The Earth and our Moon from Voyager 1

"There is a tide in the affairs of men, 

Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. 

Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. 

On such a full sea are we now afloat. 

And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures." 

-William Shakespeare

This picture of the Earth and Moon were taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a distance of 7.25 million miles (~11.66 million km). Taken on 18 September 1977 (when I was -6 years old!), this picture as the very first ever taken that showed the Earth and the Moon in one single frame.

Voyager 1 is the most distant piece of human engineering and human exploration. It's fanciful to sit and think sometimes about how far away it really is now. As of the exact time of this writing, Voyager 1 is 20,661,735,297 km from the Earth and still going. The Voyagers and their mission were a hallmark of early space exploration. Now is truly the time for us to work together to take this current of humanity's evolution as a spacefaring species, and find our ventures among the other realms in the cosmic ocean.


(Note: in the picture above, the Moon appears very close to the Earth. However, the Moon is really about as far away from us as 30 times the diameter of the Earth! The picture certainly wasn't taken from equal distances to both Earth and Moon)

Holy Planets, Batman

The Google Doodle celebrating the TRAPPIST-1 system announcement on 22 February 2017

Hopefully you've already heard about today's announcement during a NASA press conference about the confirmation of discovery of 7 Earth-sized planets around the star TRAPPIST-1, three of which are in that star system's Goldilocks Zone for liquid water. This star system is only 39 lightyears away from Earth (coincidentally, that's 12 parsecs, so just within one good Kessel Run if you have the right ship). 39 lightyears is practically down the street in the context of our galaxy (which spans over 100,000 lightyears from one end to the other). This announcement isn't only exciting, but it also comes with a lot of implications for astrobiology. We have the capabilities right now to start observing these planets closely to look for signs of biosignatures in their atmosphere and that will only get better in the coming years (especially when the James Webb Space Telescope goes into operation). I'm still in the process of crunching out my Ph.D. dissertation, so I can't write up all of my thoughts about this incredible announcement right now, but definitely stay tuned to the exoplanet and planetary science community to see what more we can learn in the coming years about these world so close to our own. 

Credit: JPL/NASA

Juno's first in-orbit picture of Jupiter and Galilean Moons is awesome

NASA's Juno spacecraft, now in orbit of Jupiter, has taken its first in-orbit image of the Jovian system. This incredible image was taken by the instrument JunoCam from ~2.7 million miles away from Jupiter.

Here's the information about the image from NASA (taken from the page where you can download the full-size image):

"This color view from NASA's Juno spacecraft is made from some of the first images taken by JunoCam after the spacecraft entered orbit around Jupiter on July 5th (UTC). The view shows that JunoCam survived its first pass through Jupiter's extreme radiation environment, and is ready to collect images of the giant planet as Juno begins its mission.

The image was taken on July 10, 2016 at 5:30 UTC, when the spacecraft was 2.7 million miles (4.3 million kilometers) from Jupiter on the outbound leg of its initial 53.5-day capture orbit. The image shows atmospheric features on Jupiter, including the Great Red Spot, and three of Jupiter's four largest moons.

JunoCam will continue to image Jupiter during Juno's capture orbits. The first high-resolution images of the planet will be taken on August 27 when the Juno spacecraft makes its next close pass to Jupiter.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The Juno mission is part of the New Frontiers Program managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena."

This picture shows the relative size and structure of Juno and offers information about the instruments. You can find more info on the NASA page for Juno.

"Voyagers" by Santiago Menghini

Voyager 1, traversing the heavens (NASA/JPL)

The Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977, at a time when the alignments of the outer planets would allow for a "Grand Tour" of the Solar System. 

Voyager 1 traveled past Jupiter and Saturn, discovering volcanoes on Io and the thick atmosphere of Titan, before it was turned around to take pictures of the planets as it traveled beyond their orbits. The famous Pale Blue Dot picture was taken by Voyager 1 when it was over 40 times further from the Sun than Earth. Since that time, Voyager 1 has passed beyond the region of space where the solar wind from our star dominates over other stars; Voyager 1 is now an interstellar traveler.

Voyager 2, while not garnering as much fame as its twin, is the only spacecraft to ever flyby Uranus and Neptune. All of our best detailed information regarding those worlds and their moons comes from Voyager 2, which passed by Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. For instance, the odd surface of Neptune's moon Triton was revealed by Voyager 2, giving us the first hints that cryovolcanism is a process which occurs on the icy worlds of our solar system.

Recently, filmmaker Santiago Menghini has put together a short film highlighting the journeys of the Voyager spacecraft. Including photographs from the missions as well as sounds from the plasma frequencies of the planets, the film is a tribute to the successes of the Voyager mission. I highly recommend checking out the movie (below, or at Vimeo). Turn up your speakers' volume and full screen this one, you won't regret it.

