Astronomical League Live XVIII

Transcript:

or those who think they're innocent yeah oh yeah or claim to be innocent
it's amazing how quiet it gets as soon as we go live it is the 18th it's the 18th
astronomical league live right yes it is all right
caitlin how did you do that you showed up again
i'm good logged out and logged back in no i'm magic no i i i need to log in
with my computer because my camera and my computer don't talk to each other
so i so i'm i'm double trouble uh tonight well
i'm not sure we can handle double trouble
oh we'll figure it out yeah that it'll be it'll be fine
so yeah i just yeah you so you're on two separate computers right now then right
i'm not necessarily i have my my like phone camera and all my computer
okay so it's just it's this one computer that i'll show the slides but you'll still hear me
okay so it'll be it'll be fine yeah he's fine that's right yes
yeah i mean i've had to do this on a um global star party before too so scott
knows that i i shall double every time too
so that's really good though i think i think it's a good way to do it is to
have two you know you have one that's doing your presentation the other one's you
yeah yeah it's uh so this is like my personal setup because otherwise
my work setup is slightly different now can you at work can you use zoom or
do they use something else we can use zoom but not
not necessarily uh it's frowned upon
i see i prefer zoom by all means but no
for work they have us use teams yeah it seems like a lot of the workplace does use teams and i am so
used to zoom when i have to do go on teams i get kind of confused because i'm
so used to zoom yeah i definitely prefer zoom as well
yeah
carol you look like you're just gliding along the milky way there
and you're muted you're muted
is it still 100 degrees out your way yeah the car said a few minutes ago 102 so oh my gosh
and it's not dry heat like for adobe lips yeah that's true
actually we're getting rain today finally really yes well that's encouraging yeah we're getting today and
tomorrow is supposed to be raining well that's good you may have to get out your boat
the temperature was 111 yesterday oh my gosh yikes
wow that's two two two five yeah i've got 80 degrees right now so
it's dropping a little bit here yes it's cool here
so david in your experience what's the hottest it's been out in arizona i think we had a hundred and fifteen
hundred and sixteen ones oh wow there's much warmer than that they have to close the airport
because uh the uh ground is too hot for the planes to land but um
huh i've never heard of that yeah that that's happened in phoenix
and i think it's happened here once
[Music] nasa's explorers on mars are on the move
and making new discoveries it's a journey you can be a part of too
nasa's curiosity rover which has been climbing mount sharp since 2014 is about
to drive up onto a broad sloping surface called the green hue pediment
this will allow scientists to fast forward perhaps millions of years in mars's history and study the history of
liquid water written into these different layers of rock and curiosity made some interesting
discoveries along the way less than half an inch in size this unusual feature eroded from sedimentary
rock was cemented by mineral-rich groundwater and check out this rock smoothly eroded
by winds over in jezreel crater the perseverance rover is getting ready for a new
destination and science campaign and it's consistently setting driving
records on mars by relying more on self-driving software that allows the rover to avoid obstacles without having
to consult a human on earth perseverance will be pushing north in an
area where an ancient river flowed into a body of water it left sediments in a shape called a
delta the rover will collect more rock samples there the ingenuity mars helicopter will
support perseverance's upcoming science campaign the helicopter has been given the green
light to try to keep flying on mars for the next few months upgrades to its navigation software will
improve flight and operational safety the mars explorers will document the
journey along the way and you can make your own discoveries visit the raw image
pages to see the latest images every day and vote for your favorites
to get the latest updates follow at nasa jpl and at nasamars on social media or
take a deeper dive on the mission websites at mars.nasa.gov
[Music]
[Music] i love that little animation
well anyways here we are with yet another astronomical league live
i've got terry mann here with me let me bring her in terryman puts these programs together
and it's a pleasure to broadcast them here from explore scientific
she has a great speaker here dr caitlin aarons i'm going to let her introduce
her and dr david levy is with us and the president of the astronomical league
carol orange is here and jim fordyce uh who is also a key figure in the
astronomical league um so i'm going to turn it over to you terry thanks for bringing it on
okay thank you scott it's always great to be here i hope everybody's doing great tonight
so david how about if we turn to you you and have you kick off our show tonight
well thank you so much thank you so much terry and it's good to be here to be with the astronomical
league at their monthly uh online meeting tonight today's quotation
is going to be from shakespeare and it's going to be from his sonnet 14
not from the stars do i my judgment and yet me thinks i have astronomy
but not to tell of good or evil luck of plagues of deaths of season quality
nor can i fortune and to brief minutes tell pointing to each as slender
rain and wind or save with prince princes if it shall go well
i oft predict that i am heaven find but from thine eyes my knowledge i
derive and constant stars in them i read such art
as truth and beauty shall together thrive if from myself
to store thou which convert or else of thee
this i prognosticate diamond in truths and beauties doom and
date thank you and thank you terry yeah thank you david it's always such a
pleasure to have you on a l live we really appreciate you being here and actually you got you and scott there's a
star party coming up isn't there that's right we have uh i can see the
little poster behind me here this is the david h levy arizona dark sky star party number two
we had one before kovid descended upon us and we've uh we're now
having our second one this will be at oracle state park which happens to be
uh the first state park in arizona to be designated a uh ida international dark sky site
we'll be doing this in tandem with biosphere 2 so it's going to be a great time and
the whole community is kind of getting excited about it we're expecting musicians
artists of course astronomers and some great speakers so
it should be really cool we'll do a kind of like a global star party from biosphere 2 itself
so we'll see how that uh that goes over but um i think it's gonna be great and
and i'm excited about it i will have just come back from the starmus festival uh in european armenia
uh and that is um if you guys are you know good at searching on the
internet look up temple of garni g-a-r-n-i that is where we're going to be holding the uh star party there and
apparently this temple that was built or uh was done in the first century a.d so
it's it's going to be very interesting i've never done anything quite like it before so we'll see how it turns out but
it'll be great to get under arizona dark skies on on my way back and um uh to
meet with uh david levy and go observing with him again so yeah uh what's the pete scott
what's up the date uh it will be july 21st through the 25th
oracle state park city of oracle scotty you mean september don't you i'm
sorry you're right september do you know where i moved [Laughter]
yeah but tickets are for sale and you can go onto
dot explorescientific.com forward slash events i'll put the link up there for you guys in chat um
but uh it's it's going to be a an awesome event and if you've not had the
chance to observe actually observe with david uh you're going to want to do it because it's uh you know it's just a lot
of fun so yeah you're going to be doing a book signing too david i hope so i hope i hope that i'll be
able to certainly have my biography is out and uh
i'm hoping that my next book for children is going to be out but certainly by the end of the year
oh that sounds good that sounds really nice so all right well thank you both
and appreciate it david like i said we really appreciate you being here it's always great to see you
thank you my pleasure yeah tell wendy hi for me too okay all right
carol i'm going listening and she says hello oh good thank you so much i'm glad
she's listening yeah all right carol how about what's going
on out your way in kansas well a lot of stuff going on and we've had tons of uh
zoom calls with the league last week or two i think we're almost fatigued out but this is the special one
so we've got to be here tonight that's right yes yes i don't have to take any minutes so it's good hey that's all good
one of the things that i've been thinking about lately is increasing the size of the umbrella of
the al more than it is already in lots of different areas one of which is
many organizations have a series of scholarships that they have available through
individual clubs or individual members that they have set up for specific purposes
and so i'm going to introduce that one of our next ec meetings council
meetings uh just see if there would be the interest in in setting up something like that
as uh things change i think we really need to somehow come up with a way of having
more ownership with individual members with the leak so we can see that they
are connected more uh directly than it seems to be another thing that's just
come up within the last little while uh is the idea of astronomy day
and i'm sure many listening out there have been involved in astronomy day in fact we usually have about three or four
of our league clubs and many of those are in the midwest but some even foreign clubs who get involved
