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Take a facts-based journey through the universe.Thu, 26 Mar 2015 17:34:04 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.1Take a facts-based journey through the universe.Astronomy CastnoTake a facts-based journey through the universe.Astronomy Casthttp://www.astronomycast.com/wp-content/plugins/powerpress/rss_default.jpghttp://www.astronomycast.com
Ep. 370: The Kaufmann–Bucherer–Neumann Experimentshttp://www.astronomycast.com/2015/03/ep-370-the-kaufmann-bucherer-neumann-experiments/
http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/03/ep-370-the-kaufmann-bucherer-neumann-experiments/#commentsWed, 25 Mar 2015 15:12:49 +0000http://www.astronomycast.com/?p=4028One of the most amazing implications of Einstein’s relativity is the fact that the inertial mass of an object depends on its velocity. That sounds like a difficult thing to test, but that’s exactly what happened through a series of experiments performed by Kaufmann, Bucherer, Neumann and others.

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]]>http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/03/ep-370-the-kaufmann-bucherer-neumann-experiments/feed/0Bucherer,Einstein,experiments,Kaufmann,Kaufmann-Bucherer-Neumann Experiments,Mass,Neumann,relativityOne of the most amazing implications of Einstein's relativity is the fact that the inertial mass of an object depends on its velocity. That sounds like a difficult thing to test, but that's exactly what happened through a series of experiments performe...One of the most amazing implications of Einstein's relativity is the fact that the inertial mass of an object depends on its velocity. That sounds like a difficult thing to test, but that's exactly what happened through a series of experiments performed by Kaufmann, Bucherer, Neumann and others.
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Download the show [MP3] | Jump to Shownotes | Jump to TranscriptAstronomy CastnoEp. 369: The Fizeau Experimenthttp://www.astronomycast.com/2015/03/ep-369-the-fizeau-experiment/
http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/03/ep-369-the-fizeau-experiment/#commentsFri, 20 Mar 2015 13:07:58 +0000http://www.astronomycast.com/?p=4025Light is tricky stuff, and it took scientists hundreds of years to puzzle out what this stuff is. But they poked and prodded at it with many clever experiments to try to measure its speed, motion and interaction with the rest of the Universe. For example, the Fizeau Experiment, which ran light through moving water to see if that caused a difference.

]]>http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/03/ep-369-the-fizeau-experiment/feed/0Fizeau Experiment,Light,motion,particles,photons,speed of light,wavesLight is tricky stuff, and it took scientists hundreds of years to puzzle out what this stuff is. But they poked and prodded at it with many clever experiments to try to measure its speed, motion and interaction with the rest of the Universe.Light is tricky stuff, and it took scientists hundreds of years to puzzle out what this stuff is. But they poked and prodded at it with many clever experiments to try to measure its speed, motion and interaction with the rest of the Universe. For example, the Fizeau Experiment, which ran light through moving water to see if that caused a difference.
Ep. 369: The Fizeau Experiment
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Astronomy Cast YouTube channelAstronomy CastnoEp. 368: Searching for the Aether Wind: the Michelson–Morley Experimenthttp://www.astronomycast.com/2015/03/ep-368-searching-for-the-aether-wind-the-michelson-morley-experiment/
http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/03/ep-368-searching-for-the-aether-wind-the-michelson-morley-experiment/#commentsMon, 02 Mar 2015 16:24:02 +0000http://www.astronomycast.com/?p=4005Waves move through a medium, like water or air. So it seemed logical to search for a medium that light waves move through. The Michelson-Morley Experiment attempted to search for this medium, known as the “luminiferous aether”. The experiment gave a negative result, and helped set the stage for the theory of General Relativity.

]]>http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/03/ep-368-searching-for-the-aether-wind-the-michelson-morley-experiment/feed/2Aether,Michelson-Morley ExperimentWaves move through a medium, like water or air. So it seemed logical to search for a medium that light waves move through. The Michelson-Morley Experiment attempted to search for this medium, known as the "luminiferous aether".Waves move through a medium, like water or air. So it seemed logical to search for a medium that light waves move through. The Michelson-Morley Experiment attempted to search for this medium, known as the "luminiferous aether". The experiment gave a negative result, and helped set the stage for the theory of General Relativity.
Ep. 368: Searching for the Aether Wind: the Michelson–Morley Experiment
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Tammy Plotner
Albert A. Michelson
Edward W. Morley
Influence of Motion of the medium on the Velocity of Light by Michelson and Morley
On a method of making the wave-length of sodium light the actual and practical standard of length by Michelson and MorleyAstronomy CastnoEp. 367: Spitzer does Exoplanetshttp://www.astronomycast.com/2015/02/ep-367-spitzer-does-exoplanets/
http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/02/ep-367-spitzer-does-exoplanets/#commentsTue, 17 Feb 2015 16:35:10 +0000http://www.astronomycast.com/?p=4004We’ve spent the last few weeks talking about different ways astronomers are searching for exoplanets. But now we reach the most exciting part of this story: actually imaging these planets directly. Today we’re going to talk about the work NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has done viewing the atmospheres of distant planets.

]]>http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/02/ep-367-spitzer-does-exoplanets/feed/0atmospheres,exoplanets,Spitzer Space TelescopeWe've spent the last few weeks talking about different ways astronomers are searching for exoplanets. But now we reach the most exciting part of this story: actually imaging these planets directly. Today we're going to talk about the work NASA's Spitze...We've spent the last few weeks talking about different ways astronomers are searching for exoplanets. But now we reach the most exciting part of this story: actually imaging these planets directly. Today we're going to talk about the work NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has done viewing the atmospheres of distant planets.
Ep. 367: Spitzer does Exoplanets
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Spitzer Space Telescope
Ep. 208: Spitzer Space Telescope
Ep. 207: Lyman Spitzer
Info and press releases from Spitzer on exoplanets
How to Find an Extrasolar Planet -- ESA
Allen Telescope Array
Pics/video from SXSW JWST Model
CosmoAcademy
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Universe Today AudiosAstronomy CastnoEp. 366: HARPS Spectrographhttp://www.astronomycast.com/2015/02/ep-366-harps-spectrograph/
http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/02/ep-366-harps-spectrograph/#commentsMon, 09 Feb 2015 21:01:08 +0000http://www.astronomycast.com/?p=3991Almost all the planet hunting has been done from space. But there’s a new instrument installed on the European Southern Observatory’s 3.6 meter telescope called the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher which has already turned up 130 planets. Is this the future? Searching for planets from the ground?

The European Gaia spacecraft launched about a year ago with the ambitious goal of mapping one billion years in the Milky Way. That’s 1% of all the stars in our entire galaxy, which it will monitor about 70 times over its 5-year mission. If all goes well, we’ll learn an enormous amount about the structure, movements and evolution of the stars in our galaxy. It’ll even find half a million quasars.

]]>http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/02/ep-365-gaia/feed/1Gaia,Milky Way,starsThe European Gaia spacecraft launched about a year ago with the ambitious goal of mapping one billion years in the Milky Way. That's 1% of all the stars in our entire galaxy, which it will monitor about 70 times over its 5-year mission. If all goes well,The European Gaia spacecraft launched about a year ago with the ambitious goal of mapping one billion years in the Milky Way. That's 1% of all the stars in our entire galaxy, which it will monitor about 70 times over its 5-year mission. If all goes well, we'll learn an enormous amount about the structure, movements and evolution of the stars in our galaxy. It'll even find half a million quasars.
Ep. 365: Gaia
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Gaia mission -- ESA
Hipparcos Space Astrometry mission
Parallax
L2 LaGrange Point -- JWST
Gaia Science Instruments
Gaia's telescopes
T Tauri stars -- AAVSO
Gaia Discovers its first supernova -- ESA
Barnard's Star: No Sign of Planets -- Centauri Dreams
Astrometry -- TPS
CosmoAcademy
Donate to Cosmoquest!
Astronomy Cast in iTunes
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Universe Today Videos
Universe Today AudiosAstronomy CastnoEp. 364: The COROT Missionhttp://www.astronomycast.com/2015/01/ep-364-the-corot-mission/
http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/01/ep-364-the-corot-mission/#commentsMon, 26 Jan 2015 17:14:11 +0000http://www.astronomycast.com/?p=3974Before NASA’s Kepler mission searched for exoplanets using the transit method, there was the European COROT mission, launched in 2006. It was sent to search for planets with short orbital periods and find solar oscillations in stars. It was an incredibly productive mission, and the focus of today’s show.

]]>http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/01/ep-364-the-corot-mission/feed/1COROT,planets,solar systemsBefore NASA's Kepler mission searched for exoplanets using the transit method, there was the European COROT mission, launched in 2006. It was sent to search for planets with short orbital periods and find solar oscillations in stars.Before NASA's Kepler mission searched for exoplanets using the transit method, there was the European COROT mission, launched in 2006. It was sent to search for planets with short orbital periods and find solar oscillations in stars. It was an incredibly productive mission, and the focus of today's show.
Ep. 364: The COROT Mission
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Sponsors: 8th Light and Swinburne Astronomy Online
Astronomy Cast on G+
SpaceX Hard Landing on Barge video
CoRoT mission
CoRoT from CNES
Transit Method of detecting extra solar planets
Asteroseismology
Observing Stars Vibrate with CoRoT -- Universe Today
Weird Collection of Worlds in Latest Cache from CoRoT -- UT
CoRoT Spacecraft Can't Be Recovered -- UT
CoRoT 7b: Smallest Exoplanet Yet has Rocky Surface -- UT
Details About CoRoT 4b -- DLR
CoRot 3b - Discovery Stirs Exoplanet Rethink - ESA
Animations of Oscillating Stars from CoRoT
How Do Astronomers Determine the Size of Stars -- Astronomy Cafe
MOST Telescope
Kepler Mission
TESS Telescope
Plato Mission
HARPS Spectrograph
Proposed mission: Terrestrial Planet Finder
17% of Stars Have Earth Sized Planets? -- NASA
CosmoAcademy
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Universe Today AudiosAstronomy CastnoEp. 363: Where Did Earth’s Water Come From?http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/01/ep-363-where-did-earths-water-come-from/
http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/01/ep-363-where-did-earths-water-come-from/#commentsWed, 21 Jan 2015 16:00:26 +0000http://www.astronomycast.com/?p=3969Where on Earth did our water come from. Well, obviously not from Earth, of course, but from space. But did it come from comets, or did the water form naturally right here in the Solar System, and the Earth just scooped it up??

