I am an astrobiologist, sci-fi geek, and professor of everything groovy. I write about science, culture, math, history, space, and science fiction. Perhaps like you, I'm seeking a greater understanding of the nature of life and asking myself why all of this really matters. Come with me, and we'll ask some questions together.
Heading out to California in just a few days for MAX 2019: A Space Festival from Media Art Exploration. The festival will take place at the California Academy of the Sciences, The Exploratorium, and the Z Space theater in San Francisco from the 16th through 18th. There will be live performances, displays of artwork, panels of scientists and artists, booths from various groups sharing their art and their science, and more! We'll be running a booth for SAGANet.org at the California Academy of Sciences on Friday, the 17th. Come find our booth and we can chat about astrobiology, space exploration, and more. We'll also have stickers and comic books to give out, scifi books and our book of astrobiology classic literature for sale, and I'll also have some of my meteorites there to show off (including a little piece of the Moon!). Hoping to see you there!
Within the Xanthe Terra region of Mars lies an impact crater known as Mojave (named after the town and desert in California!). The beautiful video below was put together by Seán Doran and shows a virtual flyover of Mojave Crater based on data from the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). HiRISE has given us 12 years of incredible data, and the flyover video below is definitely a beautiful way to look at some of those data:
Was just cruising along Facebook while snuffling through the tapering end of this sinus infection and I saw this post on my wall from the page of SciBabe (Yvette d'Entremont):
Ya, it really is just an apple. We could hope that it had been genetically modified to improve crop yields or to make it more nutritious, though most current genetic modifications are so that more pesticides can be applied, sadly. Still, it is just an apple. We have absolutely no evidence yet to suggest that genetic modifications to our food cause any differences to how our bodies digest them. Even if the full benefit of genetically modified foods hasn't been realized (perhaps in part due to the anti-GMO hysteria), that still doesn't mean we should fear what so few of us understands; rather, we should work together to increase public understanding of the science involved. On another note, I personally agree with food labelling, but not just for GM crops. I think our citizens are more likely to make informed decisions about food when they actually have information. Country-of-origin, pesticides used, estimated fossil fuel consumption for delivery to the super market, and other descriptors could go along with the ingredients and nutritional information (even if that nutritional info here in the US is biased by the wants of lobbyists). Or, maybe rather than labelling, a QR code or barcode could link to a website or in-store system that displays all of the information an informed shopped may wish to peruse. Still, the real issue with GM crops, as I see it, isn't in labelling our foods with pertinent information, but rather is in the lack of scientific literacy among the public, which leads to misunderstanding of what genetically modified foods even are. Still, that's not why I wrote this post. No, my friends, I wrote this post to share with you the insight of Wally. If you're someone who freaks out over a little dirt in your food or doesn't have an understanding of the fact that we humans are still a part of a larger biosphere, then you may not want to read what Wally has to say about spices. But, I have a feeling you're not that person, and you're going to find this to be a good point:
So ya, if you're concerned about the genetic compliment within the DNA of the foods you're eating, then you might want to consider a little further the other things that are in our food. From bat shit and dirt to pesticides and preservatives, at various levels of processing, you're bound to be getting some stuff in your food that you probably don't really want. Most of it's probably not going to hurt you, but we can definitely cut back on the pesticides and preservatives by using GM crops instead (again, if done right). In your thinking about GM crops, consider the story of Wally. Maybe you agree with Wally. Maybe Wally wins the internet. Or, maybe like these commenters you feel like Wally just ruined spices for you:
Here's a beautiful image that I took of one of my samples from Borup Fiord Pass. As I write up my dissertation, I'm going back through all of the data and trying to synthesize everything into one report. This image won't be used in my dissertation, but it's still pretty awesome. The image was taken using a scanning electron microscope (SEM). The scale bar is 10 microns (about one quarter of the width of one of my beard hairs!). The blocky looking structures in the middle are rhombohedra of carbonate minerals while the globular looking things around the top and right of the image are globules of elemental sulfur. This material was collected from the surface of some fresh snow and ice that had been blown out of a glacial crevasse while we were at our field site in the Arctic. I'm kind of sad that I don't have a good way to use this image in the dissertation, but glad that I can share it here!