in that and astronomy club astronomy day is held in october and may each year
however lately with colvin we haven't had much response
so we're going to retool that a little bit and put an extra push on to really get
people doing that again uh the reports that are
coming in and continue to come in are that we're getting somewhat back to normal and we're able to have the public
around for those kind of events so if sort of got out of the habit of doing an astronomy day officially letting the
neighborhood and the community know what astronomy is all about and maybe having
your telescope set up with a proper filtering showing the public
views of the sun with proper protection sun spots with all of us up it and doing
all sorts of educational information to go along with it so that's the thing we're going to be emphasizing in the
next couple of months hopefully we're going to get back in the mode of having astronomy days that people are actually
participating so stay tuned on that the other thing i'd like to mention and
i'm not going to take too much of jim fordas's thunder well just want to mention that at alcom this year at the
end of next month i will be hosting a president's panel on diversity
and i know we talk a lot about diversity it takes so many different forms
and society as well as in the astronomical league so we're going to have a
good discussion about that and see if we can uh maybe translate some of the words
into actions during the next few years so we can uh really have an al
presence that looks more like what our country looks like so let's see if there's anything else
i think that's about it and i'm sure jim is going to say more about this a little bit later but i
would encourage everybody to get in there and register for alcon 2022
and i understand that for the large array there may be some
restrictions that jim will be talking about i'm sure just a little bit later back to you terry
okay well thank you carol appreciate it and we do hope to see everybody in albuquerque it'll be nice to see
everybody face to face so all right i am going to start this
and i am going to ask the questions for tonight once i get everything where i need to get
um tonight's door prize is going to be an astronomical league tote bag
and three people uh will be receiving one tote bag um and
they always ask me to mention that there are problems when we ship internationally
so if it takes a while just let us know and we will give you shipping information but sometimes we
are running into problems when we do ship internationally it's all right
and please send your answers in in the next 30 minutes this isn't like the gsp
the winners will be announced tonight and when the winners are announced somebody from the league's uh national
office will contact you to get shipping address so questions for tonight please send
your answers to secretary astroleague.org
first questions how many galaxies does the latest estimate say that there are
in the universe how many galaxies does the latest
estimate say there are in the universe and again send your answers to secretary
at astroleague.org that's the first question
second question on july 17th the moon passes three degrees south of which planet
so i'll repeat that again because we've been told we run through the questions too too quickly on july 17th the moon
passes three degrees south of which planet
question number three on sunday june 12th the perseverance
rover rolled up to some odd and intriguing martian terror terrain
what did it snap a picture of and please send your answers to
secretary ask for league.org so let's do that one one more on sunday june 12th the perseverance
rover rolled up on some odd and intriguing martian terrain
what to take a picture of all right and that
will be the end of that until after i will announce winners after
caitlyn aaron's talk so let me quit sharing
there we go all right next up um how about jim fordice i would
love to hear some of the latest on alcon and what's going on
good evening uh this is jim fordice i'm the president of the albuquerque astronomical society and chairman of the
now con 2022 committee but i'm really happy right now because uh
something very odd for albuquerque and new mexico is happening right now just started happening while
terry was talking and that's there's this thing called water falling out of the sky
they call it rain the first thunderstorm of the year here at my house
so that's we do get rain from time to time so it's happening um let me get the
slide sharing here going on just a second
here can everybody see my slide yes okay good so um this is our uh
our logo for the alcon uh we've got cocopelli with some planets coming out of his head now looking through a nice
uh refractor and then looking at some some constellations that you probably
recognize um where we're going to be a and when is
from the 28th to the 30th of july of this year we will be at the embassy suites hotel
it's a very nice convention facility located just about the middle of albuquerque now we have some great room
rates as as little as 129 a night for a suite room either a single or a double
but those rooms are only available through the 24th now the good thing is is we have uh just
very recently met our minimum number of uh room nights that we needed to
provide to the hotel so that's great but they're still selling rooms they're available but only through next week
friday so get hot and get your reservation and you can find that on our elk on website
uh right on the the front page of the home page there's a link to the the uh
place uh where you can make those reservations with the embassy suites now it's got a lot of amenities it has
complementary wi-fi you get a your own cook to order breakfast every morning and there's also a complimentary
evening reception even though we're probably going to keep you busy in the evening so i'm not sure you're going to make it to that but you never know you
could just zip by and get yourself a nice drink on your way to the next
very nice place our registration costs uh are listed there for singles couples and students
that registration includes access to the ballroom for all of the speakers
you'll get a nice conference uh souvenir bag as well as a nicely printed program
which i just sent to the printers yesterday and we're getting that uh ready to go you'll also get a nice lapel
pin uh with that uh that logo on it that i showed you earlier
and you also are able to come to the 27 july welcome reception so that's on the wednesday
before the conference starts and we'll get to meet you there in person
keep in mind that conference registration closes on 6 july that's the last day that you can make an order
online however if you want to mail it in those need to be postmarked no later than the 27th of june so that's just 10
days from now so we're getting to the point where you're not going to be able to get it in if you don't get it instant
uh we have a full schedule uh picture here is a glenn chapel from astronomy
magazine he's going to be talking about the variable star observing program from the astronomical league he's been
involved with that for many years and apparently has a lot of good stories to tell about how he's done that and and
why and that should be a lot of fun he's a very interesting gentleman uh we start off on wednesday the 27th of
july with an al council meeting so terry and carol and folks like that chuck
will be there to talk all day about how to make the astronomical league better
we will then have that welcome reception that i just told you about and then that evening uh you can come down to our
observatory it's called the general nathan 20 observatory or gnto for some observing at night now keep in
mind it's july so it's not going to get dark until a little bit after 9 o'clock so you have plenty of time to get down
there and we have vans that are going down here you can buy a ticket to ride in the van
we have a vendor expo every day we now have uh uh i think it's seven or
eight vendors have uh signed up with us and we're hoping for more yet uh we still got about another month corral a
couple more in there and looks like we've got some real good ones uh including of course the astronomical
league booth will be there so you can buy all the astronomical league uh things that you uh have been just
waiting to uh to see in person before you buy them the conference itself starts on thursday
the 28th of july our reception desk of course will be open then it will also be open on on wednesday for you to check in
we will start off with a workshop on the progress made at new mexico observatories as well as five
speaker sessions including glenn chapel there that i already talked about and that gmto star party
again so we're gonna do a star party both on wednesday and thursday at gnto
um then on friday we will have the al annual meeting so that's a
kick off for the day along with an astrophotography workshop and then we'll have three speaker
sessions including that last one uh panel discussion with the uh our
president uh carol lorge and then that evening is is a real
special treat for the conference is astronaut harrison schmidt he's the apollo 17 astronaut
so he was the last man to first step onto the moon and
he is a very interesting speaker and talker we have two things going on with him
there's a vip reception with him uh where you can get a copy of his book and
and get it signed by him get a picture taken hopefully and then we will have
him uh giving us a talk after after a dinner and then following that uh we will have
an observing session at viadoro it's a national wildlife refuge on the south
side of albuquerque that is the first place to be designated as an urban night sky place that's a real nice place they
just opened their brand new uh visitor center it's very nice and i
think we'll have a real nice time there looking at some stars to finish off the day and then on saturday uh the big uh