Voyagers from Santiago Menghini on Vimeo.

NASA's "Mars Explorers Wanted" Posters

NASA and Kennedy Space Center have unveiled a new series of posters available for free download. These posters, called "Mars Explorers Wanted", show some of the possible jobs that will need to be filled by Mars explorers of the near future. You can find the full series here: Mars Explorers Wanted.

Solar Stuff, Arcing Away

This is definitely one of the 

coolest videos you'll see today! 

Here's some recent footage collected in the extreme ultraviolet from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which shows a magnetic arc of material on the sun lifting up and then blasting some of the material off into space! 

Here's a description of what you're seeing from Steele Hill and Sarah Frazier of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center:

"An elongated, streaming arch of solar material rose up at the sun’s edge before breaking apart in this animation of imagery captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on April 28, 2016. While some of the solar material fell back into the sun, the disintegration of this magnetic arch also sent some particles streaming into space. These details were captured in a type of light that’s invisible to human eyes, called extreme ultraviolet. The images were colorized in gold for easy viewing."

Answering the Question "Are We Alone?"

 A TEDx Talk by Shawn Domagal-Goldman

Shawn Domagal-Goldman may be one of the hippest of our current generation of astrobiologists. I've heard him speak several times and have found his manner of speaking profound and enjoyable. Domagal-Goldman's work has focused on global geochemistry of terrestrial worlds, including the Earth, as well as on how we can characterize extrasolar planets from afar to learn more about their surface conditions and possibilities for supporting biology. Here's a video of Domagal-Goldman's talk from TEDxMidAtlantic 2015 where he considers how NASA is currently going about answering the all-important question "Are We Alone?":

Voyaging, for Almost Four Decades

This beautiful image was produced by NASA to commemorate the anniversary of the Voyager spacecraft, which were launched in August and September of 1977. 

We'll soon be closing on 40 years since the launch of Voyagers 1 and 2. These missions have done so much for planetary science and are still alive, continuing to send data back to us about the space environment along their travels. They may last as much as another 5 or 10 years before they run so low on power that all of their instruments shut down. 

Even after the Voyagers have shut down their instruments and died, they will still travel; out there amongst the stars, the furthest reach of humanity, they will continue on.

Jupiter, King of Worlds

Jupiter is the king of the planets of our solar system. Jupiter is almost 26,000 times more massive than the Moon and 318 times more massive than Earth! Even though Jupiter is still less than one tenth of one percent as massive as the Sun, the king of our worlds is over 2.5 times greater in mass than the rest of all of the planets in the solar system combined (unless there really is a Planet IX out there, which would only change that number a little bit; a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that if Planet IX is there and is 10 times the mass of the Earth, then Jupiter would be about 2.3 times more massive than all the other planets combined)!

Jupiter is a behemoth of planetary mass in our solar system. Here you can see the relative masses of the 8 planets. (image from Das steinerne Herz on Wikipedia)

Jupiter was one of the five planets beyond Earth known by many ancient peoples. Jupiter's apparent point of light in the night's sky was associated with the god Marduk by the ancient Babylonians, while ancient Chinese beliefs personified Jupiter as the Fu Star (Fuxing), association the bright light of Jupiter with prosperity. It was from the ancient Romans that Jupiter gained the name we use for it. Jupiter in Roman mythology is the king of the gods, just as Zeus was the king of the gods in Greek mythology. We even came to name one of the days of our weeks after Jupiter (though in English, our word for that day (Thursday) has derived from the Germanic mythologies and the god Thor).

It was Galileo's discovery of four of the moons of Jupiter in 1610 and his writing of them that nearly caused the Catholic Church to murder Galileo (the idea that there could be moons orbiting other planets was certainly considered blasphemy against the church at that time). Below you can see a page from the Sidereus Nuncius ("Starry Messenger"; Galileo's 1610 book on his astronomical observations), where Galileo drew Jupiter and the moons he had discovered:

Although Galileo's discoveries of Jupiter's moons propelled astronomy and our understanding of the universe forward, it was Giovanni Cassini who first drew pictures of the features on Jupiter that he could observe with his telescope. For instance, below are some images from Cassini where he first shows what we believe was the discovery of the Great Red Spot (or, at least, discovery of a spot which may have preceded the Great Red Spot by over a century).

Perhaps one of the coolest of the earliest drawings of Jupiter came in 1880, and can be found in the collections of astronomer and artist E.L. Trouvelot. His drawing of Jupiter was created during an observation on November 1st of 1880, and clearly shows the Great Red Spot:

These early observations and drawings must have sent people's minds racing with wonderment at what those features on the king of worlds could be. However, once we started incorporating photographic imaging with observational astronomy and, especially, started sending spacecraft to explore the other worlds we started constraining what it was we were seeing on Jupiter (while also raising lots of more questions!). 