Transcript

Announcer: This episode of Astronomy Cast is brought to you by Swinburne Astronomy Online, the worlds longest running online astronomy degree program. Visit astronomy.swin.edu.au for more information.

Fraser Cain: Astronomy Cast. Episode 363. Where did the Earth’s water come from? Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos to help you understand not only what we know, but how we know. My name is Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, and the director of CosmosQuest. Hi, Pamela. How ya doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay: I’m doing well. How are you doing Fraser?

Fraser Cain: Good. And we are, at this point, at the time we are recording, we do not know what happened with SpaceX launch, and if its going to land on a floating platform in the ocean, but by the time you listen to it you will know if it happened. So, or too bad.

Dr. Pamela Gay: We’re sorry.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. We’re sorry, and maybe next time.

Dr. Pamela Gay: But, awesome technology attempt.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Absolutely. And, also, we should get a little housekeeping in order which is that you should subscribe to the – to the newly formed Astronomy Cast You Tube channel so if you want to watch the full video, you want to watch the preamble where we prepare for the show, and then record the show live, and then we stick around afterwards and we answer questions from users then you’re probably going to want to watch that. Just go to – is it Astronomy Cast?

Female Speaker: No, we don’t have that yet, so what you want to do is bounce off our Google Plus page, or look at our Twitter feed, or just look at any of the videos that are embedded on Astronomy Cast. I’ll make sure the link is all over on Astronomy Cast. So, the more subscribers we get, the more likely we are for You Tube to actually give us that pretty “url” that we so desperately desire.

Fraser Cain: I’m sure we have it somewhere in our collection. I’m sure we’ve registered – I’m sure we own it somehow, but anyway.

Female Speaker: It’s – they – their – yeah. Google, we love you, but you baffle us. You baffle us. Yeah but, follow your You Tube link to Astronomy Cast and keep up with all of the live raw Preston hasn’t made me sound more intelligent. We love you Preston. The shows that are out there, and get all of the outtakes before they’re outtakes.

Fraser Cain: Awesome. All right. Let’s get on with the show.

Announcer: This episode of Astronomy Cast s brought to you by 8th Light, Inc. 8th Light is an agile software development company. They craft beautiful applications that are durable and reliable. 8th Light provides disciplined software leadership on demand, and shares its expertise to make your product better. For more information visit them online at www.8thlight.com. Just remember, that’s www, dot, the digit eight, “t-h,” “l-i-g-h-t,” dot com. Drop them a note. 8th Light, software is their craft.

Fraser Cain: So, where on Earth did our water come from? Well, obviously, not from Earth, of course, but from space. But, did it come from comets or did it form naturally right here in the solar system and the Earth just scooped it up? And this is – just to give a little preamble to the show which is we often are asked to update people on some science, and we’re surprised how most of the changes are fairly, I guess, incremental in the science. It’s not like something that’s really super different now, but thanks to the Rosetta mission, and some of the analysis of Comet 67P we may have a little bit of an update to where Earth’s water came from. So, let’s kind of go back and set the stage here.

Where did the Earth’s water come from and why is this even a question that I think we want to ask, right?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Well, let’s start with why, why, why are we asking.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, why are we asking this question? Isn’t it obvious? The sky.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah, no, not so much. The reason we have to ask this is in the early days of our solar system there was this waterline, and the Asteroid Vesta is on the dry side of the waterline. The Asteroid Ceres is on the wet side of the waterline. And the line, if you haven’t guessed, passes right through at the distance of the asteroid belt.

Fraser Cain: I’ve gotta – I have a great analogy for the waterline which is – I don’t know if you guys ever get this, but we get frost here in Canada, and the sun will shine, and you get shadows of rooftops and stuff, and you will get frost, and then the shadow of the sun, as it moves, there’s no frost. And, it is the frost line in the solar system, and if you’ve ever seen that, that’s what’s going on. The sun is at literally one point, it is making the water go away, and at the other part the water is able to stay frozen.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And the issue here is if you were inside the waterline the sun was blasting you just a little to hot to hold onto your volatiles, so anything that likes to become gaseous and highly energetic, when heated, went away. And, so the early Earth, well inside that waterline was a molten, hot, nasty, awful, but volatile free place to be, or at least largely volatile free. And, so any water that formed with the planet Earth that was on the surface, it went away during the early solar system. The sun just baked us. So, that raises the question, we are now a water covered world, and that water had to come from somewhere. And the story we’ve been using for a long time is, it came by comet. Comets bombarded the planet.

They made the oceans, they melted and made water, and that was a happy story. It was easy. It was simplistic. We make comets in our lab classes. Nicole makes prettier ones that I do. And, they melt into water and carbon dioxide and this is stuff the Earth has.

Fraser Cain: Right. And, I guess history – and time has been around for a long time. You’ve got four point five billion years of history of the Earth although comets are fairly rare we, you know, if you add them all up over billions of years, you would get a significant amount of water [inaudible].

Dr. Pamela Gay: And, so we like to have data to back up our theories, because theories are, they are just sort of fairy tales that may or may not be true, and we’re not sure. And, unfortunately the data here is being confusing. So.

Fraser Cain: So, sorry, just one thing. So, the one theory is the comets. What are alternative theories for where that water could have come from?

Dr. Pamela Gay: I – well, it had to originally fall out of the sky, but not out of our sky like outer space, but on the planet Earth somewhere. So, someplace not Earth.

Fraser Cain: Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Water originated that someplace came to Earth and crashed onto Earth. So, that kind of means asteroids are really the only other option.

Fraser Cain: But, isn’t there another theory just that the water formed in situ. That is was essentially that water molecules floating around in space and the Earth just kind of crashed into them?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Not so much. You can’t really explain all the water that is on Earth one molecule at a time.

Fraser Cain: Okay.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So, the other theory that’s out there that doesn’t seem to quite ring true is that there could have been reserves of water deep inside the Earth that didn’t get baked out by the sun and have since migrated toward the surface. Again, can’t seem to come up with it in large enough amounts to account for our atmosphere, our oceans, and everything else. There is reserves of water deep inside the Earth, but, yeah, that theory doesn’t quite, as we’ve written it, seem to match reality right now.

Fraser Cain: So, the Earth could have protected the water from the blasting – water could have formed with the Earth, but then the Earth could have protected the water from the blasting radiation from the sun, and then it might have somehow percolated up to the surface and –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah, and so a better way to think of it is that when the Earth formed it was this motley mix of different compositions and materials and there was water scattered throughout all depths of the early planet Earth, but the stuff on the surface got baked out, and there were reserves deep inside that the sunlight wasn’t able to bake out. So, if you think about baking things in a kiln, if you don’t bake them long enough you end up with incomplete ceramic. This is why it’s easier to have hollow objects that solid objects. The solid objects you always end up with pockets inside that leads to broken ceramics eventually.

Fraser Cain: Right. Okay. And so– I guess where – so at this point everybody was pretty certain it was comets, but then – what was the thing that Rosetta discovered at 67P?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Well, and it wasn’t just Rosetta. Rosetta’s just the most recent issue. So, with Rosetta there is a spectrometer of board that is capable of analyzing the composition of stuff, so it can go through, it can scoop up. The instrument is called ROSINA, which is the Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis. And, this particular instrument is able to capture ions, capture atoms, molecules floating around near the comet that came from the comet and analyze there composition. And what it did that was it analyze the composition to see what the ratio in the water of normal H2O to heavy water which is deuterium. It has an extra neutron.

What the ratio of deuterium to compare that ratio to the ratio here on Earth. So, here on Earth its about one in every 10,000 water molecules in your average sea water is heavy water. And, unfortunately, or fortunately depending if you like mysteries or solutions, the amount of heavy water found in the sample from CP – 67CP, or CG rather, it had way, way too much heavy water to match the Earth’s atmosphere. But, this was a single measurement.

Fraser Cain: On a single comet.

Dr. Pamela Gay: It’s a single measurement on a single comet and this is the third comet we’ve made this is the sort of sample for, so we’re now looking at the situation where Comet 103P/Hartley 2 has a deuterium to hydrogen ratio that perfectly matches the planet Earth. So there we have one comet from the Oort cloud that matches. We now have 67P/CG which totally doesn’t match, and we’ve also sampled a comet that came from the Oort cloud, and it totally didn’t match.

So, having now looked at three comets with not that much data on the three comets, we’re sort of left scratching our head, but the thing is heavy water and regular water are physically very different, and it’s possible that this is simply a sampling problem. That with Comet Hartley 2 with it’s sample it was much more active than CP66 – 67. I’m going to totally going –

Fraser Cain: 67P.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: 67P.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 67P/CG. It was much more active when that sample was taken than 67P/CG currently is. So, there’s a chance that if you have a fully engaged, fully active, you are getting a representative sample comet detection that you’ll get that it matches ratio. Whereas, this – the comet is just waking up, we’re taking the first sample off the surface. There’s a chance that we’re dealing with different shaded material where the heavy water is what melted first. And we don’t know. And this is where you have to start looking at the differences between heavy water and regular water.