This awesome infographic from Geology Cafe shows some of the major types of rocks and the cycles that relate them to each other. (click here for a much larger version)
In case you missed it, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver ran a fantastical piece recently on how the American public tends to utterly fail at understanding scientific studies. Our own lack of critical thinking and scientific literacy has made it far more likely for people to misread and misunderstand the results and conclusions of scientific studies, not to mention the fact that there are now way too many people who will believe utter bullshit as long as someone makes it sound "sciency". For instance, I recently saw this piece of shit post going around on Facebook claiming that research had found that people with blue eyes were able to hold their alcohol better. Of course, that's not really what any researchers had claimed. The report in question was recently published in the American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B: Neuropsychiatric Genetics (you can find it here: Sulovari et al. 2015). In that research, a study of a subsample of 1,263 Americans of recent European decent had shown that there was a possible correlation with lighter eye color and the predisposition for alcohol dependence. The authors of that paper themselves pointed out that replication of the study would be necessary before accepting their conclusions, even though a study of only 1,263 people is very unlikely to be too conclusive given all of the possible complexities of such a sample-size limited study. The research in question is exciting and may be an indicator that there is some relationship between the genes that cause eye color and the genes that may make us more likely to become dependent on alcohol, but it in no way implies that having blue eyes makes you a better drinker or a tougher person or anything ridiculously silly like that. I highly recommend checking out the following video from Last Week Tonight. You can trust me, I'm wearing a lab coat!
On May 13th of this year, I had the honor and the pleasure of competing in the Famelab USA science communication competition's national final. Famelab allows early career scientists and communicators of science an opportunity to improve their skills through educational workshops while also competing against one another by giving short (3 minutes or less) speeches using no slides and, at most, one prop. For this year's final event, I gave a speech titled "This Thing is Older Than Your Mom", where I talked about my favorite meteorite from my personal collection and about how old some of the materials in meteorites can be.
Delivering this talk was another step along the way for me to build a career as a communicator of science. I fumbled a bit on the Q&A session of the event, but it was still a lot of fun and a huge learning experience. For the two days leading up to the final event, we were given a masterclass to develop our skills led by the magnificent Malcolm Love. I'm so happy to have had the opportunity to share some of my knowledge with a wider audience through Famelab. If you're interested, you can see the other talks I've given before at Famelab events by checking out the page they created for me.
I'm heading off to the deserts of Utah to help staff the University Rover Challenge (URC). The URC is a robotic competition where undergraduate student teams from around the globe design and build Mars rovers over the course of a year, and then they bring their robots to Utah, where we challenge them in tasks like supporting an astronaut in the field, servicing equipment, looking for signs of past or present life, and in testing their rovers by driving through a terrain obstacle course. It's a fantastic event. Here's a cool overview video of the URC from one of the events' sponsors, Protocase:
This week saw many astronomers, amateur and professional alike, jumping to solar observations to watch the transit of Mercury across the Sun. Fortunately, they all understand that looking at the Sun directly through a telescope is bad juju.
Staring directly at the Sun can cause all kinds of damage and blindness. Isaac Newton once temporarily damaged his vision by staring at the Sun for a long period. However, Newton fortunately wasn't using a telescope when this happened. So, what happens if you look at the Sun through a telescope (without the proper filters)? Well, Mark Thompson made this video, where he exposes a pig's eyeball to sunlight through a telescope. It's brutal!
Professor C. Bodin was LEGO's first female scientist, released back in 2013. It's awesome to see gender inclusivity with toys for children (and some of us who are really just older children), especially with LEGOs, which were one of my primary influences for creativity as a kid. Professor C. Bodin came equipped with two Erlenmeyer flasks, one containing something blue and one containing something yellow. The only thing I'm left wondering with her character is what those two different substances might be and what kinds of ideas children might have for what happens when Bodin mixes some of the blue stuff with some of the yellow stuff.
Alberta, Canada, has some of the world's largest pyramids. But these weren't megastructures built by ancient peoples for the honor of their leaders, to connect the afterlives of pharaohs with the gods, or to provide a special place of worship for their people. These pyramids are made entirely of yellow elemental sulfur!
