Planetary Geology

NASA’s online television service will be streaming live coverage of the Phoenix landing. I do not know the extent of the coverage or how soon it will be beaming back live footage from Mars, but from 6–11 PM EST you can be on the cutting edge of Martian Science. This will be one of the riskiest landings in NASA history. A parachute will slow the lander’s descent initially. The parachute will be ejected and three legs will be deployed followed by a downward-pointing booster for the final deceleration. All of this will take place during the “seven minutes of darkness.” Should all go well, after seven minutes the Phoenix will go online and their will be much rejoicing, if not . . . well, let’s not think about that.

Phoenix Lander. Source: University of Arizona and JPL

Phoenix Lander undergoing ‘water hammer test’ used to measure structural integrity. Source: University of Arizona and JPL

Timeline of the Phoenix Lander’s descent. Source: University of Arizona and JPL

This past week I was at a workshop organized by the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) called the “Science of Solar System Ices: A Cross-Disciplinary Workshop.” The idea of this conference was get everyone that works on extra-terrestrial ices in the same room, at the same time, to talk about their work and how people with different expertise may help them. So why was I, a lowly grad student, in attendance? I was riding the coattails of Dr. Geoff Collins and Dr. Leonard Sklar, the PI on my research grant and adviser respectively, we presented our work in poster form and with a talk, which can be seen here (Warning: shameless self-promotion).

It truly was an eye-opening experience for me, I thought I had a pretty good handle on ice with the research I have been working on, but I discovered that I don’t know a thing about it! Here are a few of the highlights:
Donald Blankenship from the University of Texas is collecting high resolution radar data from Antarctica. The work he is doing is to better understand how the surfaces of Ganameyde and Calisto function by better understanding terrestrial processes (similar to what we’re doing with Titan channels. Should an orbiter be sent to either of these moons, a similar radar system will probably be used. I wish I had some of the images to show you

The other guy was Christophe Sotin from JPL, he is a member of the Cassini mission team and has been doing experiments on methane infiltration and interior processes of icy satellites, including Titan. He was a huge help to me in understanding Titan processes and his model for “cyrogenic” convection was quite spectacular (at least the 10% I could actually understand).

It was an incredible experience to be a fly on the wall during the two days I was there. I learned an incredible amount in fields I had previously known nothing about and met so many people who just wanted to talk ice and science . . . it was a dream come true!

A team of researchers from New Zealand have published a new paper on the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The paper talks about the layer of iridium and carbon particles found at the K/T boundary and proposes a new idea on how the carbon particles were originally formed. It was thought that these carbon particles were the result of global forest fires. The new research shows that the particles are actually small spheres, called carbon cenospheres, and can only be created under conditions of immense heat and pressure. They are commonly associated with heavy industrial production facilities.

The beads, known to geologists as carbon cenospheres, cannot be formed through the combustion of plant matter, contradicting a hypothesis that the cenospheres are the charred remains of an Earth on fire. If confirmed, the discovery suggests environmental circumstances accompanying the 65-million-year-old extinction event were slightly less dramatic than previously thought.

“Carbon embedded in the rocks was vaporized by the impact, eventually forming new carbon structures in the atmosphere,” said Indiana University Bloomington geologist Simon Brassell, study coauthor and former adviser to the paper’s lead author, Mark Harvey.

For more information, see also this article from Stuff.co.nz.

[Via ScienceDaily]

Earlier this month NASA announced plans to extend the Cassini mission an additional two years. The Cassini Orbiter and Huygens Probe have returned an enormous amount of information pertaining to the Saturn system, especially Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. For nearly four years the Cassini Orbiter has given the scientific community unprecedented imagery of Titan’s surface, including impact craters, cryovolcanic features, dune fields, and dendritic river patters, revealed geysers on Enceladus, and discovered several new moons in the Saturn system

Lakes and rivers at Titan’s north pole
Source: NASA and JPL

Cassini’s mission originally had been scheduled to end in July 2008. The newly-announced two-year extension will include 60 additional orbits of Saturn and more flybys of its exotic moons. These will include 26 flybys of Titan, seven of Enceladus, and one each of Dione, Rhea and Helene. The extension also includes studies of Saturn’s rings, its complex magnetosphere, and the planet itself.