Fraser Cain: And, so do we – I mean, are we fairly certain that 67P – this is its first trip into the inner solar system?

Dr. Pamela Gay: We’re pretty sure, but we cannot be completely sure.

Fraser Cain: Right. Right. And, so – I mean you can get these long period comets and they may take say a million years to make their orbit around –

Dr. Pamela Gay: But, that would be an Oort cloud object. This is a Kuiper belt object, that’s not to say that we didn’t just miss the sucker on the last pass.

Fraser Cain: Right. So I guess you could – and then you can say – and so – if the sun has somehow been acting on the surface of the comet, what impact has that had? Has that been somehow been breaking down the ratio between water and heavy water. So, these are all a million questions, but you can probably imagine, again the way our stories worked on the universe today over the last couple of years. Comet Hartley confirms Earth’s water came from comets, right? Comet Rosetta –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Right.

Fraser Cain: Rosetta’s comet throws question into where Earth’s water came from. It’s – this is how science works.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And, it’s definitely a confusing tale to look at, and it definitely starts to get at the frustration of not fully understanding how these objects formed in the past, so we do have these large blocky objects, and the thing about looking at the 67P/CG is this is some sort of a modified shape. It is either contact binary. It is two objects that are loosely held together. It is – something happened that made it the shape of a rubber duck. Weirdly rotating rubber ducks probably don’t form naturally in the early solar system. And so, when we look at it we have to wonder how much heating went with that. And the thing about heavy water is that it thaws at a warmer temperature than – it doesn’t thaw.

It rather freezes at a warmer temperature than regular water does. Regular water you have to get all the down to 0 Celsius before you start getting ice cubes. Heavy water with the deuterium you just have to get down to 3.82 degrees Celsius which is about 39 degrees Fahrenheit. And, at that warmer temperature it will begin to freeze. One of the interesting facets about water is it forms a crystalline structure as it freezes. And, so ice cubes rise to the surface, so you have the heavy water has a freezing point that will because it to freeze at a warmer temperature, ice rises to the surface than light water. And, we know nothing about the processes which would have formed the comet.

Nothing. So, it’s possible that based on melting and freezing histories that you could come up with different satiation between where the heavy water is, where the light water is, you have organics forming on the surface. All of this creates a complex picture where it is utterly reasonable to think, “Well, that last set of material we got came from a different satiation section of the comet.”

Fraser Cain: Now, this isn’t the first icy object. Comets are the first icy objects that we’ve been able to take a look at. We’ve got Cassini evaluating the Saturnian Systems where all of those moons are icy. And then, of course, there’s the Dawn mission which is going to be – which is approaching –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Ceres.

Fraser Cain: I – which is approaching Ceres right now, so what’s going to happen there?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Well, when we get to Ceres there is this question of does Ceres have water geysers? There have been some observations made at far too great a distance, otherwise known as “from Earth,” that hint if you over process them enough that there could be, could be maybe, maybe, over process the image enough water geysers on Ceres. And, if that’s the case then we have the opportunity to start getting a sense of how much water maybe inherent in these asteroids that are at a greater distance. And the amount of water that asteroids have today is likely to be a lot less than they had in the past.

So, if we start to find asteroids that have a fair amount of water today, and we know that like the Earth the asteroids experienced a warmer past. Well, it could be that in the past during a very heavy bombardment where we were getting hit with asteroids as well as comets, it could be that some of those asteroids, that maybe they are responsible for bringing water. We just don’t know.

Fraser Cain: We’re really starting to blur that line between what is an asteroid and what is a comet. That there asteroids with very comet like attributes, and there are comets with very asteroid like attributes. We’ve had asteroids sporting tails, and even when you look at 67P, it looks like an asteroid, doesn’t it?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Well, it’s very frozen at the moment. It’s very frozen.

Fraser Cain: It’s very frozen in that it’s all covered in dust.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: And, it just looks very rocky.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And, this was one of those things that I actually got into a conversation with Jonathan McDowell and he and I went down the Google rabbit hole trying to figure out what the International Astronomical Union uses to define minor planet, asteroid, comet, minor bodies, small body. Well, there’s the Center for Minor Planets, and that appears to take into account comets and asteroids, and it appears that with the nomenclature both types of objects do have their own definitions, but it is definitely becoming systematically more difficult to differentiate between the two types of objects.

Fraser Cain: Right. And so, I guess best case scenario, back to the Dawn mission, let’s say that – I mean, because you know it’s going to be doing a lot of this kind of analysis of the water. It’s really looking for water at Ceres. What do you think would be the best case scenario of what we would learn with this mission?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Best case scenario is its spectrometers look at the water that is nicely frozen and easy to observe. Places in shadowed craters on the surface and goes, “Huh. That is exactly what we have here on Earth,” but yeah. It’s trying to get those sorts of detailed observations. It’s a small spacecraft. It’s not necessarily going to have all the instrumentation we need to completely, definitely say, “Yes.” Ideally what you want to do is scoop up a handful of dust and ice and measure it in a lab, but Ceres isn’t going to get landed on this time.

Fraser Cain: Right. But amazingly there is star dust, there has been analysis and return of samples from a comet, so this isn’t entirely impossible.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Well. And what we’re actually looking forward to is OSIRIS-REx which is actually going to do a sample return mission of the Asteroid Bennu. So, while the Dawn mission is in – definitely making massive strides in terms of imaging and regional spectroscopy, it’s not going to land and grab a handful of surface, but the OSIRIS-REx mission is going to do exactly that. So it’s a slow and gradual process. When NASA and ESA explore our solar systems they do it very incrementally. We started out with Mars’ exploration with Viking’s which kind of landed and looked around where they landed. And then we had the Pathfinder which was a little tiny rover dude.

Then we went to Curiosity – then we went to Opportunity and Spirit which were much more freewheeling explorers, but they didn’t have all the instruments one might want. Now we have Curiosity. We’re following a similar incremental exploration plan of the asteroids. Dawn is just one of many stops that we’re going to be taking and OSIRIS-REx is really the next big step that we’re going to be taking.

Fraser Cain: The other thing that I’m not sure if you’ve prepared for this, so feel free to Google if you need to, is that astronomers have done a lot of analysis of other solar systems. One of the kind of amazing things is that extra-solar planets researchers have also detected Oort clouds, vast clouds of water and even ice around other solar systems which is kind of mind-bending if you thing of this as even possible. So, in addition to looking just in the solar system astronomers are also looking out into other solar systems and they are able to see them at different phases of evolution. They can see brand new solar systems that have just formed and more ancient one, and – What does that tell us?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Well, when we look at other solar systems it starts to give us snapshots and understand how other solar systems form. This has, in some cases, confirmed our understanding of early planets sweep out these bands in the dusty disc of the early solar nebula. In other cases it has left us scratching our heads how the super Jupiter’s migrate up to right next to their suns, like the hot ones, like the 51 Pegasus. So we’re in this weird situation of where we’re confirming parts of our understand of how planets form. We’re confirming things like how asteroid belts are normal. We’re starting to find rocky worlds. We’re starting to understand planets exist in places we never imagined.

Really hot stars it turns out has them. Really tiny stars it turns out has them. The only stars that we can’t find them at are those that don’t have a lot of metals, and that makes sense because if you don’t have metals you have nothing to form planets out of. But, the reforming part of the solar system where it goes from that solar nebula to migrating their planets all over kingdom come we’re still very confused about how that happens and a lot of work has been done here on Earth. We’re able to look around and say, “Hey, Jupiter and Saturn were in resonance at some point in the past that lead to a great rearranging of our solar system.”

And, unfortunately when it comes to the basic understand of how does the ion ratio in different places, how does the isotopic ratio in different places vary? Solar systems are faint. In order to differentiate between deuterium and regular water, H2O versus D2O, you need to have giant spectrographs on giant telescopes. And you need to have systems brighter than we’ve seen so far if you want to get images that show what the ratio is snuggled up to the star versus farther out. We don’t have the technology yet.

Fraser Cain: But, I think – I know the solar system rearranging fascinates and haunts your dreams, and –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Other things haunt my dreams, but it does fascinate me.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, but this is – just this idea, right, that how could you possibly get an object as large as a super Jupiter that close to a star where an orbit is –

Dr. Pamela Gay: And not in the star.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, but –

Dr. Pamela Gay: That’s the problem –

Fraser Cain: – that fraction of –

Dr. Pamela Gay: – why does it –

Fraser Cain: – the fraction of –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: – from it’s [inaudible] than even Mercury. And so you can – once you’ve got these gigantic vast solar system rearrangements then that’s gotta say that all bets are off. That everything’s on the table again. Look at Europa. Europa’s got more water than Earth does. You just – as a Jupiter moves toward the sun or as is – these planets interact with each other and they kick out a world you could imagine one of these collide with Earth in the ancient history and providing all the water in one go. So, all bets are off.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Well, we – all bets are off currently, but there is the possibility of saying that when we have a more realistic sample from 67P/CG, oh, hey, its like Hartley 2 does, actually match the planet Earth. We need that second, third, fourth, fifth measurement as the comet gets more active. Right now we know that even just one of these high deuterium ratio objects hitting the Earth would have thrown off our ratios. So, because it’s so easy to pollute the amount of water we have with just one comet – yeah, all bets are off the table, but at the same time we can also say some theories are off the table.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. So if you had to make a guess right now based on sort of what you’ve synthesized from your reading –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes.

Fraser Cain: Where do you – what do you feel is the most likely theory of where the Earth’s water came from?