Sulfur is currently being harvested in large quantities due to its recovery from tar sand oil and gas in operations in the northwestern U.S. and western Canada. Once the sulfur is removed, the oil and gas companies can try to sell it, but sulfur is down in the markets right now and that means a lot of sulfur is just being stored, in a process called "blocking", where large blocks of elemental sulfur are produced and then stored.
Blocks of sulfur, 25 feet tall (credit: Gord McKenna)
One place where blocking has gone rampant is near the tar sands of Alberta, Canada. As of 2012, oil and gas extraction of sulfur in this region accounted for roughly 1.5 million tons per year of sulfur. At that time, 600,000 tons were being blocked each year. That led one company, called Syncrude, to start building The Great Sulfur Pyramids of Alberta!
These giant pyramids of sulfur blocks can be easily seen in satellite images. Andrew David Thaler, writing in Southern Fried Science, calculated from images and data that the largest of the sulfur pyramids was at 2,840,000 cubic meters in volume back in 2012 (it's continued to grow since then). In comparison, the Great Pyramid of Giza is only 2,580,000 cubic meters in volume. With the current rate of growth of the Great Sulfur Pyramids of Alberta, they're on track to become the largest human-made structures ever (by volume). Here's a comparison of bases of the Great Pyramid and the largest of the sulfur pyramids:
Those are some huge pyramids! I think I'll have to throw a visit to these pyramids on my travel list. Just to see those large, yellow structures of sulfur would be intriguing, even if their presence is due to the fact that we're now pushing the limits on extraction of hydrocarbons from the Earth.
Sulfur burning at Kawah Ijen (image: Oliver Grunewald)
Sulfur is most certainly one of the coolest elements. Sulfur was one of the few elements that ancient people knew of (back in a time when it was known as "brimstone", and before people even knew what elements actually are). Sulfur is the 10th most abundant element in the universe and the 6th most abundant element on Earth by weight (although most of it is in the core, along with lots of iron and nickel). Sulfur causes our flatulence to smell bad and allows people to perm their hair (due to the disulfide bonds that are broken are reformed between the amino acids in the hair). Sulfur also presents itself in some awesome colors when it's in its elemental form. For instance, here's a picture of solid elemental sulfur at room temperature from my book shelf:
Elemental sulfur is a beautiful yellow color in its natural solid form. However, when it melts, it turns various beautiful red colors:
Red molten sulfur at Kawah Ijen volcano (iamge: Photovolcanica)
Yellows and reds are cool, but elemental sulfur also burns in a beautiful blue color. Here's a video from scientificpages on Youtube which shows powdered elemental sulfur burning in open air:
In the video you can see the sulfur turning red as it melts, but you can also see the blue flame forming over it. Burning sulfur is something that anyone can try at home, but finding large amounts of elemental sulfur melting and burning in nature will only happen in a few places. One of the best known places where this occurs is in Kawah Ijen volcano, in East Java, Indonesia, where the elemental sulfur extruding from the volcano is harvested by a local company (the image at the top of this post is from Kawah Ijen). Some of the best pictures of the sulfur in Kawah Ijen have been taken by Oliver Grunewald. Here's one of Grunewald's photos of the sulfur being harvested at night:
It's truly a beautiful location for seeing elemental sulfur in all of its various colors.
Space art from NASA made in the 1970s (find more here)
We've read and seen stories and films for decades now that suggest a future where humans will live in space. From colonizing other planets to traveling through interstellar space, many people have dreamed of a human future beyond Earth. So why hasn't it happened yet?
After sending twelve men to the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s and supporting ventures of government organizations to send astronauts into low Earth orbit (LEO) since that time, we still don't live in a world where the rest of us can easily get into space. Of course, a large part of the argument for why this hasn't happened comes down to economics and initiative, but there are also many who would argue that we're not yet ready for it. Some may say that we need to figure out how to be better citizens of the Earth before we try to be citizens of space.
That may seem like a flawed argument to space exploration advocates, but it's an argument that I've heard many times. I'm going to start working on another article considering what it will take to advance our human future in space, but I'd like some community input before I do that. Comment on this post or hit me up on Twitter or Facebook with your ideas about whether or not we should venture into space and why. Also, I'd like to know the reasons people suspect for why the past dreams of our future in space have not yet come to fruition. Please, tell me:
Update Note, 30 January 2024: I used to have an image from the film Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark at the top of this article. It showed the face melting scene at the end of the film. However, Google constantly sent me violation reports because of this rather famous image, so I removed it. That said, enjoy what follows for the strongest known acid.