The Pioneer 10 spacecraft was the first extension of humanity to fly by Jupiter back in 1973. Here's one of the images taken during that encounter with the giant world. Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to measure the radiation and magnetic fields surrounding Jupiter. It was also the first to take images of the moons of Jupiter up-close. Pioneer 10 passed within 81,000 miles of the cloudtops of Jupiter on it's flyby over 40 years ago.

Jupiter has since had several other spacecraft go zooming by, most of which at least took pictures if not full-on collecting data and targeting Jupiter and its moons for observation; for instance, check out this table I stole from Wikipedia on spacecraft that have flown by along with the dates of closest approach and the minimum distance from Jupiter at that time:

-----Spacecraft-----	Closest -----Approach------	-----Distance-----
Pioneer 10	December 3, 1973	130,000 km
Pioneer 11	December 4, 1974	34,000 km
Voyager 1	March 5, 1979	349,000 km
Voyager 2	July 9, 1979	570,000 km
Ulysses	February 8, 1992	408,894 km
	February 4, 2004	120,000,000 km
Cassini	December 30, 2000	10,000,000 km
New Horizons	February 28, 2007	2,304,535 km

The only spacecraft so far to be sent into orbit of Jupiter was the Galileo Spacecraft, which operated in the Jovian system for over 8 years (from its arrival in December of 1995 until we crashed it into Jupiter (something we like to call "de-orbiting") in September of 2003). Galileo was used to study Jupiter's atmosphere and rings and to image and study the volcanoes on Io. Galileo discovered that Ganymede has its own, very strong magnetic field and really gave us most of the best data from which we have concluded that there is likely a deep subsurface ocean on Europa. The Galileo spacecraft really unlocked Jupiter and set the grounds for future spacecraft to visit that giant world.

An artist's concept of the Galileo spacecraft at Jupiter, with Io's volcanoes erupting nearby

Of the upcoming missions to Jupiter, one of them is actually going to get there very soon. The Juno spacecraft (see image to the left for a digital image of the spacecraft) is a NASA mission to Jupiter which was launched in August of 2011 and will arrive at Jupiter on July 4th of this year. Juno, named after the wife of Jupiter who was able to see through his clouds, will study Jupiter's composition, magnetic and gravitational fields, and will study the various processes within the Jovian atmosphere.

Following Juno, there are two missions in the works for studying the icy moons of Jupiter. JUICE (the Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer) is an ESA mission slated for launch in 2022. JUICE is designed to study primarily Ganymede and Callisto, though it should also fly by Europa a couple of times as well. A NASA mission set for launch on the early 2020s (likely 2022, as of now) is also in the works. The mission is currently called the Europa Multiple-Flyby Mission, though that name will surely change when the mission is more fully developed. This mission will focus on studying Europa. It will tell us about the surface processes and composition of Europa, will tell us a bit about the internal geology and composition of this moon, and, most importantly for astrobiology, will seek to determine the existence of Europa's ocean and determine what it can about the composition and possible surface-interactions of this ocean. 

Though JUICE and the Europa Multiple-Flyby Mission will target the icy moons of Jupiter, they will teach us a lot about the Jovian system in general (like how Jupiter's magnetic field and the chaotic whipping of particles through that field effect the moons of Jupiter). Taken along with Juno, the next couple of decades of research on Jupiter should be highly revealing, telling us a lot about the king of the planets but also helping us to uncover new mysteries and new questions about this behemoth in our solar system. 

In closing out this post, here is a quote about Jupiter, the god, from Ovid:

"Jupiter, from on high, smiles at the perjuries of lovers."

When it comes to the "perjuries of lovers" on Earth, Jupiter the planet, just as Jupiter the god, most certainly has no interest in our shortcomings. Though there is a beautiful history to consider in astrology, and Jupiter most certainly has played a prominent role there, the real test of time for Jupiter has revealed this king of our planets to be a massive and active monster of nature, though also beautiful in its presentation of itself to the universe.

Jupiter Drawing, from Kelvin Ma at Wikipedia

Phobos on My Phone

This pic of the Martian moon Phobos is rockin' on the background of my phone today. I recently downloaded the NASA App, which allows you to set up your phone to display a new picture very day from Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). The app also let's you download cool ringtones and notification sound-clips that are made of up of sounds from space (rockets launching, the sounds of the planets, and sonified transit data from Kepler light curves). Definitely get this app on your phone. Then you will also be able to rock sweet images, like this one of little Phobos, every single day.