Dr. Pamela Gay: My gut is telling me that when we get more data from 67P/CG we’re likely to see a different ratio of deuterium and hydrogen, and we’ll find that a combination of Kuiper belt and asteroids can account for the water, but that’s my gut. My gut is not data. My gut occasionally believes in fairy tales.

Male Speaker: Thanks for listening to Astronomy Cast, a non-profit resource provided by Astrosphere New Media Association, Fraser Cain, and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can find show notes and transcripts for every episode at astronomycast.com. You can email us at info at astronomycast.com. Tweet us at astronomycast. Like us on Facebook, or circle us on Google Plus. We record our show live on Google Plus every Monday at 12:00 p.m. Pacific, 3:00 p.m. Eastern, or 2000 Greenwich Mean Time. If you miss the live event you can always catch up over at CosmoQuest.org. If you enjoy Astronomy Cast, why don’t you give us a donation. It helps us pay for bandwidth, transcripts, and show notes.

Just click the donate link on the website. All donations are tax deductible for US residents. You can support of the show for free, too. Write a review or recommend us to your friends. Every little bit helps. Click “support the show” on our website to see some suggestions. To subscribe to this show point your pod-catching software at astronomycast.com/podcast.xml, or subscribe directly from iTunes. Our music is provided by Travis Searle, and the show is edited by Preston Gibson.

]]>http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/01/ep-363-where-did-earths-water-come-from/feed/1comets,Earth,Solar System,waterWhere on Earth did our water come from. Well, obviously not from Earth, of course, but from space. But did it come from comets, or did the water form naturally right here in the Solar System, and the Earth just scooped it up?? Ep.Where on Earth did our water come from. Well, obviously not from Earth, of course, but from space. But did it come from comets, or did the water form naturally right here in the Solar System, and the Earth just scooped it up??
Ep. 363: Where Did Earth's Water Come From?
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Did Comets Bring Water to Earth? -- EarthSky
Rosetta's Instrument Directs Scientists to Look Elsewhere for Earth's Water -- Universe Today
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Announcer: This episode of Astronomy Cast is brought to you by Swinburne Astronomy Online, the worlds longest running online astronomy degree program. Visit astronomy.swin.edu.au for more information.
Fraser Cain: Astronomy Cast. Episode 363. Where did the Earth’s water come from? Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos to help you understand not only what we know, but how we know. My name is Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, and the director of CosmosQuest. Hi, Pamela. How ya doing?
Dr. Pamela Gay: I’m doing well. How are you doing Fraser?
Fraser Cain: Good. And we are, at this point, at the time we are recording, we do not know what happened with SpaceX launch, and if its going to land on a floating platform in the ocean, but by the time you listen to it you will know if it happened. So, or too bad.
Dr. Pamela Gay: We’re sorry.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. We’re sorry, and maybe next time.
Dr. Pamela Gay: But, awesome technology attempt.
Fraser Cain: Yeah. Absolutely. And, also, we should get a little housekeeping in order which is that you should subscribe to the – to the newly formed Astronomy Cast You Tube channel so if you want to watch the full video, you want to watch the preamble where we prepare for the show, and then record the show live, and then we stick around afterwards and we answer questions from users then you’re probably going to want to watch that. Just go to – is it Astronomy Cast?
Female Speaker: No, we don’t have that yet, so what you want to do is bounce off our Google Plus page, or look at our Twitter feed, or just look at any of the videos that are embedded on Astronomy Cast. I’ll make sure the link is all over on Astronomy Cast. So, the more subscribers we get, the more likely we are for You Tube to actually give us that pretty “url” that we so desperately desire.
Fraser Cain: I’m sure we have it somewhere in our collection. I’m sure we’ve registered – I’m sure we own it somehow, but anyway.
Female Speaker: It’s – they – their – yeah. Google, we love you, but you baffle us. You baffle us. Yeah but, follow your You Tube link to Astronomy Cast and keep up with all of the live raw Preston hasn’t made me sound more intelligent. We love you Preston. The shows that are out there, and get all of the outtakes before they’re outtakes.
Fraser Cain: Awesome. All right. Let’s get on with the show.
Announcer: This episode of Astronomy Cast s brought to you by 8th Light, Inc. 8th Light is an agile software development company. They craft beautiful applications that are durable and reliable.Astronomy CastnoEp. 362: Modern Women: Carolyn Porcohttp://www.astronomycast.com/2015/01/ep-362-modern-women-carolyn-porco/
http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/01/ep-362-modern-women-carolyn-porco/#commentsMon, 12 Jan 2015 19:58:35 +0000http://www.astronomycast.com/?p=3939It hard to think of a more influential modern planetary scientist than Carolyn Porco, the leader of the imaging team for NASA’s Cassini mission exploring Saturn. But before Cassini, Porco was involved in Voyager missions, and she’ll be leading up the imaging team for New Horizons.

Transcript

Announcer: This episode of Astronomy Cast is brought to you by Swinburne Astronomy Online, the world’s longest-running online astronomy degree program. Visit astronomy.swin.edu.au for more information.

Fraser: Astronomy Cast Episode 362: Carolyn Porco. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos where we help you understand not only what we know but how we know what we know. My name is Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville and the Director of Cosmoquest. Hey Pamela, how are you doing?

Pamela: I’m doing well. How are you doing Fraser?

Fraser: Great. So do we have anything that we want to promote or let people know about this time around?

Pamela: It’s the International Year of Light and I’m far too enthusiastic and over-caffeinated. So starting January 1, 2015 there is a global celebration of the International Year of Light. There is an astronomy cornerstone called Cosmic Awareness and we’re working to get everyone to understand that light pollution bad, light from stars good. Let’s celebrate light from stars, reflective light from stars off of planets, and all of the information that we get back in the form of radio light from spacecraft and say down with light pollution.

Fraser: Down with light pollution. And then the other thing is if by the time you see this comet Lovejoy maybe is going to be a comet you can see with the unaided eye in dark skies. I think it was getting to a magnitude four.

Pamela: It’s trying.

Fraser: Yeah, so this is it. This is the comet that the universe owes us and I’m a little underwhelmed. I want another Hale-Bopp.

Pamela: Hyakutake

Fraser: I want a Hyakutake. I want the icing that we were promised. So this is a good start. Okay, so let’s get rolling.

Announcer: This episode of Astronomy Cast is brought to you by 8th Light Inc. 8th Light is an agile software development company. They craft beautiful applications that are durable and reliable. 8th Light provides disciplined software leadership on-demand and shares its expertise to make your project better. For more information visit them online at www.8thlight.com. Just remember that’s www.8thlight.com. Drop them a note. 8th Light, software is their craft.

Fraser: So it’s hard to think of a more influential, modern, planetary scientist than Carolyn Porco, the leader of the imaging team for NASA’s Cassini mission exploring Saturn. But before Cassini Porco was involved in the Voyager missions and she’ll be leading up the imaging team for New Horizons. And before we get going in this show I just want to apologize in advance to Carolyn Porco for the mistakes that we’re going to make because we’re done our research, we’ve done the best we can, but I’m sure we’re going to make a few errors. This whole thing just comes from such a sort of deep level of respect and admiration for the work that Dr. Porco does; literally the work on Voyager, the work on Cassini, the work we’re going to be seeing on New Horizons. So I apologize in advance Dr. Porco because she will tell us.

Pamela: She will. And this is the one scientist in this series that I’ve never heard speak. I’m not quite sure how this has happened. She’s a frequent public speaker but it’s just managed that I’m either just never at the right conferences or something.

Fraser: Yeah.

Pamela: So I don’t personally know her other than occasionally sharing tweets and being on the same lists, and that doesn’t mean I know her it just means our names have been listed in proximity on the internet.

Fraser: Yeah. And I actually shared an anecdote at sort of the end of the last show in the questions and answers period, which by the way at the end of every episode when we do our live show we handle all the Q&A at the end of the show. So if you want to get your questions answered just come and watch the live show that we do. You can get information on that from our page on Google+.

Anyway, we answer questions and I was talking about Carolyn Porco and sort of my first interaction with Dr. Porco was she literally taught me how to properly attribute images that come from various space agencies. So whenever I would post an image of Cassini’s images of Saturn I would go Image Credit NASA JPL and then Dr. Porco reached out to me and said, ‘You’ve got to include Space Science Institute because we’re the people who are actually taking the pictures and processing them and doing a lot of the work.’

And so at that point I understood the chain of all of the – there’s NASA, and there’s JPL who works for NASA, and then there’s Space Science Institute, and there’s the Cassini imaging team. And each of these people have a hand in bringing you this final image that we get a chance to see. And so since then I’ve gotten way better. So that’s my interactions with Carolyn Porco. So who is she?

Pamela: She’s a scientist. But seriously to give a better background she is an imaging scientist who’s been working on studying objects in the outer solar system literally since I was playing with Barbie dolls. It’s one of those times where every once in awhile you get told, ‘I’ve been doing this since you were’ and there’s always like playing with tricycles, playing with blocks, playing with Barbie dolls. She finished her Bachelor’s Degree in Science in 1974, when I was still in diapers. She finished her Ph.D. in 1983 working on the Voyager spacecraft at California Institute of Technology where she was working on the rings of Saturn when I was a child with Barbie dolls.

And she has continued throughout the entirety of my lifetime to contribute to a lot of the different spacecraft that have inspired me throughout my life. When I was a kid, as I’ve talked about in the show before, it was the Voyager mission’s data that really inspired me, that my parents more than once let me stay up late to watch the data coming back. And she was one of the scientists that helped understand the rings of Neptune and the rings of Uranus how they’re shepherded by moons. She worked on the Saturn data for her dissertation.