The strongest known acids on the planet are something called superacids. These are acids that are more acidic than a pure solution of sulfuric acid! That's most definitely "face melting acidity". Even the word "superacid" sounds like something you don't want to dance with on a Saturday night. There are many superacids that chemists have formed, but by far the worst of the worst (the most hated and cursed? well, no, it's just the strongest) is the superacid known as fluoroantimonic acid. Fluoroantimonic acid can be estimated to be over 10 quadrillion times stronger than sulfuric acid! (see the discussion below on the Hammett acidity function to see how I got that number) Fluoroantimonic acid has the chemical formula H2FSbF6 which shows you that it's composed of bonded atoms of fluorine (F) and antimony (Sb) with some hydrogen (H) as well. Let's chat a tad about the chemistry of fluoroantimonic acid and why you most definitely don't want it on your skin (or anywhere near you, for that matter, unless you're a chemist who's working with the stuff).
Dropping Acid
From left-to-right: strong acid, dilute acid, base (image from SeattlePI)
Acid (which comes from the Latin word(s) acidus/acēre, which means "sour") is something that people have known about for a long time. Acids are literally what you are tasting when you taste something sour (hence the name). Lemons and other citrous fruits have a sour taste due to citric acid. We use microbial lactic acid fermentation (producing lactic acid from glucose) to make sauerkraut, sour beers, and kimchi (and, incidentally, lactic acid fermentation ruined a pot of stew I had sitting out last week). You may have noticed that your vomit has a sour taste. That's because of the acid in your stomach that normally helps you to digest your food, though the burning sensation you feel in your throat from vomit has more to do with your stomach enzymes which cleave amino acid bonds to break down proteins (update: I had hydrochloric acid listed as the main stomach acid that causes the acrid taste of vomit, but a reader clarified that the real nasty smell and flavor comes from butyric acid).
There's a lot more to acids than taste. Put simply, an acid is a substance which can donate a proton. In chemistry, we tend to think of these proton donations as shuffling of hydrogen nuclei (a hydrogen atom, which has one proton and one electron, is only a single proton when it's ionized). There are lots of molecules that can donate a proton to water (to form the hydronium ion) or to another molecule (something that accepts a proton is called a base). Some molecules are much better at doing this than others. The molecules that are the best at donating protons are called strong acids. Strong acids include things like hydrochloric acid (HCl), nitric acid (HNO3), and sulfuric acid (H2SO4). In these cases, the chloride (Cl-), nitrate (NO3-), and sulfate (SO42-) ions are very stable as ions in solution, which is why they're so good at giving away those protons. For instance, in the picture below, the behavior of hydrochloric acid in water is compared to that of acetic acid (HC2H3O2):
As the picture illustrates, hydrochloric acid donates all of its hydrogen (protons) to water, while acetic acid tends to mostly remain as acetic acid and only a small amount dissociates to form hydronium ions and acetate ions. Because of this, we consider hydrochloric acid to be a strong acid and acetic acid to be a weak acid.
Superacids
When considering the acidity of a substance, many acids are compared in their acidity to that of sulfuric acid. The sulfate ion is very stable in its ionic form in solution and so it's not a happy camper when bound to a proton or two (which is a state called "protonated"). Like I mentioned earlier, a superacid is one that is considered to be more acidic than 100% sulfuric acid. When you have that strong of an acid, a measure of something like pH (the negative log of the concentration of protons in solution) is no longer adequate. Instead, chemists can turn to something called the Hammett acidity function.
I won't explain the Hammett acidity function here, but it can loosely be thought of as what the pH of a solution would be if it were possible to pack trillions of trillions of hydronium ions into a solution. A pure solution of sulfuric acid would have a Hammett acidity function value of -12 (so, kind of like having a pH of -12, if that were possible).
This is Magic Acid, the second most acidic superacid. It's Hammett acidity function is -19.2!
What About Fluoroantimonic Acid?