thing will be uh uh seth showstack uh talking to us uh about why we haven't
found the extraterrestrials he's uh with the the seti institute so apparently he knows something about that and
and we'll we'll see what he has to say about why we haven't found any yet now he's supposed to be a really great
speaker and we're looking forward to that that will be at the awards banquet that night we'll start off the day with
the observing award coordinator meeting some presentations by those who have won youth awards
we'll have a photometry workshop and for speaker sessions
some tours trips and special events that we have going on with this conference is
firstly on wednesday we will have a tour of the university of new mexico institute of meteoritics it's a really
great place to see some meteors they've got a collection that's just really unbelievable
i've already talked to you a bit about the general nathan twining observatory star parties uh gnto is a four acre real nice
dark sky spot about 40 miles south of albuquerque we've got both main and
imaging domes on the site the picture there the upper picture is of our main dome and we have 22 observing pads a lot
of those pads we'll have a telescope on it from a task member uh so that you can
take a look at the our nice dark skies through the those telescopes we also
have some uh people that have come coming in from out of state who have contacted me and said hey i want to
drive down to the site with my telescope now that's possible to do is explain how to do that on the website and and so if
you're driving a town and want to bring your telescope down to our observatory we can arrange to make that happen
um on thursday we will have a tour of the rainbow park that is the rio rancho
astronomical society observatory uh that is of course in rio
rancho and and they'll tour you around their facility uh if you're interested
here's a list of our other speakers those people i've said you know four or five observing or seeing the speaking
sessions every day i'll let you take a look at that for a minute really a nice
slate of different people you may notice that chuck allen our astronomical league vice president will
be uh giving a presentation on observable universe scale he's been asking me all kinds of
questions about how big the room is and just what's going on he's he's got a real fan dangle going on that's going to
start off on friday morning now that is one yeah i think you don't want to miss but a lot of very other interesting
things there one also point out is ann finkbeiner she is going to be talking about her
book that's titled a grand and bold thing it's a book about the sloan
digital survey i just really liked that book it was a lot of fun of course i also like it
because it all happened in new mexico and so it's close to home and
ann has just got a real good thing going on there i think it's going to be a great presentation and lots of other
very interesting folks talking as well some other tours and trips we have
harrison schmidt talking to us on friday i mentioned that there's a picture of him when he was uh actually walking on
the moon and then a picture more recently uh he's in his uh mid to late
80s i believe now still going strong very engaging uh really fun guy to be
around and and well worth uh coming to uh to to be in his presence and hear what he
has to say about his time on the moon uh we'll also be going down to viadoro
that night after harrison talks there's plenty of time you can do all that listen to him speak and then get on a
van ride down to viadoro it's actually pretty close to the city and do that and wrap up your evening by about 11 p.m
and then on saturday of course we have that awards banquet that i've already talked about that's going to be
kind of the nice end event for the conference though we do have one more thing going on on sunday
we purposely did this after the conference is over because going down to the very large array and
seeing that that great collection of radio telescopes it takes all day to do to get down there and take
a look and get back we have two different packages you can just do the tour itself you can go down
there you can ride a bus real nice uh comfortable bus and you'll get a lunch and we'll get you
down there you can see the vla and get you back by about 6 p.m or so or you can
do that what we call the tour and observing which uh is all the the above
you actually leave a little bit later in the day because we're going to keep you down there have you go through the vla
finish up in the later afternoon we'll then have you have a dinner in pi
town new mexico which for those of you who've been to pai town is famous for its pies of
course and we will be also including in that the lyceum tour the lyceum is a place in
magdalena new mexico that has been put together by a guy by the name of john
briggs which i'm sure many of you know he's been in the astronomy business for
his entire life and he has a collection of books and telescopes and all sorts of
paraphernalia associated with astronomy that he has put on out for
for observation that is just amazing it's uh it's really quite a an interesting place to visit and walk
through uh and then we'll follow up all of that that night by going out to a place close
to pai town that's where we're going to have dinner there is because this 40-inch dobsonian that we're going to take you to that's shown in the two
bottom pictures here is uh is a heck of a telescope john briggs who's looked through just
about every telescope in the world as far as i can tell said this telescope is just really
something he has had a chance to get down there and look through it and he says it it really is worth getting down
there and uh so this is something that you want to come down and see and take advantage of uh we will get you down
there get you couple hours of looking through the telescope and then get you back into albuquerque about midnight
to 1 a.m in the morning to to wrap up the conference
as far as who's coming and how many people are coming we've got uh currently 141 registered people excuse me 100 i i
messed up there we actually have 142 i added one in and i didn't change the upper number there
um and uh uh we have 84 people coming to our banquet we've got 69 coming to that
schmidt dinner we've got 25 people that have signed up for the vip reception with
harrison schmidt and as i already mentioned the hotel is very nearly sold out but they're still have a few rooms
available for us but once they get to the point where they just don't have any room so you won't be able to get it at
the 129 rate um but get in quick and and get those uh
purchased um the conference this year is a bit smaller than we hoped for we were
expecting somewhere on the order about 250 people or so registering so uh
really looking forward to kind of the late surge we need about 100 more people to uh to
send in orders and and get us up to where we're expecting to be but we'll have a good time no matter what 142
people or 250 people or whoever we've got i think we'll have a great time there
and this is my last uh slide here this shows you how to get to the website it's
alcon2022.astroleague.org you can send us a
question at the email address that's on there and there's my contact information
as well back to you terry well thank you jim i'm really looking
forward to this we actually had larry crumpler on uh virtual alcon last year
he is an amazing speaker uh finding out about the mars rover and all the
information it was amazing i i really enjoyed that he's very much involved
with it uh day to day uh working with uh curiosity and perseverance so he's
he knows what's going on you know as of yesterday yeah yeah he is an excellent speaker so
but all the rest of them are too uh carol can we make a note that council meeting needs to be over with in time
for the reception on wednesday night yes we will make sure of that
i think we've done a lot of the pre-work ahead of time before we get to albuquerque and
terry says she's going to hold me to that yes i'm definitely going to hold you to that we have done enough zoom
meetings at least to cut our meeting time down hopefully a little bit or at least delete one of our meetings totally if
we're lucky so yeah it's amazing we all kind of look forward to being there and yet we find
ourselves in meetings and we're trying to hurry up and get things just where we want them to be right now so
it will be a lot of fun for everybody i think so everybody
register get your hotel room that's what one of the things i was concerned about because when i registered for the hotel
they were filling up then uh so yeah get in there before the 24th before the registration is over with for the hotel
especially and for alcon so thank you very much jim uh carol i plan on being at a council
meeting before the reception starts you heard it here first we are going down
terry's going to be at the reception all right thank you very much all right
we haven't been gone that long so i don't really think we need to do a 10 minute break before we go to caitlyn
unless caitlyn you would like a 10 minute break do you need it to get ready or anything
i'm i'm good to go whenever you are all right i tell you what let's go ahead
and let me introduce dr caitlin erins dr aaron's research involves remote
sensing of icy surfaces including permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles
and planetary volcanism on the moon mars ceres and pluto she was actually or
maybe still is known as uh pluto oh tell me what it is
yes it starts with starquest we call her dr pluto yep
yep she received her bs in physics and astrophysics and geology
from west virginia university in 2015 and a phd in space and planetary science
at the university of arkansas in 2020 caitlin is currently a nasa post
doctoral program fellow at the goddard space flight center and a
member of the lunar reconnaissance orbiter diviner science team in 2018 she
received the 10 out one of the 10 outstanding young american awards