All of this early, amazing work, all of this done in the years right after finishing her Ph.D. put her in a position that when the Cassini mission began its planning stages heading up towards launch she was selected in 1990 to head the imaging team for the Cassini-Huygens. This meant that she’d be the person in charge of the group of humans dealing with the pretty images that everyone sees in the news. There’s lots of different instruments on Cassini that do lots and lots of different science, but it’s those images that everyone uses as their background on their computer, as the beautiful color images on the covers of magazines. She’s the person that makes those happen.

Fraser: I don’t think people really realize how these missions work and how that you have a mission like Cassini and it’s really just a platform for a whole bunch of science experiments and each science experiment on that mission is run by a different team, sometimes a different university. So there’s people who work at NASA JPL who are actually helping to make sure the whole spacecraft is operating, that it’s receiving its data, that communications to and from, the telemetry of the spacecraft. But the individual instruments themselves are run by different people and they often will have their own Twitter accounts and their own Facebook pages and they’ll handle their own press releases.

And so, as you say, the main camera imagery on Cassini is just another instrument that’s used for various scientific studies.

Pamela: And I think this got summed up really nicely in terms of just how complicated the politics in this mission are on saturn.jpl.nasa.gov, which is one of the cooler NASA URLs. It says, “The Cassini partnership represents an undertaking whose scope and cost would likely not have been born by a single nation, but is made possible through shared investment and participation. Through the mission about 260 scientists from 17 countries will gain a better understanding of Saturn, its stunning rings, its magnetosphere Titan and other icy moons.”

So you have European leads, you have American leads, you have contractors, you have instrument scientists, you have participating scientists, and all of this is led under project scientist Linda Spilker right now with deputy project scientist Scott Eddington and project science system engineer Nora Elongy. And what I love about this mission is right now two of three top people in the mission are women and you see strong female participation throughout the mission. As you look through all the different instruments there’s a plasma spectrometer that’s a whole bunch of lines; no one ever wants to see those. There’s a cosmic dust analyzer. This allows us to understand the compositions of the bits of debris that can be captured from the rings and as they pass near the atmosphere.

This is amazing science but again, the scientists doing this aren’t producing pretty pictures that appear in the news. There’s an infrared spectrometer again, amazing science. This is what allows us to start seeing the molecular chemistry of the mission. Again, data no one ever wants to look at the pictures in the public.

Fraser: No.

Pamela: There’s an ion neutral mass and I could keep going. But then when you hit the imaging science subsystem this is one of the smaller teams. The magnetometer is even smaller. But the imaging subsystem is one of the smallest teams and it’s the team that everyone sees everything they’re doing.

Fraser: Yeah. Do you remember when the day the Earth smiled? Do you remember that thing that happened a couple of –?

Pamela: Yeah.

Fraser: Like a couple of years ago. They were going to recreate that pale blue dot image that Carl Sagan helped organize with the Voyager spacecraft. And so everybody smiled in the general direction of Saturn and then they posted an image of sort of the new picture that was taken by Cassini of Earth from orbiting Saturn. And these are the kinds of things that she has helped organize to sort of help get that word out and really help feed that enthusiasm for space.

Pamela: So that was back on July 19, 2013 and what was amazing about that was for her it was a chance to redo something that she was part of before because she was part of the team that planned the Voyager imaging that didn’t just do Carl Sagan’s pale blue dot, but actually did a portrait of our entire solar system as Voyager looked back on the solar system.

Fraser: So let’s go back into her career and sort of start with – I guess we’ll work on Voyager and sort of what she was involved with there.

Pamela: With her dissertation work at Cal Tech she was focused on looking at the rings of Saturn. It was with Voyager that for the first time we had sufficient detailed imaging to start to see that there were moons inside the rings, the spokes in the rings, and all the other structures that appeared. She was working with dynamacist Peter Goldreich and it was during this work that she started to try and put forward models looking at what are the causes for these spokes? From there she went on to be part of the Voyager imaging team working at the University of Arizona following her successful completion of her dissertation. She was a tenure track professor getting tenure in 1991.

Through her work with the Voyager team she kept looking at rings. She was the lead of the rings working group for Voyager and the rings on the outer two most planets; Uranus and Neptune, are just weird. She was one of the ones that really worked to try and understand why they were weird and the role that moonlets and small moons have in shepherding the, in some cases, incomplete rings and in creating the divisions that we see in these rings.

So that is an amazing combination of using computers when computers were just starting to be able to do complex modeling, to understand complex dynamics of what she was seeing in the imaging data.

Fraser: And so a lot of the stuff that she helped discover at Saturn and I guess some of the outer planets, but really at Saturn what was amazing was then she got selected as the leader of the imaging team on Cassini-Huygens and was then able to verify with much better instruments a lot of the stuff that was very tantalizing, but they weren’t able to really see very close up.

Pamela: And one of the coolest things that they’ve been able to follow-up on is she’d predicted that oscillations inside of Saturn, acoustic oscillations – this is where sound waves traveling through Saturn actually affect its dynamics – that these acoustic waves moving through Saturn actually have an effect on the rings around Saturn. That’s a really precise thing to think about and realize where we know that stars oscillate, we suspected that planets could oscillate, but to carry that through and say, ‘Okay, a sound wave actually creates a density distribution change inside of the star. That should affect gravity. Huh, I wonder if we can see this in the rings.’

There are certain ideas that people come up with that make perfect sense once you articulate them, but the where in your brain do you find that creative spark to come up with that idea is not something that everyone has the ability to do, and this is one of those predictions that really shows that creative spark that is so much a part of being an excellent scientist.

Fraser: It must have been so frustrating to come onto Cassini, to know the capabilities of the spacecraft and then when Cassini got its mission plan I guess changed to take a longer route to reach Saturn using various gravitational assists – I’m trying to remember when it launched but it probably didn’t get to – when did it get to Saturn in sort of 2004?

Pamela: It launched in 1997 and it did a Jupiter flyby in 2000, arrived in 2004 at Saturn. And so here she is, 14 years after being selected to lead the imaging team and she’s finally at Saturn.

Fraser: Finally at Saturn.

Pamela: The thing is though this is the mission that has just kept going and kept producing awesome results all across all of the different missions. During the most recent senior review the team that did the senior review said that Saturn is one of the most well-managed spacecraft going and so where they were originally planned for four years they’ve now done ten and they’re looking at a further extension. We did an entire episode on this that you can go back and listen to, but of the 514 gigabytes that they’ve taken and that’s not a lot of data when you look at missions like solar dynamic orbiter; they do that every single day. With their 514 gigabytes of data they have published well over 3,000 papers and they’ve discovered seven moons, they’ve –

Fraser: Yeah, let’s talk about some of those discoveries. Seven moons, new rings.

Pamela: Yeah. New rings. They’ve confirmed the spokes in the rings, have started to make sense of them. They’ve looked at the storm patterns. They’ve discovered, and this was part of the imaging team that Dr. Porco is part of, that there are vast hydrocarbon seas on Titan. They’ve found snow is perhaps not quite the right word for frozen methane and ethane, but they’ve found frozen formerly liquid stuff falling out of the sky onto the surface of Titan and then in some cases melting or sublimating weather on other worlds. That’s just a great thing to be able to start to study, start to see in detail.

Fraser: They were the first people who saw the cryovolcanism on Enceladus.

Pamela: Yes. I’m kind of – like so many different things happened that it’s hard to know what to hit on highlighting because this is a mission that has spent ten years doing amazing science. And part of the reason that we know about so many different things that it makes me tongue-tied and speechless is because through her work Carolyn Porco hasn’t just been a solid scientist, she’s also been out there as a speaker. A lot of people have the mistaken notion that she’s the principal investigator for the entire Cassini mission because she is one of the most public people on the mission, rather than just being in charge of the most visible part of the mission.

She dedicates a lot of time to going out and communicating what she does; being a consultant on CNN, doing profiles for a variety of different science shows, she’s appeared on things like Stargazing Live and the BBC. And through all of this communication she is helping to continue the legacy of Carl Sagan who was actually one of her mentors, someone that she worked with early in her career. In fact, she was a consultant on Contact, which of course Carl Sagan wrote the book that it’s based on and it said that Carl Sagan told Jodie Foster that in trying to figure out how to portray this character, a character modeled after Jill Tarter who is very much alive, he said, ‘Look at how Carolyn Porco conducts herself and use her as a model for how to act.’ And that’s just kind of odd and awesome.

Fraser: That’s pretty interesting. I didn’t know that he had offered up that as the model for the movie. That’s really cool.

So in addition of course and I guess the latest thing in addition to the work on Cassini-Huygens is now it’s time to spin up for an entirely new mission, a whole new project, which is New Horizons which of course we’ve been reporting on New Horizons for ten years. I actually had a chance – if you look back on my feed on YouTube, about three weeks ago or so, I hosted a hangout with Allen Stern and the Post Docs, I guess that’s their new band, and all of the people who are going to be some of the science team that are working on the New Horizon mission. And of course they’re going to be providing these first close-up pictures of Pluto next year. And by about May or so the images from New Horizons are going to be better than the images from the Hubble.

This is the point where we’ve been stop having to use those same old boring images of Pluto and the artist illustrations.

Pamela: The Hubble images.

Fraser: Yeah, the boring Hubble images of Pluto and the artist illustrations that we’ve been using for a decade, for decades, since I’ve been – like literally for 15 years since I’ve been reporting on this stuff I’ve been using the same five images of Pluto for every single story that we do. So we’re finally going to get new images of Pluto and Dr. Porco is going to be the one who’s going to be helping usher these into our eyeballs.