Tom Kucy's "Ground Control: Apollo Archive" - a video memorial of Apollo

...And if she faintly glimmers here, 

And paled is her light, 

Yet alway in her proper sphere 

She's mistress of the night. 

- from "The Moon", Henry David Thoreau

This past month, the NASA-affiliated Project Apollo Archive released a large collection of thousands of images from the Apollo Moon missions on their Flickr page. It's a study in awe and wonderment to sit and click through the images. The archive offers amazing views of the Earth from space, still shots of the astronauts hard at work onboard their spacecraft, and some of the most incredible imagery of humans working on the surface of the Moon. I highly recommend taking some time to revel in the images. 

If seeing these images of our world's largest natural satellite is as fantastical for you as it is for me, then you might also enjoy the following film produced by Tom Kucy and titled "Ground Control: Apollo Archive". Kucy took some of the images and edited them together with audio to provide a short film that is absolutely stunning:

Here's some info from Kucy regarding the video:

"GROUND CONTROL is a small personal project, bringing NASA's Apollo Archive photos to life. I utilized Adobe Photoshop, After Effects and Audition to complete this project. In order to achieve the subtle and weightless movement of each scene, I used an animation technique known as parallaxing. I shifted each image element ever so slightly to push forth the notion of how large and vast space truly is. 

I would love to bring more missions to life, and may pursue a small series based on the most memorable Apollo missions."

I for one would love to see Kucy create some more mission-based videos.

Kepler-452b: One of the newest discovered kids on the block may be similar to our Earth

An artist's concept of what Kepler-452b might look like from orbit (NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)

We've now confirmed the existence of nearly 2,000 exoplanets in our neighborhood of the galaxy. There are still another three thousand or so possible finds that are awaiting confirmation, but there's a good chance many of them will turn out to be real planets as well. We still estimate maybe 160 billion (or more) planets exist in our galaxy alone (averaging 1.6 planets per star). These numbers are incredible, especially for those of us who remember a time when we had not yet confirmed the existence of planets around other stars. 

Most of the worlds we have confirmed were first detected by the Kepler space telescope. Kepler was launched and entered service in 2009, immediately getting to the work of hunting for alien worlds. The mission had a highly successful lifetime of 3.5 years and was even granted a mission extension, but then, in 2013, a second of four of the reaction wheels within the spacecraft had broken (the reaction wheels are what allow such spacecraft to orient themselves in space without the need for fuel). Since that time, an ingenious repurposing of the spacecraft for a new planet-hunting mission called "Second Light" (a.k.a. K2) has been undertaken. Second Light has been operating since early 2014 and has been slowly building upon the list of potential exoplanets out there.

From all of the worlds discovered through Kepler's original mission and the Second Light mission, none has been as exciting for the general public as one that was just announced this past week. On July 23rd, researchers announced 521 more planet candidates, including 11 worlds that are close in their size and orbital distances from their stars as is our own Earth. One of those eleven is a world currently known as Kepler-452b. This exoplanet orbits a G2 star (one that is in the same spectral class as our Sun), it has an orbit that is similar in size to the Earth's (Kepler-452b's year is only 20 days longer), and this alien world is only about 1.6 times larger than the Earth. The following infographic from Space.com gives some fantastic details on what we've recently discovered about this exoworld:

The discovery of another world very similar to our own Earth is very suggestive that we are on the right path to discovering extraterrestrial life. Since my birth, we've now determined that there are billions of planets in our galaxy and we now know that some of them, like Kepler-452b, are very similar to our homeworld in their size and orbit (and some even orbit similar stars!). With current improvements in telescope technology and the development of exoplanet atmosphere research, it seems more and more like it really is only a matter of time before we start seeing abundant evidence for worlds that are habitable. Following that, how long might it be before the first detections of biosignature gases on exoplanets? If life is abundant in our universe, then it seems like we are only around the corner from finally determining whether we are alone in the vast cosmos.

Kepler-452b excites many people because of how similar it is to our world. Might there be a geophysical processes occurring on that world that are similar to ours? Might there be plate tectonics, continents, oceans...

We have a tendency to think that we need to find worlds like our own to find life (though this may not truly be the case), and that's why Kepler-452b is so exciting. I'm glad to know that so many people in the general public have been excited by this new finding. It might be that Kepler-452b is another Venus (a hothouse world devastated by a runaway greenhouse), or maybe the surface of Kepler-452b is simply a barren wasteland. Yet it's fun to imagine some of the more intriguing possibilities. 

