tools

 A new textbook of my own design awaits my Planetary Science students this fall!

I've got to say, as much as I've enjoyed the last 8 months of research, I am looking forward to the coming semester of teaching. Once again, I'll be the course director for PHYS 3070: Planets and Planetary Systems and also for PHYS 4120: Gas and Fluid Dynamics.

This will be my first time teaching a class for the second time, and that means that I have the opportunity to fine tune my course organization and lectures. While both courses went well last year, there is room for improvement which will hopefully be appreciated by the dozen or so Planetary Science and 20ish Fluids students.

State of the Blog (2013-2014)

 A cropped version of Jerusha Lederman's artwork that appeared in ScienceNOW. This artwork was originally commissioned by CRESS for the cover of GRL which accompanied my article on Comet Siding spring. This is the first time my work has ever been given the cover of a publication!

Those of you out there (if indeed anyone is left!) may have noticed the substantial downtick in blogging over the last year or so. Instead of the more typical every other week activity, this space has essentially gone dark with two exceptions. While one of those exceptions, describing how to make a petrographic microscope from easily obtained materials, has proven to be rather popular there is no arguing for a relative lack of published activity in this space.


Largely this is the result of two factors. The first, discussed when I got this job back in 2012 and finished up my first term, is that in some ways I feel a bit more constrained than I once did.

The second and more important is that the fraction of my brain available for dreaming up posting topics has decreased. The most surprising thing to me about being a professor is in how many directions you are simultaneously being pulled. Between applications, collaborations, committee work, teaching, administration and keeping on top of the projects and division of labor between students my thoughts tend more towards the temporal these days. That means that my prime creative hours - on the bus into York and in that time before my colleagues and students arrive at work - are now largely spent putting out fires via email or trying to get ahead of the deluge.

How to make your own Petrographic Microscope

 

Note the colourful chondrules as viewed under cross-polarized light. Such views are used for mineral identification and demonstrate the interaction of light with real-world samples. You too can make your own petrographic microscope! Here's how...

Here at York, as we welcome our newest class of students, we're taking a few minutes to pause and start thinking more about our recruitment efforts in the future. One question that comes up often is how we can stand out in a sea of power point presentations. The solution - to try to be a little more hands-on by bringing in some props to illustrate some of the principles behind our work. To that end,  some of us have come up with little inexpensive demonstrations that capture a lot of what we do here in the Earth and Space Science and Engineering Department. Look for these at university nights at high schools everywhere in the coming months!

For my part, I put together a little, inexpensive rig that gives students a taste of a few different themes. Basically, you could call it the poor man's petrographic microscope. It presents a neat little introduction to some interesting optics with serious engineering applications as well as some earth science. By using meteorite thin sections as my specimen, I can springboard into planetary science and spacecraft and how we can use simple techniques to learn a great deal from the materials we encounter in our exploration.

State of the Blog (2012-2013)

In some ways the last year since the 201-2012 state of the blog has been very quiet, certainly there have been relatively few posts. But in other ways, under the digital surface, it has been one of the biggest years yet for me! From the landing of MSL to my hiring by York University, it has truly been a year of monumental changes. Yet, my daily routine has changed little (well except for the added mechanics of teaching, granting and committee work) - I still head into York on the 196 and try my best to learn a bit more about the planets and how to unlock their secrets each day.

A Surreal Summer

 A photo I took of myself last summer in Pasadena, CA while working on the Mars Science Laboratory Mission which appears on the cover of today's St. John's Telegram. Can you tell that I'd been doing Mars Time for a whole month by that point? In some ways, this summer has been almost as surreal as last summer.

It has been a long slog of a summer, but today there's a fallish tinge in the air here in Toronto and I can feel the semester beginning to creep up on me once again. One thing I never really grasped about this job when I took it was how many different components there are to being a prof.  I will admit that I was certainly aware of each of those things but not of how much time they can eat up, collectively.

Whither HTWT?

Readers of this space may have noted that posting frequency has really fallen off a cliff in the past year or so. There's a couple of reasons for that. First, as a full time faculty member at York, my workload has increased (or at least my ability to rearrange my workload has decreased). But more importantly, I'm still trying to sort out exactly what it is that I am trying to do with this space.

As you'll recall, this was originally meant to document the pathway from postdoctoral to something else. As that progressed, it came to include more topics in academia, research, planetary science and outreach. And while none of that has really changed, the fact that I could string up a "Mission Accomplished" banner on the topic of my original goal as of last summer has given me pause.

I've come to ask myself the question about several posts: not only is this something I could comment on, but is it something I should comment on? While I still feel like the same person, I am not so naive as to think that my comments can be dismissed as easily as they were before. In short, no longer do I represent myself alone (if ever that was true).