Pamela: It is a large team and she is part of that team and it’s going to be amazing to see how all of the different science comes out of this because she’s an expert on rings and moons and how all of these different bodies interact, and as we’ve studied Pluto more and more with the Hubble Space Telescope we’ve realized this is a really odd object. It’s one of the larger of the Kuiper Belt objects, it has a moon that orbits such that you really – it’s more of a binary system where the center of mass of Shuron or Cairon, depending on how you pronounce it, and Pluto is outside of both bodies. There are a variety of additional moons and it’s thought that there could be an icy ring.

Talk about having the right person to do the job. This is someone who’s worked systematically on how moons affect the dynamics of systems, on the containment of rings, ringlets at Uranus and Neptune, and now she has one more object to sort out; crazy, awesome, icy dynamics.

Fraser: Right. It’s going to be sort of a different kind of mission though because the thing with Cassini is it’s been orbiting Saturn for, as we said, ten years now and it’s got years still to go, we hope. But with New Horizons it’s going to be this flyby, so all of this work is going to be in this tiny little crunch and the kinds of operations that they’re going to have to do is going to be this really tight coordination. I mean part of the thing is that as they get closer they’re going to be getting better and better resolution images of the environment and they’re going to know if there are other objects that they’re going to try and make observations of.

And then they’ve got this like 13-hour delay or whatever it is – is that what it is? Anyway, multiple hour delay, I’m thinking it’s 13 hours, to reach New Horizons and give it new directions on where to face the camera and what features to point at and if it has to make any kind of trajectory changes if there’s debris or moons or stuff that they weren’t expecting as they get there. So it’s a completely different kind of challenge, right? Just imagine that they’re going to be – when it’s starting to happen and that flyby is happening New Horizons is going so fast they’re going to have to be making these snap decisions to get as much science as they can as it quickly zips past Pluto. So it’s a totally different game. I mean it’s going to be something.

Pamela: It’s Voyager all over again. If you think back to the beginnings of her career it was all about the flybys. And now we have a flyby with much higher tech, or at least as high as it goes with NASA given when it was built, and so you have this new spacecraft that is new technology but the same sort of data run that she saw with her dissertation work at Saturn and her follow-up work at Uranus and Neptune. So sometimes you return back to your origins.

But this time we have her on Twitter and one of the things that I know from my personal experience is everyone assumes that I’m significantly younger than I am because I dye my hair and use social media. I love the implication that social media instantly knocks ten to 15 years off my age and it apparently does the same thing to Carolyn Porco because I made a lot of assumptions about her age based on her appearance and her use of social media and was utterly wrong as I learned in preparing for this show.

So here you have someone that is awesome at social media, did not grow up with a cell phone in her hands, but has figured out how to communicate the excitement of day-to-day discovery and the pain of politics that comes with – well, sometimes you’re more politician than scientist when you lead a collaboration. She’s going to be bringing us all of these new discoveries one paper and one tweet at a time.

Fraser: I’m going to read a quote here, which was an award that she and Babak Tafreshi won back in 2009, the Lennart Nilsson Award. The citation reads, “Carolyn Porco combines the finest techniques of planetary exploration and scientific research with aesthetic finesse and educational talent while her images, which depict the heavenly bodies of the Saturn system with unique precision, serve as tools for the world’s leading experts. They also reveal the beauty of the universe in a manner that is an inspiration to one and all.” I think that’s great.

What’s funny is she had like literally just a couple of days ago she wrote a new post on the Cyclops, this is the Cassini imaging team’s website, about this aspect of the rings which she found quite fascinating. There are these cliffs on the edge of the B-ring which are like 2.5 kilometers high. So normally the whole ring is flat, ten meters thick, but there’s a point in the B-ring where there are these strange cliffs caused by some of the moons I think where they’re like 2.5 kilometers high of this like jumbled cloud and they actually cast these shadows on the rings.

She had sort of mentioned how fascinating this was and someone sent in some art to show what it might look like if it was a spacecraft gliding across the top of the ring. So you can just see this kind of imagination is captivated by the kinds of things that she’s looking at and she’s able to express this fascination at the same time doing the science and going, ‘This stuff is beautiful and this stuff is important scientifically.’ And that is – you couldn’t ask for anything more I think in a scientist than to have those two things. It’s what Carl Sagan had. I think it’s what you have.

Pamela: I try.

Fraser: And I think folks like Phil Plate and a lot of the scientists who are just doing the research but also really helping express that enthusiasm. It’s infections. So kudos to Dr. Carolyn Porco.

Pamela: If you want to see her in action she’s done a pair of TED Talks and I see from folks on Twitter – David McKees is pointing out that she was on the June 29th episode of StarTalk Radio. So you can catch her doing her thing, communicating science in a way that will get you to fall in love with the understanding that she brings to us about the universe.

Fraser: Yes. Go to the Cyclops website and sign up for her email newsletter, which is where you’ll get like missives from her once every month or so. And then you can follow her on Twitter, right? Is it Carolyn Porco on Twitter? Search it up and you can find it. Talk to her directly. At least listen from her.

Pamela: Sounds great.

Fraser: Awesome. Well, thank you very much Pamela and we’ll talk to you next week. I think we’ve wrapped up this series on Modern Women in Astronomy so I think we’re going to go back to Fraser’s crazy ideas about space and astronomy from here on out.

Pamela: Yeah, so we have no clue what our next big idea is going to be so feel free to pipe up and make suggestions and I have Fraser’s awesomely long list of things to choose from as well.

Fraser: Wonderful. All right, thank you very much Pamela and we’ll talk to you next week.

Pamela: Sounds good, Fraser. Talk to you later.

Fraser: Thanks for listening to Astronomy Cast, a non-profit resource provided by Astrosphere New Media Association, Fraser Cain, and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can find show notes and transcripts for every episode at astronomycast.com. You can email us at info@astronomycast.com. Tweet us @AstronomyCast, like us on Facebook or circle us on Google+.

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]]>http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/01/ep-362-modern-women-carolyn-porco/feed/1Cassini,New Horizons,Saturn,VoyagerIt hard to think of a more influential modern planetary scientist than Carolyn Porco, the leader of the imaging team for NASA's Cassini mission exploring Saturn. But before Cassini, Porco was involved in Voyager missions,It hard to think of a more influential modern planetary scientist than Carolyn Porco, the leader of the imaging team for NASA's Cassini mission exploring Saturn. But before Cassini, Porco was involved in Voyager missions, and she'll be leading up the imaging team for New Horizons.
Ep. 362: Modern Women: Carolyn Porco
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Show Notes
Sponsors: 8th Light and Swinburne Astronomy Online
Astronomy Cast on G+
International Year of Light
Comet Lovejoy -- how to find it and see it
Carolyn Porco bio (carolynporco.com)
Carolyn Porco bio from Space Science Institute
Cassini CICLOPS images
Cassini mission website
The Day the Earth Smiled
An Odyssey: From the Bronx to Saturn's Rings -- New York Times
Ghostly Spokes in Saturn's Rings Spotted by Cassini -- NASA
Paper: Planetary Acoustic Mode Seismology in Saturn's Rings
Episode 229: Cassini
Discoveries from the Cassini mission
Hydrocarbon Seas on Titan -- NASA
Ice Fountains on Enceladus -- BBC
Fraser's Live Hangout with the New Horizon's team
Ring System Around Pluto? -- Universe Today
New Horizons Mission
Carolyn Porco on Twitter
Lennart Nilsson Award 2009
Incredible Towering Structures Cast Shadows on Saturn's Rings -- Universe Today
Carolyn Porco's TED talks
CosmoAcademy
Donate to Cosmoquest!
Astronomy Cast in iTunes
Universe Today on iTunes
Universe Today Videos
Universe Today Audios
Transcript
Transcription services provided by: GMR Transcription
Announcer: This episode of Astronomy Cast is brought to you by Swinburne Astronomy Online, the world’s longest-running online astronomy degree program. Visit astronomy.swin.edu.au for more information.
Fraser: Astronomy Cast Episode 362: Carolyn Porco. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos where we help you understand not only what we know but how we know what we know. My name is Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville and the Director of Cosmoquest. Hey Pamela, how are you doing?
Pamela: I’m doing well. How are you doing Fraser?
Fraser: Great. So do we have anything that we want to promote or let people know about this time around?
Pamela: It’s the International Year of Light and I’m far too enthusiastic and over-caffeinated. So starting January 1, 2015 there is a global celebration of the International Year of Light. There is an astronomy cornerstone called Cosmic Awareness and we’re working to get everyone to understand that light pollution bad, light from stars good. Let’s celebrate light from stars, reflective light from stars off of planets, and all of the information that we get back in the form of radio light from spacecraft and say down with light pollution.
Fraser: Down with light pollution. And then the other thing is if by the time you see this comet Lovejoy maybe is going to be a comet you can see with the unaided eye in dark skies. I think it was getting to a magnitude four.
Pamela: It’s trying.
Fraser: Yeah, so this is it. This is the comet that the universe owes us and I’m a little underwhelmed. I want another Hale-Bopp.
Pamela: Hyakutake
Fraser: I want a Hyakutake. I want the icing that we were promised. So this is a good start. Okay, so let’s get rolling.
Announcer: This episode of Astronomy Cast is brought to you by 8th Light Inc. 8th Light is an agile software development company. They craft beautiful applications that are durable and reliable. 8th Light provides disciplined software leadership on-demand and shares its expertise to make your project better. For more information visit them online at www.8thlight.com. Just remember that’s www.8thlight.com. Drop them a note. 8th Light, software is their craft.
Fraser: So it’s hard to think of a more influential, modern,Astronomy CastnoEp. 361: Modern Women: Maria Zuberhttp://www.astronomycast.com/2015/01/ep-361-modern-women-maria-zuber/
http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/01/ep-361-modern-women-maria-zuber/#commentsMon, 05 Jan 2015 17:07:13 +0000http://www.astronomycast.com/?p=3933Maria Zuber is one of the hardest working scientists in planetary science, being a part of six different space missions to explore the Solar System. Currently, she’s the lead investigator for NASA’s GRAIL mission.