Maybe Kepler-452b has a surface covered in microbial mats that generate large amounts of gases that are far from equilibrium with the atmosphere. Maybe that world has gigantic creatures like walking trees, dinosaurs, or giant floating blobs. Maybe there are intelligent beings on that world that have also discovered math and science and who have orbiting space telescopes that are peering out into their galactic neighborhood. Maybe, if that's the case, then just maybe they're also holding exciting press conferences to share their findings of new exoplanets around other stars. Maybe they've even had a meeting to discuss this new planet that is just like theirs in it's orbit around a similar star. Maybe that planet is just a bit smaller. Does it also have life?

An artist's illustration of a possible surface of newfound planet Kepler-452b (SETI Institute/Danielle Futselaar)

Earth From Nearly 1 Million Miles Away!

I recently wrote a blog post about The Blue Marble, the famous 1972 image of our planet from space taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts, and about the importance of seeing our home planet from space. When we view the entirety of our globe, without our perceived national and ethnic borders, we give ourselves a chance to reflect on our role within the global biosphere, within the global community. 

On the 20th of July of this year, NASA released a new image of our world taken from space. This image was collected by a spacecraft called the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), and it was taken from almost 1 million miles away from the surface of the planet. 

Here is that image, in all of its glory:

Our Earth from a distance of ~930,000 miles (1.5 million km), taken on 6 July 2015 by the DSCOVR spacecraft

The DSCOVR spacecraft took the above image not long after it reached its final orbit at roughly 930,000 miles away (~1.5 million km). The distance is important, as the spacecraft will operate at this distance for the rest of its mission, orbiting at a point in space known as the Lagrange Point 1, or L1. This point in space will provide the spacecraft with a stable orbit (no need for extra fuel to keep it in its orbit) and will allow the spacecraft to monitor the entirety of our planet.

The primary goals of DSCOVR, which is run primarily through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), are to monitor solar wind conditions and to provide nearly continuous climate data for our world. The spacecraft will measure the intensity of energetic particles making their way from the Sun to the Earth, such as those released in coronal mass ejections (DSCOVR will be able to offer 15-60 minute warnings of incoming changes to the solar wind that may pose dangers to our technology). DSCOVR will use UV, visible, and infrared light reflected from the Earth to measure ozone, ash and dust, cloud composition and structure, and vegetation cover. The spacecraft will also take full images of the Earth every two hours. 

Full, high-resolution pictures of the Earth at a rate of one every two hours! That's incredible. This means that it's only a matter of time until we get to see some awesome timelapse videos put together showing the dynamic Earth from nearly 1 million miles away. I can only imagine what these new data sets are going to mean for Science on a Sphere and other tools for public engagement, let alone all of the awesome science that's going to come from the DSCOVR mission.

This first image from the Deep Space Climate Observatory is so fantastic and so inspiring that even President Obama posted a Tweet about it:

Just got this new blue marble photo from @NASA. A beautiful reminder that we need to protect the only planet we have. pic.twitter.com/JQ3174P0LF

— President Obama (@POTUS) July 20, 2015

For a bit more info about the Deep Space Climate Observatory, check out the video below:

NASA and University Researchers Discuss the Search for Life in the Solar System & Beyond at AbSciCon 2015

Image taken from the NASA Astrobiology Roadmap

Last week, at the Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon) in Chicago, NASA convened a press briefing to feature some of the lead figures within the realm of astrobiology and to promote discussion of what we're doing right now in astrobiology as well as what will be coming next. You can find the video of that briefing at the bottom of this post!

The panel for the briefing consisted of the following four people:

-John Grunsfeld, former astronaut and now Associate Administrator for Science at NASA Headquarters

-Alexis Templeton, Principal Investigator for the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Rock-Powered Life team

-Britney Schmidt, Principal Investigator for the NASA-funded project Sub-Ice Marine and Planetary Analog Ecosystems (SIM

-Vikki Meadows, Principal Investigator at the University of Washington's Virtual Planetary Laboratory

Left to right: Vikki Meeadows, Britney Scmidt, and Alexis Templeton. Image posted to Twitter by NASA NExSS

I've never met John Grunsfeld in person, but I love the energy and enthusiasm he presents when he talks. I have met Vikki Meadows, Britney Schmidt, and Alexis Templeton. They are impressive researchers and wonderful people. 

Britney and Alexis are especially kick-ass women. Britney has quickly climbed to fame within the sciences as a lead expert on the icy worlds of our solar system. She's travelled to Antarctica to study icy analog environments and a paper that she authored in the journal Nature in 2011 rocked icy-worlds research with the conclusion that the chaos regions on Europa may be caused by shallow subsurface fluids. 