by the u.s junior chamber for her efforts in science outreach and i can tell you this girl does outreach and she
does it very very well i've known her since she was in high school and
it was incredible just to watch her grow into an adult and the things she does she really was one of those people you
stand back back and say man i can't wait to see what she is going to do so you know it's been a real pleasure
just just being around you and you know watching you grow up and your mom your your family is just amazing so
let me hand dr caitlin ahrens over to our audience uh thank you so much terry for the
introduction and and i gotta say i definitely grew up with the astronomical league too and so
you know any young folks out there uh listening in the astronomical league is
such a resourceful organization and use it to your benefit
we are so widespread um to be sure but
be involved with your local astronomy club it will help uh and it'll keep you fascinated don't
ever think of it as something that you you have to do and never think of it as as a as a chore or a job or anything
just be purely curious and be involved with your local astronomy club
and uh and who knows what all people you're gonna meet um you know being involved with the
central appalachian astronomy club uh for uh you know many
years now over a decade now and uh to the present uh i i've met some incredible
astronomers that have eventually helped me through my career so uh so you never know you never know uh
but uh but go and be involved with your local astronomy club i so all right so let's uh let's get
started with some some meet mars uh stuff tonight uh so this evening i'm gonna chat about
um just weird mars geology what in the red world is going on here uh so i'm not
gonna dwell too much about rover updates or or anything like that not not too
much though because goodness gracious that could take several hours uh just going through the rovers alone
but i want to kind of touch base as to like just how weird mars
is like the surface geology of mars is just incredibly incredibly fascinating
uh and there's still a lot that we truly have no idea when the world is going on there or rather what in the red world is
going on here guys let's there we go so just a little bit about
mars it is a rocky planet it's about half the size of earth um it can get
pretty chilly though negative 230 degrees fahrenheit and it's coldest so
yeah a little bit chilly there but you know what it can get pretty balmy at some points around the equator typically
on no more than 70 degrees there a very very thin atmosphere um it does
have seasons and i'll talk about seasons here in a bit because there's no trees on mars so it's not
like you can like oh hey the tree is turning colors uh no there's there's no trees with that
kind of season kind of deal so uh so what kind of seasons are we
actually dealing with on on mars i'll talk about later um a whole day on mars is i just a
little over 24 hours it's 24 hours and 37 minutes uh so not too bad if you are
to have a monday on mars i kind of deal but a whole year takes
687 days so not very uh you know much a long time
standing between birthdays if anything and it does have two moons and i put moons and quotations here because phobos
and demos are captured uh dinky little asteroids um so they're not true natural satellites like our
moon is with earth uh but i love showing this particular
map uh of mars this is from 1877 by chaparrally uh he used an 8.7 inch telescope uh to
create just this beautiful full map of mars um but interestingly enough though
you just see all of these crisscross lines and everything and and there for a while we just call these um canali or
canals i thinking that there's got to be some beautiful
waterways uh maybe tunnel systems aqua duck systems all over mars and and just
all these very intricate almost uh architectural structures
uh all over mars now most of us being uh you know amateur
astronomers here and you know you if you look at a telescope through an eyepiece long enough
start to get some uh you know little crisscross images in uh in your vision right especially if
you're like staring at a bright moon for several hours you start to get the little you know
wibbly blues in your eyes turns out that's pretty much what's going on here from from chaparralia's uh those canals
aren't necessarily there now the darker areas those are almost spot-on um he might
have seen the some of the darker regions of mars some of the volcanic regions on mars are typically a bit darker the
poles on mars are lighter uh compared to the equator but those very intricate canals
nope that's unfortunately an optical eye entity there
but beautiful beautiful mars uh many many missions uh since then to bring us uh beautiful
images and maps uh so much so much data to still be had
with mars um but alas no canals no
no no riverboats uh going through mars anytime soon so oh well
but what we do have um as of 2011 is some of our beautiful geologic maps uh
so these are some of the maps that i work uh with on a daily basis both on the moon and mars uh and so on and so forth
with other planets and moons through the solar system every single color that you see on this map is a different geologic
thing this is so interesting and it's so multi-colored if only mars was actually this colorful
that would be astounding i would love to know what the purple uh regions are but alas now you get you know 50 shades of
red at this point uh but i with mars though just how
very intricate and beautiful all this geology is i and then someone had to take the time
to map out all of this geology and we're still
finding new things we're still learning about each of this geology so just because it's all mapped out it's not
like we're just kind of going like okay we're done now what no far from it if anything this map is a
good starting point and there's still much more to add or to
understand uh so just kind of going real briefly through um some missions here so we've
had quite a bit of missions that here uh so i and plenty more too so what i i
don't have uh included on here is like the hope uh probe um from the united arab
emirates uh but there there's still a lot more missions to be planned uh in
the future as well uh so we've had you know a few flybys what i mean by flybys
though is that you you pretty much truly fly by and take as many pictures as you can and then you just keep going
or you crash orbiters you go around the planet a couple times take as many pictures and
measurements as you can and eventually crash uh and then you have your your landers and rover systems
so quite a few um now most of these are are already
you know sadly dead missions now uh so fly-bys yeah okay they would have
already flown by okay i quite a few orbiters are are already um decommissioned
uh we've already lost spirit and opportunity um brave little rovers there
our phoenix lander um unfortunately didn't last that long either though but you know what we still got curiosity we
still got perseverance and ingenuity so we're still doing um rover wheels on the
ground uh or in case of ingenuity propellers in the sky uh we're still going strong
there so who was first um so this is uh an
interesting little tidbit here though uh the soviet union launched nine different probes uh from 1960 to 1969 uh while
still going through um space race to the moon at this point too but unfortunately
all of those probes had failed as far as communications or just completely just crash-landed
um we didn't understand uh orbit mechanics of mars just yet we didn't
really fully understand mars's atmosphere at the time either so oh well
uh finally mars ii in 1971 um finally landed on on mars but it died very
shortly after so that didn't work either it wasn't until finally march 3. i i put an asterisk sarah soft landing
it kind of did a nice little tumble there but you know what it lasted a couple seconds it made communications
okay so finally mariner four six seven eight nine
i quite a few flybys um eight nine more orbiters finally the very first
photographs of another planet with remote sensors um completely debunked
the whole canal systems here as well though so let's take a look at the very first photographs of mars
shall we yeah very
very fuzzy and an interesting note i have here too is that all of the mariner orbiters and
flybys and it missed olympus wands and dallas marineris now
granted when you have resolutions like this yeah you know what i can i can at least
give them a i you know maybe a bronze medal of like good try uh but the fact that you missed the
largest volcano in the whole solar system that's actually pretty impressive uh so
at least they we finally got the first images of olympus bonds from viking uh
the viking landers one and two uh they landed on opposite sides of the planet i this was kind of our our first
kind of touch about astrobiology um at least we we were able to confirm
oxidation uh and a little bit of chemical activity to then imply
oh there might be some some biological implications here uh but the viking images are absolutely
gorgeous to look at i i definitely encourage everyone to just go google uh
viking images they're they're really really spectacular um kind of images
whereas global surveyor i have a special place in my heart for mars global surveyor
because that was actually the first planetary mission uh that i got to do any sort of research on
uh back in 2012 i worked at um the usgs in flagstaff uh arizona so
worked on mars global surveyor for a couple years i uh unfortunately it had i
died it had been decommissioned in 2006 but it gave us our first composition map it
gave us a magnetic field map i it told us a lot about the dust cycles
on mars as well and it really gave us a really good basic map
to help us figure out oh where do we want to land our phoenix lander where do we want to put play our
future rovers or future landers so mars global surveyor gave us our our first
really good maps um uh especially getting ready for pathfinder and sojourner which was 1997.