Transcript

Fraser Cain: Astronomy Cast Episode 361, Maria Zuber. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, your weekly facts based journey through the Cosmos. We help you understand not only what we know but how we know what we know.

My name is Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the Director of CosmoQuest. Hey, Pamela, how are you doing?

Pamela Gay: I’m doing well. How are you doing, Frazier?

Fraser Cain: Great. We’re recording this just moments before Newtonmas. So – which is December 25th.

Pamela Gay: There are three days of Die Hard remaining.

Fraser Cain: Three days of Die Hard remaining.

Pamela Gay: There’s the five Die Hard episodes. And instead of the 12 days of Christmas or the ten days of Cards against Humanity, we’re celebrating the five days of Die Hard in our house.

Fraser Cain: Nerds. But I know the feeling. Now, do we have any announcements this week, any you want to mention, you want to plug?

Pamela Gay: If you need a year-end tax donation help, we can provide you a tax donation in the United States through SIUE for your donations to Cosmo Quest in the European Union, for your donations to 365 Days of Astronomy. And you know, Astronomy Cast is also here in the US, and we’re just trying to figure out how to make the next year happen. And we are losing some of our sponsors, so if your company is interested in sponsoring our shows, drop me an email, info@astronomycast.com.

Fraser Cain: Perfect. Okay. Let’s get cracking.

Maria Zuber is one of the hardest working scientists in planetary exploration. Being a part of six different space missions to explore the solar system, and currently, she’s the lead investigator for NASA’s ground mission. All right, Pamela, so who is Maria Zuber and why did you select her?

Pamela Gay: I selected her because she’s someone that I think no one knows her name well enough. When you ask for big names in Planetary Science, Allen Stern’s name always comes up. Karen Porka’s name always comes up.

Fraser Cain: Steve Squires.

Pamela Gay: Yeah. There’s all these – Jim Bell – there’s just certain names that come up over and over and over again. But then when you go to a conference and you look to see who takes the podium over and over again to present research session after session, object after object, it’s this woman from MIT. And I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about her. And unfortunately, I’ve never actually heard anyone say a word about her.

But as you pointed out, she’s part of a large number of missions, and I’ve simply been consistently impressed with what she does and how well she carries herself and carries her mission. So I wanted to bring her up as part of the Series.

Fraser Cain: All right. So, let’s start with the missions because I think that’s – you know, that’s where her entire body of work has – has really recently really played out. So where do you want to – which mission do you want to start with?

Pamela Gay: Well, might as well start for the one where she is principal investigator. And this is the NASA grail mission, two different spacecraft, Ebb and Flow, as they were named by people volunteering names all across the United States. These are two little spacecraft that are mapping the gravity profile of the moon by flying very low to its surface, sometimes just a few kilometers above, usually about 20 kilometers above.

And the way they’re mapping out the gravity is they’re maintaining laser contact between themselves and when they’re within viewability of the planet earth, laser contact with the planet earth. And these lasers are used to very carefully measure the timing between the different spacecraft, so they’re able to see how the orbits vary as they go over more high gravity and low gravity areas of the moon.

Fraser Cain: Right. They’ve done this with earth as well, and it’s a wonderful experiment because the two spacecraft – I’m holding out a hand so unfortunately the podcast listeners won’t be able to see this – but the two spacecraft know how far each other are apart with absolute precision with these lasers that they’re shooting back and forth.

And then, as they go over the various just like craters and pockets of more density, one spacecraft gets pulled a little faster than the other one. And they measure a distance between them. And then, the other one is able to sort of come back and catch up. And then, they triangulate with the earth. And they’ve produced these beautiful images. They call them – what do they call – GEO –

Pamela Gay: Gravity maps, geo maps.

Fraser Cain: Geo map, yeah. And it kind of looks like a potato when you – because they’ll sort of – they’ll make the – they’ll artificially change the scale. Right? And so, you can see sort of this great, big lumpy earth and this great big lumpy – in this case, the lumpy moon that shows you sort of where the pockets of high density are. And I always just imagine this mysterious hidden treasure in those places of higher density and gravity.

Pamela Gay: And what’s amazing is when you start combining these geodesies with the laser altimetry, which tells us exactly how high and low the different surface bits are. You start to be able to get this very careful map of, well; of course this area has more gravity. It has a mountain. So there’s more stuff.

But this other area, it has a deep crater. All of that material is compacted so you’re still getting higher gravity but now you’re getting the higher gravity from an area that’s compacted. It’s all sorts of neat things that come out where you can tell the difference between just a nice normal dense region, a nice normal not so dense region and then all of the complexities that incur from, well, cratering events in the past.

And this is a complicated mission. Here on Earth when we map out gravity, we have the benefit of being able to be in constant contact with the spacecraft as it flies over the Earth. With the moon, there’s that annoying backside, dark side, as it’s locally called, where we can’t see a spacecraft. And here on Earth, they do it from a much higher altitude because of our atmosphere.

If you think about it, the occasional 20 kilometers – well, the often 20-some-odd kilometers up that these spacecraft are orbiting at, well, we’ve now had humans jump from balloons, from higher altitudes down to the surface of the Earth. And these spacecraft have gotten as low as seven kilometer while functionally carrying on their mission and not trying to commit suicide. And those start to be altitudes that you expect jetliners to be at and we’re orbiting spacecraft close to the moon at those altitudes.

Fraser Cain: Well, but the downside of doing that kind of a mission with that low altitude is it’s not stable and as the spacecraft have learned. Because they crashed them into the surface back in 2012.

Pamela Gay: And we’re still working to figure out all of the science and so it’s one of these things of, yes, we did sacrifice the spacecraft in order to get a wealth of science. It is going to take us still several more years to completely untangle and fully understand by combining it with data that we’re getting from the lunar reconnaissance orbiter, which is another mission that Maria Zuber was involved in.

She, on that particular mission, was the investigative lead of the laser ranger. This is a set of lasers that will fire from the spacecraft down to the surface of the moon and measure the amount of time and the quality of the return of the laser light as it comes back up to the spacecraft. This allows them to get ideas of the texture of the surface while also very precisely measuring the distance to the surface. So this is very complimentary work, where she’s combining the laser ranging work. She was Deputy Principle Investigator on the instrument itself, the lunar orbiter laser altimeter.

And so, she’s put all of these different positions together from principle investigator of one spacecraft to Deputy Principle Investigator of an instrument and investigation lead for the science to really give us a deep – literally, deep understanding of the lunar surface.

Fraser Cain: Actually – I said in my intro that she’s been on six missions – actually, she’s been in ten. She’s been a team member on ten NASA planetary missions.

Pamela Gay: So going all the way back, she did laser altimetry with Mars observer. She did gravity and altimetry team for Clementine. She was Deputy Principle Investigator on the orbiter laser altimeter on Mars Global Surveyor. She was Team Leader and Laser Ranging Investigator for near – the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Mission, Co-Investigator and lead of the Geo Physics investigation on NASA Messenger, which is where I first encountered her.

She was Team Lead for the Radio Science Gravity Investigation, a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Co-Investigator on Dawn’s [inaudible] [00:12:05] to Vesta and Series, Deputy Principle Investigator as we started with the lunar orbiter laser altimetry instrument on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. So she just mission after mission after mission has done this consistent and amazing body of work on mapping out the surfaces and the gravity of rocky bodies all over our solar system.

Fraser Cain: And the youngest of the people that we’ve been profiling so far. She’s only in her mid-50s, which is just amazing to have that much sort of under your belt already at that age.

Pamela Gay: She’s no nonsense. She’s just I’m gonna get the science done and she does all of this while – she’s not just like every day faculty member. She’s the Vice President for Research in the EA Grinswald Professor of Geo Physics, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So this is a woman who has massive bureaucratic responsibilities at one of the world’s top research institutions, is working on a large number of NASA spacecraft and is still churning out amazing research with all of the resources that she has access to.

Fraser Cain: So how did she get her start then? Let’s go through her resume.

Pamela Gay: Well, she went to the University of Pennsylvania, graduated in 1980 so started with regular good ole state education. She went on Brown University, which is kind of one of the big universities that you see Geo Physics people passing through.

She finished with her Ph.D. in 1986 from Brown University. She did her dissertation on unstable deformation and layered media, which I think is the fanciest way I have ever encountered for someone to phrase. Soil comes in layers. Sometimes it’s not flat. And that’s basically what that translates into is she studied what are the factors that lead to stratified surfaces [inaudible] [00:14:42] wrinkled and ridged and folded and all of the different things that occur on rocky bodies.

From there, she went on to – she’s worked a whole variety of different places from the National Research Council to she spent time at Goddard Space Flight Center, to being a professor at Johns Hopkins University where she was for many, many years. And then, in ’95 she went to Massachusetts’s Institute of Technology. So she’s very much an East Coast kind of woman, which I have to respect as being an East Coaster trapped in the mid-West myself.

And it’s just one of those resumes that when you download it, it’s over 20 pages. And she’s removed everything that isn’t essential. It is strictly peer reviewed national and international service and awesomeness.

Fraser Cain: And so, what then – I mean, I know that she serves on a pile of boards and has all of these responsibilities, in addition – so what are some of the other sort of roles that she plays?