Fluoroantimonic acid, the strongest known acid, has a Hammett acidity function value of -28! (though there are also sources out there stating an unconfirmed value of -31.3) This is what the pH of a solution would be if it were possible to pack 1028 moles of hydronium into each liter of solution. To give you an idea of how crazy that is, a solution with a pH of 1 (which is easily acidic enough to burn your skin) has 0.1 moles of hydronium per liter. Since the molar mass (the mass per mole) of hydronium is 19.02 g/mol, a quick calculation will show that fluoroantimonic acid is as acidic as a solution would be if it contained over 1026 kg/L of hydronium. That's more than the known density of neutron stars! (Luckily, that's not really how these superacids work.) As I mentioned above, it can be estimated that fluorantimonic acid is about 10 quadrillion times stronger than sulfuric acid. Since sulfuric acid has a Hammett function of -12 and fluorantimonic acid has a Hammett function of -28, the difference is 16, or about 1016 more moles of hydronium. That's 10 quadrillion times more! However, as I mentioned above, this isn't really how superacids work and the Hammett function can only loosely be idealized as the negative log of the acid concentration.
This is the structure of fluoroantimonic acid. White balls are hydrogen, green - fluorine, and purple - antimony.
Fluoroantimonic acid is a ridiculously strong acid. It will eat through glass and plastic. It will react explosively with water (so it is only mixed in solution of hydrofluoric acid). It can protonate almost any organic molecule (force a proton onto the molecule), and it will most definitely cause some massive trauma to any living organism (by massive trauma, I mean it will certainly destroy any and all flesh it comes into contact with). There's really only one way to store it. A bond between fluorine and carbon is the strongest chemical bond in organic chemistry. Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), brand name known as Teflon, is composed of repeating units of carbon bonded to fluorine atoms. For a container to hold fluoroantimonic acid, it has to be made out of PTFE. Yup, you read that right: the strongest acid known to humanity can be stored in the same stuff that keeps your eggs from sticking to the pan when you make breakfast.
PTFE - Keeps your breakfast from sticking to the pan and kicks the snot out of the world's strongest acid
I bet you'll never look at your non-stick frying pans the same way again! There are some uses of superacids like fluoroantimonic acid. These acids are great at creating substances known as carbocations (molecules with ionized carbon atoms) and providing environments for studying such substances. Carbocations are intermediates in some economically important reactions, so studying their behavior when isolated is pretty important. Outside of the need to protonate things that normally aren't protonated or to create these carbocations, it's pretty safe to say that there's absolutely no need to have superacids like fluoroantimonic acid around. Well, maybe not. Here's a TEDxGhent talk from a couple years ago by Lennart Joos where he suggests using a superacid known as phosphotungstic acid to combat smog:
So maybe there are some great uses for superacids. Still, I don't think I have any need to play with something like fluoroantimonic acid during this lifetime. My hats off to those chemists who deal with this stuff safely and securely (and my hopes that it remains that way in their future work). The science behind fluorantimonic acid is awesome, but when I think of the stuff all I can imagine is all of my skin melting off in the most painful of ways. Scary.
An artist's conception of New Horizons passing Pluto and its satellites (NASA)
It has definitely been a big year for one little world in our solar system.
The flyby of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft on July 14th of this year has spawned renewed interests in the king of the Kuiper Belt, lord of the dwarf planets. From reigniting the discussions over Pluto's designation as a dwarf planet to revealing that the surface of Pluto holds geological mysteries for us to explore, New Horizons has been an amazing success. As the spacecraft continues on its mission and leaves Pluto behind, many of us wonder what might come next for the 17th largest object in our solar system.
Pluto has long fascinated many of us. Since the accidental discovery of Pluto by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 (he was definitely looking for a planet, but it's very lucky he actually found Pluto) and its being named for the god of the underworld in Roman mythology by an eleven year-old girl, Pluto has made many of us wonder about what lies beyond the planets in our solar system and has inspired storytellers of all sorts to question what remote regions of star systems might be like. H.P. Lovecraft included Pluto in his fictional mythologies of the "ancient evil ones", it's believed by many that Disney named their famous cartoon dog after Pluto, Doctor Who visited Pluto in a fictional future, and in the Mass Effect video-game universe Charon, Pluto's largest moon, is the locale where an alien device for faster-than-light travel is discovered. In fact, there have been a large number of science fiction stories that have included mention of Pluto. Part of the allure of Pluto for storytelling has been the uncertainty about what kind of world it is. We've often talked about Pluto as being a frozen world touched only by the dimmest light from the Sun; a little, icy ball enshrouded in mystery. But, thanks to the New Horizons mission, we now know so much more about Pluto: we know that there are icy mountains on Pluto that rise as high as 3.5 km above the surface, there are variations in the composition of surface ices (most notably causing the "heart" on Pluto; see above image), and that the moons of Pluto have their own surprises in store. Also, it's great to know that scientists from the New Horizons team have been naming the features on Pluto after various science fiction and fantasy stories as well as from the history of exploration. There are the Cthulhu Regio, Vader Crater, Sputnik Planum, Viking Terra, and Uhuru and Spock Craters, just to name a few.