uh so in in uh context here it was like truly just right after mars global uh surveyor you
got pathfinder and mr turner i'll give you guys size here in a bit because pathfinder uh
they're really adorable um but i i will give you size comparisons just to show like yeah this
um pathfinder is truly the size of like a toy poodle uh so so size comparison here
it's a really really tiny little thing but it did give us some wind data it
gave like very very miniscule amounts of of soil and rock um kind of data here
2001 odyssey this one was an interesting little mission though but it really i
gave us a good nail in the coffin for mapping hydrogen in the polar region so
it's like oh okay there's frozen uh water and carbon dioxide at the poles
of mars great awesome what in the world do we do about that
well i'll tell you there's some weird geology there at the polls uh but also climate cycles as well
you have so much methane and carbon dioxide and water ice is kind of sublimating and then freezing and
sublimating and freezing so those polar caps are very very dynamic
mars express again really helped us out with the polar caps though in this case really helped us out with um there's a
lot more carbon dioxide in the southern pole uh than the northern pole and i'll show
you what happens when there's a big difference in geology
and why that is uh a favorite uh two favorite instruments here would be the hrsc the high
resolution stereo camera um and omega omega um kind of surpassed the mars global
surveyor mineral maps so then we had omega mineral maps
and i spirit and opportunity helped a lot with that as well spurred an opportunity had
a had an interesting run though uh very very long
long extended life more than we thought that they were going to be uh so they had anything from weird
minerals uh ancient magma fields soil layers uh
frost dust devils um but eventually they they all
all died out unfortunately the thing about spirited opportunity though that we've learned
is uh it's not so much of like their size or anything it's because they were solar powered um so the their backs
uh were completely solar powered which is fine it definitely let them keep going but the thing about dust devils is
that they pretty much just got buried in sand and uh that's pretty much what happened
couldn't wake up i but now we finally have uh our mars
reconnaissance orbiter this beauty big honkin camera here um so anybody
who's a camera fanatic out there you would absolutely love the high-rise camera um 19.7 inch aperture about 30
centimeters per pixel resolution this thing is gigantic and amazing
um so and i'll be showing a ton of pictures from the high rise
images which are freely available to go see uh and explore for yourself as well
if anybody has any uh cool 3d glasses at home just the cheap blue red uh filter 3d
glasses out there um high rise the high rise image gallery is starting to add
more um just view at your own home on your own desktop computer
i you know take it to a party or something you never know just take some cheap 3d glasses and go
with mars geology um but the high-rise camera interestingly enough i it worked so well
that pretty much the the very similar engineers that worked on the high-rise camera
built a very similar camera for the juno mission um to give us our very beautiful
high resolution um the swirly storm clouds over jupiter
so it's pretty much nearly the same design as the high-rise camera or on
mars um so definitely go look at juno images too because those are really cool
i quick little shout out to mars phoenix uh lander i i
gotta have a shout out to the green bank observatory in west virginia because they confirmed uh the landing
transmissions from phoenix going i landed and i'm still alive yay uh the
radio telescope was able to confirm um like good whew it landed okay let's
let's do science then um phoenix verified at least the presence of water
ice uh in subsurface which i mean just soil layers going on there
um it definitely gave us our first microscope imager uh with a lander as
well then we finally have curiosity nice bigger rover now so spirit and
opportunity again i'll show you size here in a bit but curiosity we're going bigger and badder so it landed 2012 um
i want to say either either late july or early august 2012 13 different instruments uh that it was
nicknamed the ultimate geologist i won many engineering awards not just
for its incredible build and all the amazing instruments it has on it as well
but also because of its landing you're trying to land a small car on a
completely different planet uh yeah that was very much like nail biting a hair
raising adventure there but you know what it worked and we were able to improve that landing
sequence for the surveillance rover but i want to touch base real quick about the tires uh on curiosity because
we kind of skimped a little bit on the entire design a little bit we figured okay you know what
the previous rovers had very thick tires they got stuck in the sand easily let's
thin out the tires what could possibly go wrong um so i'll tell you what happened here
in a bit uh but something i want to point out though is you know like why would you put holes uh on the tires well
interestingly enough these aren't uh these holes are on here uh for a purpose they're not here for just i you
know oh just you know for aesthetic reasons or anything no this is all morse code uh
for jpl so curiosity could just overrun along the surface with marking
uh its tracks going jbl jpl jpl for jet propulsion
laboratory uh but unfortunately because we we thinned out the tire treads a
little bit here we have some uh wearing on the treads uh going on here
so and they're getting increasingly uh scary and bigger so
you know what curiosity is doing fine yeah it may limp a little bit but
it's doing just fine i maven the mars atmosphere and volatile
evolution mission um got there in 2014 still working
uh it's an atmosphere probe um so orbiter here i it really gave us a good sense of of
that carbon dioxide shifting between the poles um really gave us a sense of like
oh wait a moment the atmosphere is on mars is kind of weird there's cool cloud
systems on mars uh it's thin but it's not uniform across the whole
planet it there's like thinner spots in some areas there's metal
bits i in the atmosphere as well so it's it's all sorts of all sorts of weird
mars is delayed uh so i oh wait no there's a there's a second
exo mars this is the first xmr so first exo mars was an astrobiology mission
let's try tried to get there in 2016 with the chaparrally lander
i unfortunately well you know what technically it landed it just landed in several spots
um so so there's going to be a supposedly another exo mars mission in
the works in the future uh but yep so there's the poor chaparrally lander
here and here and here and here and here maybe that little bit there
moving on uh insight so the insight mission is i
steadily uh declining unfortunately so it was a beautiful mission
i really gave us a good sense of uh the interior of the planet what kind of uh
mars quakes are going on uh on mars and yes we were able to detect mars quakes
not i you know scary end of the world magnitude 12
mars quakes or anything goodness gracious though um i think the the largest earthquake we were able to figure out with in sight is
about a magnitude four so pretty good shaking there to be able to detect that uh with mars insight
um but why we want to know about mars quakes is we're just assuming that the
inside of mars is similar to earth but in reality you really don't know
so understanding the interior the core what kind of mantle um
system is even going on on mars we know it's a dead planet
geologically uh on the inside uh it's it's it's dead
on the inside but uh but in reality though we don't know much
about the layers what kind of layer system are we dealing with on on mars so essentially insight
is pretty much just kind of um you know putting a glass uh to the ground and kind of tapping and
seeing if they can can hear anything uh so the mars in sight was uh like i
said it's still an ongoing mission though but it is uh it only has like a
couple months to years left uh of its of its mission before it's decommissioned
now interestingly enough though the probe uh the hp
cubed instrument here in the heat flow probe this thing was supposed to go down a couple of meters uh worth uh down into
the ground and that would have told us a lot about the soil mechanics that would have told
us what kind of heat the soil might have been giving off i what kind of
vibrations the soil how compact the soil might have been problem with that is we realized that
the soil was way tougher than we thought uh which is exciting because hey that's
data that we didn't have before okay uh but there for a while the probe got
stuck i actually got stuck several times but the most recent time was uh like
mid last year and it got to the point where we had to get
the um uh one of the deployment arms to essentially i i
hammer it in into the soil to get it unstuck
and then i think if anything had just got it stuck in a completely different way
so you know what lessons learned we tried it was still interesting nonetheless and
then finally we have our perseverance river again big
rover here uh it's a curiosity being about the size of a small car perseverance rover it's a slightly
longer eye in uh um and its instrumentation though a lot more instruments this time
too this thing is a massive massive rover i but its landing site is just
absolutely gorgeous this is jezreel crater no it is not this multicolored
again i really wish jezreel crater was this purples and greens and oranges and
everything but no alas no it is not what you're seeing here though is a mineral map of jezreel craters so every
color that you see here is a different kind of mineral which is really neat this would have
been an ancient delta deposits so some sort of flowing uh water would have had happened here
and then outflow outpour into this giant basin here so this is the jezreel delta
here uh but all of these would have been different kinds of clay minerals
different kinds of silicate minerals different kinds of maybe iron and magnesium minerals
all of those different kinds of minerals i i could say rocks are rocks or rocks or
rocks but knowing what kinds of rocks we're dealing with like clays versus irons and
magnesiums and stuff can really give us a sense of like oh
what kind of like volcanic systems would we have been dealing with at this time
uh if you're feeling if you're looking at clay a lot of clay minerals there would have had to have been water
involved to make the clay minerals is so really gives us a cool sense of
what would have been here what kind of materials would have been sloshing around
in this basin many many many thousands of years ago
i so just a huge swath of where all we have landed on mars and it really truly
feels like we've we've barely scratched the surface of mars there's still a lot of different areas that we have yet to
explore with any kind of rovers and landers but you know what that's the exciting part is that there's
constantly talks uh and workshops and conferences and and
group meetings about okay where do we want to go next where do we want to land