I was abundantly overjoyed to see Alexis Templeton on the panel. She's one of the most renowned researchers in the realm of geobiology, she knows more about the connections between microorganisms and the variety of environments present on the Earth than anyone else I've ever met, and she is my graduate research advisor! Here's a picture of Alexis and I taken by John Spear while we were working at our field site, Borup Fiord Pass, in the Canadian High Arctic during the summer of 2014:

Alexis has been involved in many research projects that seek to characterize the myriad ways that microorganisms interrelate with their environments. Research that has been conducted in her lab over the years has included looking at the microbial alteration of basalt on the seafloor, characterizing metal oxidation by microbes in the depths of the Earth, and working on our NASA-funded project to understand microbial sulfur cycling and the formation of sulfur biosignatures at an Arctic analog to icy extraterrestrial environments. 

Most recently, Alexis has become the Principle Investigator of a team that goes by the handle Rock-Powered Life (RPL). This team, funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute, seeks to characterize the pathways through which water and rock can react to form the simplest ingredients for living processes on Earth. They're also considering what these reactions mean for the habitability of extraterrestrial environments, such as those in the subsurface oceans of Europa and Enceladus. 

The NASA press briefing last week went very well. All of the members of the panel gave fantastic introductions to what we're doing right now in astrobiology to better understand life on Earth and the potential for life in our solar system and beyond! I highly recommend checking out the briefing video below:

My research talk for AbSciCon 2015

I'm traveling off to Chicago tomorrow morning to attend the 2015 Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon). AbSciCon is a scientific meeting for researchers, educators, and science communicators who work in the diverse realm of astrobiology, the scientific pursuit to understand the origins, evolution, and radiation of life in the universe. This is my first big science conference, so I'm pretty excited. I'll be giving a research talk this coming Tuesday, the 16th of June, to share a little bit of my graduate research. My talk will be part of a conference session titled "Habitability of Extraterrestrial Analog Environments" and it will allow me to talk about my current work on samples that I collected last summer at Borup Fiord Pass in the Canadian High Arctic. If you're interested, here's a little introduction to what I'll be talking about on Tuesday:

My field site, Borup Fiord Pass, is a valley in the Canadian High Arctic where there resides a very special glacier. Near the toe of this glacier (the glacier's edge) you can find large accumulations of yellow elemental sulfur on top of the ice. These deposits of sulfur form from sulfide-rich springs that emerge on the glacier or just at its edge. The sulfide carried by the springs is derived from the reduction (electronation) of sulfate by microorganisms that thrive in the subsurface. The yellow sulfur that appears at the surface may be partly formed through the activity of microbial life and also may feed microorganisms that are capable of oxidizing (de-electronating) elemental sulfur. This unique sulfur-dominated system may serve as an ideal analogue for icy environments in our solar system and beyond, especially those where subsurface fluids may emerge at the surface of an icy system (like maybe on Jupiter's moon Europa!).

I had the wonderful opportunity to visit this remarkable site for two weeks during the summer of 2014. Here is an image taken by John Spear, of the Colorado School of Mines, while flying over the glacier in a helicopter:

The image shows the region at the toe of the glacier where yellow sulfur staining was visible. The large sulfur covered area in this shot is about 100x100 square meters (about the size of a couple of American football fields). Interestingly, during our time at the site, we did not observe an active spring. Instead, what we found was that a very thick structure of ice had formed at the edge of the glacier. This icing is not only covered in sulfur, but is loaded with sulfur in various states (sulfide, elemental sulfur, and sulfate). We took samples from various regions on the sulfur icing, on the glacier, and in the melt water streams that ran down the valley. Below is a ternary diagram showing some of the data I've now analyzed for major cations in the samples as compared to some samples from previous years:

What this figure is showing is that there is a range of cation chemistry that can be observed in samples collected at the site. There are data here for active springs from previous years, sulfur deposits from 2009 and 2014, as well as melt water and stream water from around the site from 2000 and 2014. Most importantly, these data show that the sulfur icing is really similar to the sulfide-rich springs, which is part of why we reason that the spring was flowing and then that fluid was frozen in place to make the sulfur icing.

Sulfur bubbles on a melt pool on a sulfur icing

One of the coolest things about the sulfur icing during our time at Borup Fiord Pass was the active thawing and refreezing of the ice each day within melt pools on top of the icing. Hydrogen sulfide gas that had been locked within the sulfur icing would gurgle its way up through these melt pools, forming bubbles on the surface of the fluid. In several places these bubbles became encrusted in yellow sulfur and formed sulfur bubbles, like those shown to the left here.