So what does this mean, going forward? Well, now that I have my feet under me a little bit, I think I can bend the trajectory of this space a little bit. After all, why not use it to weigh in on topics of concern in the work that I do, and to bring forward explanations of what that work is? I think that's the path I will try to tread. We'll see how effectively that can be done over the coming weeks, months and years.

Dare Mighty Things, Canada

Canada was the 3rd country to build a satellite, Alouette, shown above (Photo courtesy CRC). From the very start, ours was an international effort, but one that has been fraught with many ups and downs as my recent reading of "Canada's Fifty Years in Space" (written by the resident of the neighboring office to mine at York, Gordon Shepherd) has revealed. On this anniversary, I can't help but wonder, what might the future hold?

2012 was a significant year for space exploration. Not only was this past year the 50^th anniversary of the launch of Canada’s first satellite, Alouette, but it was also the 50^th anniversary of the start of planetary exploration with Mariner 2’s voyage to Venus.

Our exploration of the planets continues to this day. Just this past August, as millions around the world watched, the Mars Science Laboratory Rover Curiosity achieved a daring landing on the dusty soils of Gale Crater in equatorial Mars. Over the next two years, the largest and most capable planetary rover ever developed will climb the five-kilometer high Mount Sharp and will search for the tantalizing clues to why a place that was once very much like the early Earth diverged to become a frozen desert. It will also help to determine if those early conditions might have led to life on our neighboring world.

I was fortunate to be at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena on the night of the landing. As I cheered them on from mission control, the team that successfully met the challenge of delivering Curiosity to Mars celebrated. A product of eight long hard years of work, the landing was a great triumph for the United States as a Nation and a message to the world that their country can still accomplish inspiring things.

In a small way it was a triumph for Canada as well. For a relatively meager investment of $17.5 million, Canada was able to provide Curiosity with an indispensable tool – the alpha particle x-ray spectrometer that will determine the proportions of different elements in the Martian soil. In turn, a team of Canadian scientists was welcomed into the fold.

Some might say that this is another example of Canada “punching above our weight” on the international stage. After all, Canadians make up over 5% of the team that will decide what the rover will do each day, despite having contributed less than 1% to its costs.

However, such a statement ignores the fact that, compared to the United States and even ailing Europe, our Space Program is relatively undersized both in absolute terms and proportional to our population. Despite drastically reducing its commitment in the years since Apollo, the US still spends nearly $60 per citizen per year in space, Canada under $7.

The present situation contrasts strongly with our history. Canada, the third nation to build and place a satellite in orbit, was an early achiever. From the Canadarm to RadarSat to the CCDs that captured Curiosity’s first glimpse of the Martian surface our expertise remains world class.

Furthermore, as a nation spread across a vast expanse we stand to benefit more than most from investments in space. Orbiting spacecraft are the only effective way that we can communicate across the distances that separate us, seek out the natural resource wealth lying undiscovered beneath our territory and monitor the health of our atmosphere, oceans, forests and cities in trust for future generations.

The innovations that improve our daily lives and our ability to accomplish these goals come from technologies that push the limits of what is possible. It is not a stretch to say that the techniques being pioneered today on Mars, where the conditions and challenges are more severe, will lead to tomorrow’s advances. If we do not, as a nation, choose to do these things, those spoils will not be ours.

Fortunately, robotic exploration is economical. We could actually lead! Had Canada been responsible for all aspects of building and launching Curiosity it would have cost us just a tenth of one cent for every tax dollar spent in Canada. Projects like this would give us a robust exploration program that would enhance our expertise at home and enable our space industry to become more competitive abroad while making us stronger partners in international projects.

But beyond our ability to calculate monetary costs and benefits, planetary exploration is an inspirational exercise. Today, these robots are the true explorers, their cameras give us a human perspective on worlds that until recently were nothing more than points of light in the sky. Such images are the reason why many of us choose Engineering and the Sciences as a career. Couldn’t we all take pride if spacecraft made right here at home were opening up new vistas of their own?

At the press conference that followed the touchdown, Charles Elachi, Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory cited the Olympics. He said that he felt his team had won the Gold medal with their picture-perfect landing. Like the Olympics, some cite Space Exploration as a dream not worth the cost. It is also said that, as Canadians, we pride ourselves on being a pragmatic people. But are Peace, Order and Good Government all there is to us? For my part, on the eve of our next 50 years in space, I feel Canada also can dare mighty things. 

__________

Originally, I had intended to submit this as a Newspaper Op-Ed, but in the end decided that this was the better venue. I'd also like to thank a former professor of mine and a current colleague on MSL, Dr. Laurie Leshin, for help with editing. 

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.

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.