Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter: at the Moon and Returning Data!

One of the first images of the lunar surface from LROC. The camera has a high enough resolution to see the equipment left at the Apollo landing sites, and those are some of the top priority targets once LRO reaches its primary mission orbit.

I was completely delinquent about reporting this due to the craziness that was my June, but the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter launched on June 18 and has arrived at the moon and is already returning data. As a Mars scientist that is amazing to me. If it were a Mars probe, there would be ~7 months between launch and orbital insertion, but with the moon, it only takes a few days. Last I heard they are still refining the orbit, but the pictures from LROC, the high resolution camera (similar to the HiRISE camera orbiting Mars) are spectacular, and they will only get better. And remember, since LRO is at the moon rather than at Mars, it is going to be blasting data back to earth through a firehose rather than a straw. Many hundreds of gigabits per day! I think this mission is going to do a lot to bring the Moon back into the spotlight.

Now Back to our Regularly Scheduled Programming

As of yesterday at noon, I am happy to report that I passed my A-exam and now have a M.S. in Astronomy, and am a PhD candidate! That’s right, I somehow managed to convince my committee that shooting rocks with lasers and looking at landing sites on Mars is worthy of a PhD. Being grilled about the fundamentals of your science by Jim Bell (my adviser and lead scientist for the rover color cameras), Steve Squyres (lead scientist for the rover missions), Bob Kay (petrologist and geochemist), and Yervant Terzian (radio astronomer) is a grueling experience. But then at the end being complimented on your work is a great feeling.

And then relaxing and hanging out with friends, going berry-picking, eating good Indian food: even better.

My advice to future grad students facing their thesis proposal exam (every school seems to have a different name for this exam…): start planning early. The earlier you have an outline of your thesis and can start going over it and discussing it with your adviser, the smoother the process will go. Also, find out about the paperwork your school requires for the exam ahead of time so you don’t have to deal with it the day-of.

Anyway, I hope I’ll be able to post here a little more regularly now that things have settled down. Have a great 4th of July!

Volcanic Explosion Seen From Space

This is completely awesome:

(Courtesy of Ian O’Neil and Richard Drumm)

Buzz Says: Aim for Mars

Buzz Aldrin, of walking-on-the-freakin’-moon fame recently wrote an editorial for CNN about the future of NASA. I’ll let you follow this link to the full article, but here are a couple of excerpts:

More than just exploring a hostile new world, Apollo 11 was about bold vision and great risk, about the obstacles a great nation could overcome with dedication, courage and teamwork. It was about choosing a goal that exceeded our grasp — and then reaching across history to make it happen.

…

By refocusing our space program on Mars for America’s future, we can restore the sense of wonder and adventure in space exploration that we knew in the summer of 1969. We won the moon race; now it’s time for us to live and work on Mars, first on its moons and then on its surface.

Exploring and colonizing Mars can bring us new scientific understanding of climate change, of how planet-wide processes can make a warm and wet world into a barren landscape. By exploring and understanding Mars, we may gain key insights into the past and future of our own world.

Surreal-looking HiRISE Picture of the Day

I don’t have time to write a full post since I am busy trying to get a presentable outline of my PhD thesis prepared to show to my committee next week. So in the mean time, enjoy this beautiful and bizarre HiRISE image of defrosting terrain on Mars. Click the image or this link to go to the HiRISE page and see the full version.

Carnival of Space #108 : Solstice Edition!

Another week, another carnival of space! This one is special though because yesterday was the northern summer solstice! Go check out the Carnival over at Starts With a Bang, and enjoy the long hours of daylight (if you live in the North) or go have a snowball fight (if you live in the south).

Fun with Lasers

Ladies and gentlemen: I just spent a week vaporizing rocks with a laser!

Now, after your first thought of “Whoa, awesome” wears off, you may be wondering why I would do such a thing. Because it’s fun, obviously. But also because the Mars Science Laboratory rover “Curiosity” will be doing the same thing on Mars.

The ChemCam instrument uses an infrared laser to shoot pulses of light at rocks. The light is so intense and deposits so much energy into a tiny spot on the target, that the molecules break up into their constituent atoms and the electrons on those atoms are ripped off. This creates an expanding cloud of super-hot plasma (many thousands of degrees). Of course, atoms really would prefer to be quietly sitting in molecules with all of their electrons peacefully orbiting their nucleus: that’s the lowest energy configuration, and nature always tries to minimize the energy in a system.

So as the plasma cools, the electrons join back up with the atoms, and in the process they give up some of their energy in the form of light. Since electrons can only orbit atoms at certain energy levels, the light given off can only be certain wavelengths as well. Even better, every element on the periodic table has different energy levels, so they each give off distinctive colors of light. If one were able to collect that light and measure its wavelength, one could tell what atoms were in the target.

That’s why we shoot rocks with lasers. By zapping the rocks on Mars we will be able to calculate their chemistry and determine what kind of rocks they are and how they got that way. This technique, which goes by the official name of “Laser-Induced Brakdown Spectoscopy” or LIBS also has the advantage that it is fast. The laser pulses ten times per second, and each pulse returns a spectrum full of information. For most analyses, we use the average of a few spectra, but still, it only takes seconds to collect the data.

Analyzing it is the tricky part, and that’s what I will be doing over the next few years: figuring out the best way to look at LIBS data to extract the information quickly and accurately.

Carnival of Space #107

After three flights and a nice nighttime drive during which I got to watch a  thunderstorm raging off on the horizon, lighting up the clouds like paper lanterns, I am in Los Alamos! I am here all week doing lab work: I finally get to shoot rocks with lasers! I’ll post some more info about why we are attacking rocks with sci-fi weapons at some point this week, but for now, go check out the 107th carnival of space over at Innumerable Worlds!

Big Picture: Mercury MESSENGER

If you’re not already following the Boston Globe’s Big Picture blog, you should be. They always have spectacular photos, often of current events, but also quite often of space-related stuff! Today’s post is about the MESSENGER mission to Mercury. Go check it out.

Carnival of Space #106

Hello folks, apologies for the lack of posts lately. I have been keeping busy trying to write up a draft of a paper on the Gale crater landing site for MSL, which is taking a very long time and becoming very large. I don’t anticipate having lots of time to post here this month. Even as I work on the draft, I will be traveling out to Los Alamos National Lab next week to begin analyzing some rock samples by vaporizing them with a laser, and then I’ll be rushing back to Ithaca to try to cobble together a coherent outline for my PhD thesis. I then get to defend that outline in front of my committee in early July. Assuming I survive that, they pat me on the back, hand me a master’s degree, and say “now go do all that stuff you listed in your outline”.

And of course, as if that wasn’t enough to keep me busy, I’m involved in a month-long novel outlining project over at the writing forum Liberty Hall. My novel is going to be character-focused realistic science fiction involving space pirates (sorry, no peg legs or eye patches here), colonizing and mining the planets of 55 Cancri, and lots of moral dilemmas. In other words, I’ve got my work cut out for me…

All of which is to say that posts here will be less frequent (unless you want to hear about planning a sci-fi novel or the mundane aspects of making figures for a paper). In the meantime though, other space-bloggers are writing some great stuff, and as always you can get a good sampling at the Carnival of Space. This week it is hosted by Next Big Future. Go take a look!