I was so intrigued by these sulfur bubbles that I had to know more about them. I took some of the material and ran x-ray diffraction (XRD) on it. XRD allows us to determine what minerals or other crystallized material is present within a sample. The XRD data revealed something very interesting. The data show elemental sulfur present in three different forms, known as allotropes. Usually, in nature, sulfur is most stable as eight-membered rings of sulfur atoms that are packed in a certain arrangement that is known as α-S₈. (a.k.a. alpha-cyclooctasulfur). However, there are two other mineral forms of cyclooctasulfur that can also form in nature. These are known as the beta and gamma forms. β-S₈ is a form of cyclooctasulfur that
forms when α-S₈ is heated above ~96 C. It's extremely bizarre to find this form of sulfur in a sample from Borup Fiord Pass, where the fluid forming the sulfur icing likely never reached a temperature that high. Likewise, the gamma form of cyclooctasulfur, γ-S₈ (which is also known as the mineral Rosickyite), usually only forms in high temperature environments. That said, Susanne Douglas and Heixong Yang published an article in the journal Geology in 2002 where they reported finding Rosickyite within an endoevaporitic microbial film. They hypothesized that processes of microbial sulfur metabolism that formed elemental sulfur favored the formation of γ-S₈ over α-S₈. If that's not exciting enough, Damnhait Gleeson, who was once a member of our lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, also previously reported finding rosickyite in a microbial sample, this time it was within a sample of sulfur collected at Borup Fiord Pass in 2009 by Katherine Wright (also a former member of our lab). Since rosickyite was previously detected at our site, it wasn't a huge surprise, but it's definitely exciting. 

During my talk at AbSciCon, I'll be showing some images of the sulfur bubble material that I recently collected using an electron microscope. There's some really interesting structures to be found within these samples. I'm now hot on the trail of figuring out if I'm seeing the representation of gamma and beta cyclooctasulfur or perhaps something else all together. I don't know yet if these unique forms of sulfur and strange things that I'm seeing under the electron microscope are indicative of the biological processing of sulfur or if they've formed through an abiotic process at Borup Fiord Pass (which would also be very interesting), but it's nice to find new and exciting things when doing research.

There's a bit more that I'll be presenting at my talk at AbSciCon, however the talk is only supposed to be 10 minutes in length (which is a very short time for a talk). Fortunately, for the stuff that I don't get to cover in my talk, my colleague Chris Trivedi of the Colorado School of Mines will be presenting a poster with information about his work on our samples from Borup Fiord Pass. Hopefully, if people find our work interesting and want to know more following my talk, they'll then have a chance to check out Chris' poster as well.

This is me saluting the sulfur stained glacier and the valley that holds it

I'm definitely looking forward to the experiences I'll be having in the coming week at AbSciCon 2015. There's going to be a lot of great science to hear about and to talk about. I'm going to serve as a judge for student posters at the conference and I'll also be serving as a Meeting Mentor, spending half of one conference day with a high school student shadowing me at the conference. On top of all of this great stuff, on Monday evening there will be the final preliminary heat of the 3rd season of the NASA Famelab science communication competition. In case you don't know, I won the first preliminary heat of the competition in August of 2014, when I shared a story about my first day in the field at Borup Fiord Pass. I'm looking forward to watching a new line-up of scientists and science communicators as they compete in this final heat for Famelab. I have a feeling there are going to be some awesome talks and a lot of great stories.

I'll be adding more posts in the coming weeks that detail my experiences at AbSciCon, so look forward to those. I think I'll wrap this post up right now by sharing the video of the talk I gave when I competed in NASA Famelab in 2014. Here's looking forward to great science and good times at AbSciCon 2015!

The Blue Marble: The importance of seeing our world in its entirety

This image of the Earth was taken by the crew of Apollo 17 on their trip to the Moon on the 7th of December, 1972. It is one of the most famous images in recorded history and has come to be known as The Blue Marble. 

Not only is the image significant as it was taken by the last human beings to travel to the Moon (something that will hopefully soon change), but The Blue Marble is one of the first images that captured our world as a whole, without any of the borders we've been told to imagine between nations and cultures. The image shows the place of birth of every human being who has ever lived. The Blue Marble shows land, sea, clouds, vegetation, and ice. Just like the Earthrise and Pale Blue Dot images, The Blue Marble gives us pause to reflect upon our connections to one another and to the rest of our biosphere. Seeing our world as a whole set amongst the background black of space should remind us that we're all in this crazy thing called life together and that our world is only one amongst what we now know to be a very great many.

Seeing the World We've Made

All is Fair in Love and War, by Bugspray609

Any thoughtful person who takes the time to regard the known history of our species must assuredly, at least sometimes, take some pause when considering the dichotomy of how well and how bad we have treated each other. For all of the beauty we have created in our music and art and literature and architecture, we have have created just as much destruction and pain through our acts of selfishness and fear. I think any person who seeks a better life in this world for everyone has to admit to and understand the atrocities that have occurred in human history while working to stop such atrocities from occurring again (whether through direct or indirect means).