Some of the surface features of Pluto
New Horizons' mission is continuing on now that the spacecraft has screamed past Pluto. The current plan for New Horizons is to try to fly by some other Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) before continuing on and away. Much like the Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, New Horizons will continue sailing away from us, leaving our solar system behind in the decades and centuries to come. It will have long-since lost the capability of communicating with us or even operating, but maybe thousands or millions of years from now it will bump into some alien spacecraft and present a mystery to whoever finds it.
I used to think that New Horizons was going fast enough to overtake Voyager 1 at some point in the near future, but it turns out that New Horizons will never catch up with Voyager 1. This means that Voyager 1 will continue to be the furthest stretch of humanity in the universe for quite some time to come.
Now that New Horizons has left the Plutonian system, a lot of people have wondered what else lies in store for Pluto? Of course, there's the still the debate as to whether or not Pluto should be called a planet. You may know that Pluto is currently classified as a dwarf planet due to a vote amongst the International Astronomical Union (IAU) back in 2006. This decision caused a lot of public backlash, mostly for sentimental reasons. A lot of people felt like Pluto had always been a planet in their lifetimes so it should stay that way (of course, that's not how science works). There are certainly some good scientific reasons to call Pluto a planet, but, as many people point out, if we call Pluto a planet, then there are a lot of other worlds in the solar system that we'll have to call planets as well. These other worlds are also currently known as dwarf planets, and include the likes of Makemake and Eris (it was really the discovery of Eris that became the impetus for reclassifying Pluto). I personally tend to be on the fence about calling Pluto a planet. It most certainly shouldn't be classified along with the terrestrial worlds, like Venus and Earth, and definitely doesn't fit with the gas giants, like Jupiter and Uranus. Yet, the word planet hails from the Greek for "wandering star" (aster planetes) and that original concept could be fit to just about any body in the solar system. Also, to change the classification of Pluto required finding a definition of "planet" that fit the other eight large worlds, but would cut out Pluto and other dwarf planets and moons. That's what led the IAU to come up with their three requirements for a "planethood": 1. A planet is in orbit around the Sun 2. A planet has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape) 3. A planet has cleared its orbital neighborhood The first part takes care of moons that orbit around other bodies, but also fails to include exoplanets (which do not orbit our Sun!). The second part makes a planet anything that is massive enough to draw itself roughly into a spherical shape, which fits with the planets and the dwarf planets, but leaves out many of the smaller asteroids and some moons. Finally, the third part is where they got Pluto. Pluto is a member of the Kuiper Belt and has not "cleared its neighborhood" of other bodies. Pluto is also weird in a lot of other ways (for instance, it's orbital plane is nothing close to that of the eight planets in the solar system), but there are many of us who still love Pluto, regardless of what it's called. It seems to many of us that what we choose to call Pluto should be based on science. There are several other dwarf planets and smaller bodies that were once considered planets (including Vesta, Juno, Ceres, and Pallas), so the idea that Pluto should be a planet because it was once a planet makes little to no sense. If we make Pluto a planet, then that means we have many other planets as well (which is not necessarily a problem, but does bother some people). Of course, there is also the potential that we could abandon "planet" as a scientific word and find something else, leaving the word "planet" to be something of a public matter. I suppose the debate over Pluto's status will continue on. How long that debate will last and what its outcomes will be, who knows... As for what comes next for Pluto: there are no current missions in the works that will visit Pluto. We've learned a lot from New Horizons and will continue learning more as the data stream in over the next 15 months. However, although we'll have gained a lot more knowledge about Pluto, there will surely be many more mysteries to ponder. I would love to see a future where we could afford to send missions to the outer solar system more often, but, for now, we have to hope that there might be another mission to Pluto within our lifetimes. If you'd like to know more about Pluto and the New Horizons mission, the video below has a lot of great information. It was released before the New Horizons flyby, but still serves as a fantastic resource for interested people:
Also, if you'd like to know more about the New Horizons flyby of Pluto, Space.com posted a Complete Coverage article for following the news as it was coming up online.