such and such i and and why it's always the why why do we want to land here
versus here it took um you know about two and a half to three years to even choose the jezreel crater
landing site for uh the perseverance rover it took many many meetings and workshops to bring the
mars community in and form debates and debates and debates we had
uh over a hundred different landing sites on mars then they narrated down to only like three or four landing sites
right and then the mars community was kind of pretty much doing a voting and debate system
uh with like oh well this is why we should go here instead of here and no no no
let's go here instead of here and gotta get the reasons and ultimately jezreel crater won not to say that the other
sites aren't gonna get a future chance uh but there's still hundreds of
different landing sites to still explore too so this is where it gets the i love this
so much so this is the size comparison of these rovers here um so hold so way down at the bottom here is your your
center pathfinder um mini rover here you got your spirit and
curiosity size um off to the left here then your your
this is curiosity but and like i said perseverance is just a little bit longer
uh size though but height wise it's about the same so giant
giant rover systems uh that that we're improving upon curiosity perseverance
versus spirit and opportunity i yeah very very strong holding there i i
love this mars exploration family portrait as well there's still so many different international collaborations
with these mars missions too and there's still plenty of them coming about too
so finally okay now i can talk about how weird mars actually is or how i like to
call pretty picture time here we go i so again like i said every single color
that you see here on this geologic map is a different geology i'm not gonna go through every single geology because
we don't have five hours to be here um but i'm gonna at least hit on the
highlights and one of the most spectacular highlights uh on the planet mars is the volcano uh systems of the
tharsis region in particular so this is uh region here so this is olympus mons
the largest volcano not just on mars but the largest volcano in the whole solar
system after this powerpoint i'll show you guys a a a very simple size comparison of just how big how tall
olympus mons actually is but the base of uh of this volcano can pretty much
swallow the state of arizona so nice good size comparison there of how
big the base is at least it's very tall too then you have your your three lovely
other volcanoes here um uh as part of your uh tharsis bulge here so you got um
and pavenus and arcia so nice little alignment here you got some
other smaller um what are called foley uh or ortholite
uh little volcanic systems there as well so really really cute if we were to look at an elevation map uh here so the very
uh whites and browns and reds are the very very high altitude elevation areas
the blues and the greens are much lower elevations here so this is why we call it the tharsis bulge it's just this huge
huge plate uh that has just been bulged up uh with these volcanic systems and it bulged so
much there's so much pressure on this part of the crust to bulge upward and it
pretty much uh you know helped crack uh a lot of this um this canyon system
here this is valles marineris hair so yes beautiful olympus mons yet again
now interesting uh center here so typically when you think of a volcano you think of just a one
vent volcano system and you're done but this has several weird holes here and
that's because olympus mons was so active in its prime that it would explode
and and the hole will actually collapse because it it just had so much of an
explosion i that it would it would collapse and kind of fill up um or just scab over uh in a
sense but it would just keep going and then scab over and collapse and then keep
going again scab over and collapse and it did this several times it just kept making a new hole every time so we call
this nested calderas it's just the pure activity going on and on and on and on
and on uh and so there's a lovely side view of
olympus mons as well so gorgeous gorgeous volcano now these
are not just the only volcanoes there's other large volcanoes as well like uh elysia mons there's also um really
beautiful lava flow uh morphologies as well i i love these this kind of
morphology here uh this is part of i believe rcmon's i
or or part of just part of olympus ones i think uh so you can get cliffs kind of um
dangling and sinking back in and almost they're almost like floating uh they're not floating anymore
uh but that's pretty much what they would have done at some point and little itty bitty
volcano uh domes as well so they're kind of like little volcano pimples uh here
and there throughout the northern part of mars you heard it here mars has acne yeah
i again just tiny little dome soap that could have been built up and then collapsed built up and collapsed
just all sorts of beautiful beautiful geology again most of these pictures are from
the uh mars highrise camera which are freely available to uh
to go peruse at your leisure
i this i isn't necessarily a volcano system i just want to show a mineral map
of why craters are interesting now i i can say craters are just very fancy holes in the ground
okay uh but craters can really tell us a lot about uh what kind of weird geology is
going on in the surface as well because if you figure there's special holes in the ground
it's how well it would have punctured the surface what would have been excavated from the
crater i and so seeing mineral maps around craters we can see oh it's called an
ejecta so you have something just wham hitting the hitting the ground making a giant
hole and then stuff just going complete all over the place and that's that
is called ejecta um so so you can have different kinds of
quebec patterns here that's that this is going to be now my official term of ejecta uh
for craters now not sure how you would even spell that but uh good luck to anybody out there
but you can have so many different kinds of weird patterns here my favorite um kind of eject the complaint patterns out
of craters are kind of stuff that looks like flower petals um so these flower petal looking um
ejecta that's honestly due to a lot of ice
i or or water that would have been in the soil and whenever you hit it at such a rapid
speed it heats up that ice and water and what it fluidizes
the the ejecta and it makes it all kind of fluid um so that's why it looks almost like
flower pebbly um looking there and even off to the right here all of this uh um
layered uh pedaling going on there so that that could have also been done to um ice and water as
well uh this is just how beautiful the high rise images are so again we're looking
at like 30 centimeter per pixel resolution here um most high-rise images are just kind of a simple strip uh image
here but then you could just keep zooming in and zooming in at just how much detail
is just in this one part of of a crater i and this is
not a typical crater this is not just a very simple hole is because this crater
would have had a lot of ice might have had some salt um in it as well to make kind of a weird
fluid um almost look like a fluid painting i in a sense if anybody has seen fluid uh art and fluid paintings
like that uh another interesting thing that the rovers picked up with their mineral
cameras are uh are these little uh balls of fun these are what we like to call martian
blueberries i these are not actual blueberries you do not want to eat these little things
uh but the closest thing that we have to these on earth are called moki balls
um so they're just iron creations they're iron balls
usually found in like river systems and and one eyes because the river would take clumps of iron and smooth it around
and around and around and make a little little snowball of iron
uh but we call these blueberries is because the mineral caramels on rovers
uh iron shows up as that kind of a bluish tint uh so we love calling these
martian blueberries but again you don't want to eat these i
this i love this part of mars it is just absolutely
gorgeous uh so this is part of um uh noctis labyrinthus uh which we call
the the crown jewel uh on mars this is probably the most uh
beautiful pieces of minerals that you would see anywhere on mars this is
somewhere close to valles marineris um but this is probably where you'll find
um your your better minerals if anything so this
i not of gemstone quality but this is an opal field
on mars uh so like i said it's not gemstone quality by any
means necessary here but still very beautiful that we have opal
uh on a on a different planet um to be sure and then there's it's a whole field
of opal in this particular spot on mars i i had mentioned
this briefly when talking about the uh the iron accretions and and the craters here though but there are some places on
mars that have quite a bit of salt uh uh in the soil and so salt really makes
uh weird mounds and and soil uh
dynamics going on here though so this is a a piece of assault field
on mars really really cool now here's another interesting geology uh
that i it probably sounds boring at first these are dooms
i essentially just very uh special piles of sand
on mars but i promise it's way more interesting than i make it i've sounded out to be
i these are very very weird piles of sand on mars i it's because mars because
it has such a low pressure in its atmosphere in a very very thin atmosphere but with a lot of
wind it creates some really weird shapes with its sand i it makes weird sand castles
if anything so you can have really beautiful um uh linear stripey looking dunes you can
have dudes that look you know very chaotic um crumpled up pieces of paper looking
texture of of dunes but you could also have bark and dunes which we love to
um i have shout outs to star trek though because it looks like the star trek logo
with some of these uh bark and doom fields you can all have also have star dune
field so star dune um fields are typically within craters that have a lot of winds in different directions when
you have winds in different directions it kind of piles up the sand in uh in this kind of uh um scaly
lizard-scale looking pattern i uh within a crater
but dunes are also an interesting way for seasons so now we're gonna get into
seasons real quick so there's there's a summer season and a winter season so yeah i know there's
really not much to say there's technically a spring uh in fall season as well too but you
essentially got your your very warm summer and then very cold winter once it hits winter a lot of beautiful
dune systems just become completely encased in frost and it's almost like it stands still in time it looks really
eerie but they show up very very bright because of all the frost so you know
it's winter when the when your dune field suddenly you know it crystallizes and then
glosses over okay i guess it's winter now okay cool um but when it turns into springtime
that's when the fun part comes out because these dune fields with a layer
of frost now imagine if you will a layer of frost comes in almost like a spooky fog coming
in and then just kind of settles and crystallizes over the dune field as it's it's settling down onto the dune field