In the 1937 preface to his science-fiction story, "Star Maker", Olaf Stapledon wrote of the direct and indirect approaches to overcoming the crises of human suffering while commenting on the foreseen terror of the rise of fascism in Europe. He pointed out the importance developing the "self-critical self-consciousness of the human species" (something I see as the capability for us to review our actions and work to improve the world for future generations by improving our actions). Although written over three decades before The Blue Marble image was produced, Stapledon had the foresight to point out the potential importance of seeing our world as a whole:

"...Perhaps the attempt to see our turbulent world against a background of stars may, after all, increase, not lessen, the significance of the present human crisis. It may also strengthen our charity to one another."

Stapledon even attempted a guess in Star Maker at what the Earth may look like from space:

"...The sheer beauty of our planet surprised me. It was a huge pearl, set in spangled ebony. It was nacrous, it was an opal. No, it was far more lovely than any jewel. Its patterned colouring was more subtle, more ethereal. It displayed the delicacy and brilliance, the intricacy and harmony of a live thing. Strange that in my remoteness I seemed to feel, as never before, the vital presence of Earth as of a creature alive but tranced and obscurely yearning to wake."

Olaf Stapledon couldn't have known it at the time of that writing, but the first official image taken of the Earth from space would be collected from a weapon of war, a V-2 rocket, less than a decade after the writing of Star Maker.

Earth from Space 

Taken from a V-2 Rocket in 1946, this is the first picture of Earth from space

Since the atmosphere of the Earth doesn't actually have a perfectly defined edge or separation that can tell you when you're still on Earth or when you're in space, a border called the Kármán Line was agreed upon for this purpose at 100 km above the surface of the planet. Theodore von Kármán, the namesake for the Kármán Line, was the first person to realize that it is around this altitude that the gases of the atmosphere become too rarified for aeronautical flight. As such, it's also this altitude that separates the study of aeronautics from the study of astronautics.

The first image of Earth taken by a camera that had passed the Kármán Line was taken on the 24th of October in 1946. This camera was riding along with a V-2 rocket, a weapon of war that was the progenitor of the rockets that took the first American astronauts into space and which took the first people to the Moon. It's somewhat ironic that one of the arguably most important pictures in history, one which has the power to captivate our wonder and to show us that we really are all in this together, was captured from an implement of death and destruction.

You can find more information about the first picture of Earth from space in this article from Air & Space Magazine.

Capturing the Blue Marble

There have been lots of pictures taken of the entirety of the Earth from spacecraft since that first one in 1946, but The Blue Marble remains as the first full shot of our world fully lit by the sun. 

Still, there are a lot of other great images from spacecraft of the Earth that have been released. Here, for example, are satellite composite images of Earth released by NASA in 2001 and 2002:

Composite images of the Earth from space, developed by NASA

Another fantastic image of our world is one known as The Blue Marble 2012. In the first week after its release, the Flickr page for the image garnered over 3 million views and now stands at almost 6 million views total. It's a fantastic composite image of our world that was taken from the Suomi NPP satellite:

The Blue Marble and similar images are testaments to our technological and scientific progress as a species. I think everyone should take a moment, at least once in their goings about in their daily lives, to consider the importance of seeing our world as a whole. 

Capturing images and videos of our Earth gives us a chance to look at our entire biosphere as though it is one living entity. Just as all humans are composed of human cells and cells of microorganisms that work together in one large system, our world can be viewed as one entity with one biosphere composed of many trillions of trillions of organisms that all function together as one whole (think: Gaia Hypothesis). It's especially intriguing to watch video, like the ISS Ustream Live Feed, that shows some of the dynamic processes on Earth that can be seen from space.

There's no knowing yet if biology is itself a cosmological imperative or if maybe life as we know it on our little Blue Marble is just the happenstance of chemistry and physics in one place and in one time. Many of us think the former is more likely, especially given the vastness of our universe and the myriad worlds we now know to exist outside of our own, yet we won't know more without further exploration. 

When I see The Blue Marble, it reminds me that all of our technological and cultural advancement over the last two hundred thousand years may just be the beginning of our advancement as a cosmologically conscious species. The Blue Marble, as an image, couldn't have been taken without our first taking those minuscule steps into space. If we continue working together to advance ourselves, technologically and philosophically, then maybe one day The Blue Marble will be an icon for how we first took to the heavens to know more about our world and its place in the cosmos.

Update (10 June 2015):

For more information about the importance of seeing our world from space, check out this article published in Space Policy in 2010 by my friend, Sanjoy Som. He discusses the importance of The Blue Marble and has proposed that we create a world flag with The Blue Marble at its center to support future exploration for all of our species and all of our biosphere. If you're interested in getting involved in spreading the word about The Blue Marble, check out One Flag in Space as well.