An image from New Horizons shows a mountain range of ice on Pluto (NASA)
As I close out this post, I leave these questions for you: -What comes next for Pluto? -Would you like to see another mission to Pluto? A lander this time, maybe? -Where do you stand on Pluto's status as a dwarf planet? -Finally, if you could name some of the new features on Pluto after science fiction and fantasy or famous exploration stories, which names would you choose and why?
The Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource at dusk (credit: SSRL/SLAC)
My lab mates and I are once again back at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), a synchrotron particle accelerator in Menlo Park, California. We're here to conduct some x-ray microprobe mapping and x-ray absorption spectroscopy on samples from our various research projects (and to sleep very little while working all day and night, but that's just how we roll at synchrotrons). I've been to three synchrotrons so far in my life: the Swiss Light Source (SLS) at the Paul Scherrer Institut near Villagen, Switzerland; the Canadian Light Source (CLS) in Saskatoon, Canada; and, of course, here at SSRL.
SSRL is a particle accelerator where a storage ring (the rough shape of which you can see in the image above) holds electrons that are traveling at close to the speed of light. Synchrotrons are awesome laboratories full of a wide array of instruments that make use of the infrared, visible, ultraviolet, and, especially, x-ray radiation produced when these relativistic electrons spin around the ring. Each of the individual experimental stations at synchrotrons are called Beamlines (BLs). Four of us from our lab group, the Templeton Geomicrobiology Lab, are working on three of these beamlines here at SSRL this weekend. Two of our beamlines are made for x-ray microprobe mapping and microscale x-ray spectroscopy while the other beamline is designed for bulk x-ray absorption spectroscopy.
I wrote a post entitled "Sulfur X-Ray Microprobe and XAS at SSRL: A First Look Into My Beamline Science" back in 2013 where I first introduced some of the work that I've done here at SSRL for my graduate research. That's back when Beamline 14-3 at SSRL was first getting up and running. I'm now conducting more of that work on BL 14-3 (actually, this may be the last time I come to SSRL, at least as a graduate student).
BL 14-3 is an x-ray microprobe beamline. An x-ray microprobe is based on the concept that each element can absorb x-rays of a very specific energy. When the x-rays are absorbed, one thing that can happen is the emission of light. With the sulfur x-ray microprobe on BL 14-3, I'm scanning across polished surfaces of material that I collected at Borup Fiord Pass last summer. The x-ray microprobe can tell me how much sulfur is present in an area that I've mapped this way. Here's an image showing a rough map that I just collected:
The image on the left is a reflected light micrograph (a microscope image) of one of my samples. The inset is a tricolored map image showing where sulfide (red/orange), elemental sulfur (green/yellow), and sulfate (blue) can all be spatially resolved in this sample. Pretty awesome!
Once I've mapped the sample, I can conduct x-ray absorption spectroscopy on the most interesting spots in the sample. This will allow me to figure out not only what kinds of sulfur are in my sample, but also how those types of sulfur are distributed throughout the material. Fantastical!
Of course, being that I'm at a synchrotron, I imagine this has not been my best writing. There's this thing about synchrotron work, where many of us will be working most of the day and night and taking our sleep in little bouts when we can get it. The time we get on synchrotrons is always limited and we like to make the most of it, so we end up driving ourselves into a bit of zombie mode toward the end of our time at these facilities (especially for those of us who caffeinate heavily while here).
I'm very hopeful for the data I'm collecting this weekend. These data, along with the rest of my work from this summer, should drive my research into its last leg as I look toward the last year or so of my graduate work. Using sulfur x-ray micropobe mapping and x-ray spectroscopy here at SSRL should give me some of the key pieces of data that will help me to build my dissertation.