it traps nitrogen and carbon dioxide gases into the dunes and then it sits there and it
waits and waits and it waits all through winter until spring arrives and that
frost layer starts to uh sublimate a little bit starts to vaporize off the dune fields so what
happens to that carbon dioxide and nitrogen gases well it turns into this
it turns into what we call spiders so spider season
is a thing on mars it happens very quickly um it's as soon as spring
arrives we definitely know when spring is here whenever the spiders on mars
appear now these are not actual arachnids i but
what they do look like it they do look like that they're skittering across the surface it looks kind of creepy uh what
these are is that it's that carbon dioxide and nitrogen gases that are trapped in the frost and in the dunes
and as that frost goes away all that gas just kind of goes like little itty bitty geysers
little dusty dark dusty puffs of little geysers and as they go puff
they'll just kind of look like that they're dissolving skittering across the surface and they'll go away
um but that's when we know that it's springtime on mars is when the when the large spiders arrive which
at this point saying it out loud it sounds like a b rated sci-fi movie so you know someone out there gonna make
that uh but because everything's so dynamic i we
also get dust storms as well dust devils um it really kicks up a lot of interesting dust patterns as well
uh let's see yeah they're good okay so there it's playing i i i love this this
is from the spirit um rover when it's a back in 2005 in the an aggressive crater
i you see just a really interesting beautiful dust and devils just kind of gliding through
there so you get the main bright one in the center here but you got a couple of them in the background um just kind of
going through there's there's another bright one oh two big ones back there so really really cool
and those dust devils uh really make some interesting tracks as well so all of this really uh chaotic looking tracks
all over the place we i teasingly call this the etch-a-sketch uh design
it it's definitely you know it's really hard to say i just sketch to a bunch of
undergrads nowadays because they have no idea what it stretches anymore it makes me feel very very sad uh but hopefully
most of the audience out there does not have just sketches to understand uh you know just how how bizarre all these
patterns are um with the dust devils all right so moving on to another very
weird head scratcher of a geologic feature here on mars uh these are called recurring slope
linear or rsls rsls i really gave us a very very heated
debate as to whether mars is wet or dry
and was it wet in the past is it wet now is it dry in the past is it dry now at
one point in time uh was it wet versus dry
and so seeing these flows are these wet flows
that don't stay there they will disappear and then as the name suggests they
reoccur recurring slope linear they will appear back again and then disappear and come
back again and disappear again i we see these in in just a very few
regions across mars i i think the latest
debate slash theory is that these are dry flows that something is going on on
the tops of canyons and craters that are just making bits and pieces of the
crater fall and almost make uh dark streaks coming down
uh into their valleys but they still look really weird um nonetheless though so all these really
dark uh little streaks um that you see here uh going
downhill all of this would be recurring slope linear our cells so the debate is
still going by all means i think just the current theory and out is that these are considered
dry um but it's a matter of like well if they're dry though could they still be
wet in some cases could there be salt and then if there's salt involved
salt would have had to have implied that it would have been wet at some point
so it's it's just going and going and going um another interesting feature that does
imply water at some point are gullies so gully systems here um beautiful
beautiful gullies there's gullies all over earth as well so we as planetary
scientists will go and travel uh around the world to study
mars like environments um so we find gully systems on earth
uh the volcanoes in iceland and hawaii are very similar to volcanoes some of the
smaller volcanoes that we see on mars as well lava tubes there's some beautiful
lava tubes in arizona and new mexico very similar to what we suppose lava tubes would be on mars as well so we use
earth as a really nice playground uh to study mars
i this is a piece of terrain that we have no idea what to do with and we truly just call it chaos terrain
well yes geologists have no idea what's going on here uh so we truly just call it jumbled up mountains
and that's about it so this is chaos terrain and moving on i so just just the the full aspect of
just how weird some of this geology is on mars you can truly just look at these images
for hours and hours and hours on end um there are some aspects that it's still
pretty active every once in a while we still get active landslides um uh all over mars as well at times
there would have been ancient glacial systems now how ancient are the glaciers
that's still uh under debate as well uh but again we see these all over earth
uh iceland and greenland and mostly through canada
we see these on mars as well i just beautiful beautiful this is probably my
favorite glacial um looking like tongue tongue there just a bunch of glacial
material just kind of blah outward all right so this is also an
interesting little head scratcher this is called swiss cheese terrain
it's really it it it will take your eyes uh some time to adjust it does take a
lot of practice to realize what's actually going on here all of these pits that you see here are actually going in
to your screen it may look like a lot of the the blotchy parts are popping out at
you that's actually inverse so all of those pits are actually going into the screen it does
like i said it does take some time for your eyes to kind of adjust and train your eyes to realize like
where's the sun angle and you know what aspect are you looking at here but all these weird pits that you see here
we call it swiss cheese terrain uh it's weird this is only found on mars
and this is only found in the south pole of mars so this is where the carbon dioxide part comes in
but we still don't understand why and we still don't understand how
either there are very very few laboratories in the world
that are trying to recreate this kind of effect with carbon dioxide ice at mars
temperatures uh in a laboratory to try to recreate this kind of feature
it's very very difficult because we still don't fully understand what the world is going on here but it's so cool
to think that this is only found in the south pole of mars nowhere else in the entire solar
system has swiss cheese terrain um but we love this part of the swiss
cheese terrain this is called the happy face this cheese terrain which we uh we
you know it looks like uh one of those eat pork smiley face cookies right
um so a quick little shout out to some uh some mars books that have been recently
released i you know shameless promotion here uh if you're
really wanting to dive into like the minerals and the physics of the mars volcanoes i
check out mars a volcanic world uh by springer um by the editor springer um
editor giovanni leon i myself have authored uh two chapters for that book
so it's a very fun very fun adventure there um but if you're wanting to read more about just volcanoes in general
throughout the whole solar system i highly recommend natalie's um recent book fire and ice and you can find that
on amazon a fantastic fantastic uh book um going through the whole solar system and
are kind of weird volcanoes are in the solar system i and with that i i
will leave you with this link here um www.uahirise.org this is where you can
find all the beautiful high resolution uh high-rise camera images of
all across mars i if you have a classroom out there and you want to image pieces of mars for
your classroom you are able to have image requests um with the camera system as well so
it's a fantastic activity for the classroom uh as well so the high rise
camera is absolutely gorgeous and truly just look at images for hours on end
uh and with that i i thank you so much and just real quick i just give you guys
a size comparison of just how big olympus spawns is uh using sticky notes
um so if you were to have uh mount saint helens as the width of my sticky note
pad here so madison helens is about 1300 meters high i
compared to mount everest the size of this cube of sticky notes here so pretty
good size mount everest is about 8 800 meters uh tall here
so if you have mount everest this is mount uh olympus mods here so very very big
height uh wise compared to mount everest which is 8 800 meters
olympus mons height is about 21 000 meters so pretty big
volcano but it is the largest volcano in the whole solar system though so it's fantastic
and thank you so much um alcon for for having me on this evening to chat about
the weird and fantastic geology of course thank you caitlyn that was amazing while
scott's looking at a screen i got a quick question the little blueberry little itty bitty how big are those i
mean yeah very baby size bead size um but
very similar uh some of them can be like musket ball size um as well so very very similar to um just mokey balls
uh that you would find out in the southwest okay yeah because i thought wow it looks
like bb's almost yeah that's pretty cool so i didn't mean to jump in front scott
if there's any questions there's questions here it's fine i'm just i'm going back through the
chat stream just to make sure hopefully i don't miss anything here um
people enjoyed your presentation i know that um yeah
i particularly enjoy the way you give presentations katelyn so you make it fun
and very extremely informative and you can relate to what it is she's saying you know when she's talking
yeah just like you did with olympus monster size i mean that's that is amazing
because it's hard to figure this to compare it to something in your mind but when you did that then
that gave us a comparison where we understood better
it was interesting to get comparisons with just uh you know household objects
i'm also in the middle of moving so trying to find objects that i haven't packed yet
for this talk was a little bit challenging but we got through it
yeah so this is uh from james fullerton uh watching on facebook he says what do
the fluid ejecta given the slope of the volcanoes tell us about the viscosity of the
material that was once fluid oh fantastic question considering that's
exactly what i work on um so definitely the the different kinds
of ice how much ice are you dealing with how much salt uh are you are you handling in in your
soil so all these different kinds of minerals i can either make it very flowy
i but then the more salt and then typically more iron minerals you have in it it really gunks up the works so the
more chunky um that kind of flower petal uh morphology that you have with like some
of the flows and some of the craters as well it's really gonna gunk up the works there um but ice it's a great lubricant
so it really helps spread everything out now we don't really see that much ice
around the the volcanic systems just to the north of olympus mons is where we
start to get that that divide into glacial territory
um but how old those regions are uh are still
uh being investigated okay another question from james fullerton are there plans to put a
stronger drill on a future mission yes absolutely
yeah we've we've learned uh through mars insight for sure but drill systems are actually becoming
an interesting technology for not just mars but we're wanting to go back to the moon we want to send uh boots on the
ground uh to the moon in just a couple years with the artemis program and so we're
developing drills for artemis we're developing drills for future mars landers and
rovers uh there's concepts out there to do drills for europa and ocean worlds something that
has thicker ice shells uh with some of these moons of jupiter and saturn
so all the all this ideas of of drill systems and the designs drills
are are really starting to become a better idea and concept and then hopefully
from idea and concept into actually building it and testing it um so for now most of these drills are
like yes we do want better drills but the design and concept of them are
still being worked on i the next uh fantastic drill to come about would
probably be viper so viper is a volatile investigation
um i don't remember what the p is for viper it's a very interesting acronym here uh
but it's essentially a rover for the lunar uh south pole
uh near a nobel crater and it's gonna have a drill system um to drill into the bits and pieces of the
ice so that concept and design is gonna be really fantastic to learn
um if that design works and then hopefully we'll use that design then for mars
great uh mike over across watching on youtube asks do dust devils on mars show lower
atmospheric pressure in the center like dust devils on earth that's an excellent question we are
still trying to learn about that right now it's it's a little difficult to try to chase dust
devils uh on earth to be sure but you know what there are dust double
areas uh that we would try to set up wind uh measurements and and what a lot of folks
from the uh applied physics laboratory apl um go out and visit with those wind
measurements or wind measurement instruments and try to chase earth dust devils to understand mars
dust levels i as far as pressures go i don't know that at the top of my head
but i do know that there is quite a bit of work being done currently
uh of like the differences here we do know that we have some wind measurements
from some of the rovers especially from spirit and opportunity who have had the either lucky or unlucky
chance of being blown around from a dust devil i
so it you know what it was it was mixed blessings for those rovers and dust
so it knocked off i guess some of the dust off the solar panels right a little cleaning job but
i don't know it would be interesting to actually hear the dust devil get uh perseverance
though so oh yeah to try to listen to it oh yeah that would be really interesting or just a lot of you
know okay
jeff wise watching on youtube now i'm not
he said is it so big because of the low gravity i'm not exactly certain what
he's talking about but i so
being big i guess i'm gonna assume bulking baby volcanoes uh
in which case volcanic systems is growing and growing and growing
um gravity can help a little bit you know when you have very low gravity it can
help with a lot of that building and building and building another thing that mars doesn't have that we have here on
earth are plate tectonics um so you know our platonics really help
yeah yeah okay we have volcanoes and earthquakes uh all over the all over the place but it essentially helps shift
material around enough uh whereas on mars you get all that
material to build up and then build up and build up and build up and build up uh that and your crust isn't really
going anywhere uh it's it's gonna have to release uh in some way now
there's still a lot of speculation as to um like why the three smaller tharsis volcanoes look
like that they're in alignment could those have been similar to say like the volcanoes in hawaii where you had like
hot spots just kind of like oh made a volcano i'm going to shift over here let's make another volcano
okay if we're done making apple cana shift over here make another volcano and uh so so that's that's a favorite
theory going on right now but to understand how how hot spots would have moved and then why didn't it make
any more than than those three or did it move
uh and and make some of the smaller ones that are not necessarily in alignment and and all this stuff so
all of that is still being investigated yes uh again jeff wise he says that strange
south pole region looks like the soil was boiling it is so flat with the pits
it is the pits [Laughter]
um but interesting thing that you said about boiling this so there are experiments going on
um not necessarily with the swiss cheese terrain but with with carbon dioxide ice
there is a moment where carbon dioxide ice can look like that it's boiling at a certain
temp very low temperature and pressure it does look like that it's boiling as it's sublimating
and the open university in the uk have a very large mars simulation
chamber that can go down the temperatures and pressures of mars and they boil
i that carbon dioxide ice mixed with a lot a bunch of different kinds of sand um to
simulate mars and just to see what would happen um and turns out that they're recreating landslides they're recreating
a lot of really cool um different kinds of morphology and geology they haven't figured out a way to create
the pits though so stay tuned for that i guess that is the pits that is the pitch
so carlos fernandez uh who loves to make
incredible illustrations planet planetary illustrations and other types of
illustrations says that viper is the volatiles investigating
polar exploration yeah that makes sense yeah i thought it
stood for purple but okay anyways uh everyone says thank you very much
um it was very interesting well thank you thank you so much for
having me this evening and touch out about uh mars geology well thank you caitlyn that was an
amazing talk really appreciate it it's always a pleasure to have you here
so all right what we are going to do now before i forget is to give the answers to the
questions so um
on the first question how many galaxies does the latest estimate say there are in the universe this is i just read this
this week so it said 200 billion in the universe and don now
has got that answer or the closest answer so carl sagan was approximately correct
right probably so yeah
all right on july 17th the moon passes three degrees south of which planet and
it passes south of neptune at 9 00 pm eastern daylight time and deb wagner
answer that question correctly and on sunday june 12th the perseverance
rover rolled up to some odd intriguing martian terrain what did it snap a picture of
a rock shaped like a snakehead one of the articles said it looks like it's out
of indiana jones it just looks like a snake coming out of the rock and rich
trailing has answered that one correct so congratulations to you three somebody
from the astronomical league office will be contacting you in the next few days
so i would like to thank jim fordice uh the chair or
leading the alcon effort and he is also the president of the albuquerque astronomical society thank you so much
jim for the update can't wait to get there next month and thank you scott
for everything that you have done to help all of us and david levy
you know written so many books poet we sure do appreciate him starting us
off every show that we have had and carol org thank you so much for being the
president of the astronomical league in the time you take and put in all the effort uh it is greatly
appreciated thank you sure caitlyn as always it is such a
pleasure to have you here everybody enjoys your talk there is so much energy and information in
everything you do thank you so much sure if i can just say a brief mess a few
words here caitlyn is an example of someone who came through our awards
program in the league and she has gone well beyond that and
what an example you are caitlyn for our upcoming uh contest winners as we go
forward so well done thank you thank you and i would like to thank
everyone that is watching uh we couldn't do this without you and we appreciate you being there all of your questions
and all of your interest thank you all very much and astronomical league live because we
will be doing alcon next month we're going to take a break we're all going to be pretty busy over the next month
getting ready being there and finally coming back home so we are going to pick up astronomical league live on
august 12th at 7 00 pm eastern daylight time and please everybody join us at
albuquerque if you can july 28th through the 30th uh so many of us that you see online
will be there and it would be great to just meet some people that we know names but we don't know the faces so please
join us if you can it will be a lot of fun it every time we have
an alcon it is always a lot of fun we meet new new people you make new
friends and you catch up with distant family because it's like the whole community we all know each other
so thank you all very much thank you everybody here on uh al live i sure do
appreciate it scott you want to say i just you know
it's an honor to do these uh astronomical league live programs and um i'm always happy to be part of it so
thank you well thank you and we will see scott out at alcon he will be doing some
interviews with some of the award winners um interviewing
some of the speakers none of the talks none of the you know actual talks or anything will be online but uh you can
you're more than welcome to come on out registration still open for a while uh and you can tune in and watch some of
the interviews it's always interesting to hear what they all the people that are there have to say
so scott we will see you in albuquerque yeah and thank you everyone else i sure hope we see everybody out there
yeah thank you you know one of the things i'll remind everyone although i will be broadcasting some
portions of the astronomic or the alkyne it is not a replacement for actually
being there we will have short interviews with uh some of the
presenters and the award winners and uh the movers and shakers valcon but
being there you're going to see the full presentations you'll be able to have be at the banquet you'll be able to rub
shoulders with hair harrison schmidt if you want to uh you know you're going to make new friends and lifelong friends in
many cases and um it's uh it's an amazing event
uh and you'll be hanging out with your peers so consider
if at all possible getting that plane ticket making those reservations at embassy suites and being there with us
in july so thanks and i think that's all i have to say anything else
terry uh not for me anybody else have anything they'd like to say
all right thank you so much scott thank you everybody out there we sure do appreciate it
and everybody take care enjoy the weekend okay thank you very much bye-bye
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
wow [Music]
you