Pamela Gay: So she’s also – or she was until 2012 – a guest investigator at the Department of Geology and Geo Physics Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. So she combines when she’s studying rocky bodies trying to understand our own planet Earth with working to understand Mars, the moon, various asteroids, looking at Mercury. And she’s also been a visiting scholar at Radcliffe Institute across the city of Boston. And she – as I said, she spent numerous years at Johns Hopkins University in a variety of different roles.

Fraser Cain: That’s awesome. So let’s talk a bit – well, one question which I’ve been asking you with every person that we’ve been talking about – have you had a chance to meet her?

Pamela Gay: Yes. I’m pretty sure she has absolutely no memory of me. I’ve seen her give I don’t know how many talks at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference and the European Planetary Sciences Conference. And I’ve more than once bumped into her and done the requisite that was a very good talk, and she probably has absolutely no memory of me.

Pamela Gay: Yeah. When you go to these conferences there are certain speakers that you listen to because you know they’re going to convey a great deal of information that you need to know. And there are those that you know are going to convey a beautiful story that is worth listening to.

And then, there are those that are simply going to do the very clinical but – I’m trying to figure out how to say this correctly – it’s the journalistic just the facts, ma’am, kind of – or I guess detective work just the facts that cuts through the chase and does it in a way where you’re captivated but none of the flowery language or special fonts are required. And she’s one of those people that does the just the facts talk that enraptures you with how much information is coming out beautifully conveyed.

Fraser Cain: So the next – I think we talked about the grail mission. We talked about a couple of other missions. The big one that’s coming up now is Dawn is gonna be arriving at Series, and really soon now. I mean, we are not far away –

Pamela Gay: This summer, six months away.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. For another one of these missions that’s been out there. And we’ve been following it for years and years, but it’s already [inaudible] [00:19:02] which I know you had a lot of work in helping with the education and outreach and mapping [inaudible]. So what is the work that’s gonna be happening with Series?

Pamela Gay: It’s in many ways a rinse and a repeat look at new worlds. At a certain level you want to replicate the same experiments over and over and over and very controlled parameters. Well, we can’t really purposely turn the gravity on and off on an asteroid or very one particular mineral in its surface. But what we can do is visit a variety of different worlds, perform the exact same experiments on those variety of different worlds and see what we can learn by letting nature vary the parameters.

And this is something that you really see occurring in Dr. Zuber’s research where first we went to Vesta, which is on the dry side of the water line that is in our solar system that is kind of the line of demarcation that divides where worlds could form and have water with the outer worlds and where the young sun would have essentially dried out all the volatiles while the worlds were still young.

Series formed on the opposite side of that water line from Vesta. We’ve orbited Vesta. We’ve studied its geology to the best of our abilities. We’ve imaged it in high resolution looking to try and understand the folding, the bouldering, the deformation of craters, the way [inaudible] [00:20:50] have formed. And now we’re going out to Series, where it’s admittedly a bit larger of a world, but more importantly, it formed on the other side of that water line, not too different a position compared to the rest of the asteroids. It’s still part of the asteroid belt. It’s just the other side of that asteroid belt.

And it has the potential to have volatiles left over from its formation. So now we’re going to replicate the imaging sets that were done, the spectroscopy, all of the different experiments to try and understand how does that one change in parameter along with the change in mass affect the way one of these small worlds is formed.

Fraser Cain: And so, we’re gonna get – I mean, as it relates to the work Dr. Zuber is doing – we are gonna be getting this gravity map. Up to some extent we’re gonna get – understand the bid of the surface geology, the density, of Series and how it compares to what we learned with Vesta. Right?

Pamela Gay: Exactly. And this is also going on to be compared with work that she’s done at Mercury with Messenger, work that’s been done at Mars with Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Surveyor and work that is still being done by Lenore Reconnaissance Orbiter with its laser altimeter and work that is still being completely analyzed that came from the Ebb and Flow grail spacecraft.

Fraser Cain: Do you ever – I mean, I know you’re an Astronomer. You focus on sort of Astro Physics Astronomy. Do you ever wish you were a planetary scientist? Do you ever wish you had gone down that path? Was that ever a possibility for you?

Pamela Gay: So I have to admit that I am someone that when I discovered how much organic chemistry was involved in Geo Physics sort of went, “Oh, dear God, no.” And this simply has to do with we are all better and worse at different things. And for me, proper nouns is not a skill set I have. And organic chemistry the formation of complex molecules, the mineralogy, all of those things were things that I simply have no passion for and instead sort of have a desire to go, “Please. I will listen. I will enjoy your analysis. Don’t make me do that.”

The skill set that these people have, they have almost the same physics background I have, less plasmas. But they also have to know so much chemistry, so much hydrology. And whereas in Astrophysics it’s all about the P-Chem, which I love P-Chem, how atoms interact, how quantum states emerge and evolve in different pressures and temperatures, magnetic fields play a completely different role in astronomy.

That need to understand things that form molecules, that form complex molecules, that form molecules that interact and form in different geometries, that’s a skill set I don’t have and didn’t want to have and would have gone into animal behavior before I went into organic chemistry if needed to – there are so many other paths I would have gone down first.

Fraser Cain: Really?

Pamela Gay: But I love learning what these people learn and that’s the great thing about what you and I do is I’m sure there’s things that you look at that the scientists that we read the results from have done and you’re just like, “Whoa. So glad that wasn’t me.”

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Pamela Gay: And so much respect for the people who have gone out and done this detailed work.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. So we’re gonna probably wrap this up pretty shortly, but one thing that I highly recommend people do is they go and check out Dr. Zuber’s resume. And I’m sure this is the same document that we’re both looking at. And I’m not sure how many pages it is, 30 or 40 pages?

Pamela Gay: 27 pages.

Fraser Cain: 27 pages, that’s right. That’s the one. Okay. Great. And so, just for example, professional involvement is a full page of – no, two pages, right? And things like President’s Commission on Implementation of the United States exploration policy in 2004, the program committee for the MIT Darwin Bicentennial Conference in 2009. Like I have never in my life seen a body of work so well documented and so sort of laid out in this way that I think when people ask us like how can you get to be in a career in Astronomy, a career in Space, what kinds of things should you do?

Look up Maria Zuber’s resume because it is an action plan to see what a person who has really thrown herself 100 percent at this question has generated. It tells you the kinds of research that she’s worked on, the kinds of professional community she’s been a part of, the awards that she’s won. This is – this is what it takes and she is like the perfect example of it.

Pamela Gay: And something that I deeply – again, I don’t really even have the word for it – deeply appreciate seems like kind of the wrong word – about her CV, her Curriculum Vita resume, for those of you in normal jobs outside of academia. I know that I over the years have begun to drop off older things from my CV. It’s like, “Ah, no one’s gonna care about the awards I won as an undergrad. No one’s gonna care about” – she hasn’t done that. So this is really one of those things that you can look at and go, “Hey, I got that award when I was her age. That’s kinda cool.”

And there’s this ability to go through and see how everything builds one thing upon the other and how all of us start with very similar beginnings. And it’s what we choose to do as we go along. It’s also interesting to look at how her publications have changed in terms of as an early career scientist if you scroll all the way back in her stuff, it’s first author, first author, first author, first author.

And then she starts getting more and more involved in teams and you see her students taking the first authorship role more and more often and that evolution to being last author as she became a team lead. All these small things that tell you so much about who the person is and leave nothing to the imagination, it’s just kind of awesome.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. No. I counted 28 papers published in 2014 of which she wasn’t the lead author on any of them. She was part of the team, but then as you said, you go back to her first papers back in 1980 – in the 1980s. And she’s all the first author, so that is – that is the evolution that a working scientist makes as you become more and more of a team leader and a manager, as opposed to working hard in your office on your research to helping a team take advantage of your knowledge and experience to get the best science they can, so yeah.

Pamela Gay: And I just love that she includes that first paper she wrote as, I’m guessing it was as an undergrad with her advisor that’s on the Virgo Cluster. It’s completely not related to anything else in her research, but it’s a paper she did while she was an undergraduate. So it’s there.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. So again, if you have any interest at all in trying to create a lifelong career in science, base science or science, check out her resume. Because that should be your blueprint for success.

Fraser Cain: Right. Okay. Well, next week we’re gonna talk about somebody that I hope everybody has heard about, which is gonna be Dr. Carolyn Porka who works on the Cassini Mission.

Pamela Gay: And on New Horizons.

Fraser Cain: Among other things, yeah, among everything.

Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. So we’ll be talking about Carolyn Porka, who I think both of us have had a chance to talk to, so.

Pamela Gay: Yes.

Fraser Cain: Very cool. Okay. Well, thank you very much, Pamela. And we’ll talk to you next week.

Pamela Gay: Okay. Sounds good.

Male Speaker: Thanks for listening to Astronomy Cast, a non-profit resource provide by Astrosphere, New Media Association, Frazier Cane and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can find show notes and transcripts for every episode at Astronomycast.com. You can email us at info@astronomycast.com, tweet us at Astronomy Cast, like us on Facebook or circle us on Google Plus.

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]]>http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/01/ep-361-modern-women-maria-zuber/feed/1Maria Zuber is one of the hardest working scientists in planetary science, being a part of six different space missions to explore the Solar System. Currently, she's the lead investigator for NASA's GRAIL mission. Ep.Maria Zuber is one of the hardest working scientists in planetary science, being a part of six different space missions to explore the Solar System. Currently, she's the lead investigator for NASA's GRAIL mission.
Ep. 361: Modern Women: Maria Zuber
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Maria Zuber vitae -- MIT
GRAIL mission
Gravity Potato -- Universe Today
GRAIL First Results Provide Most Precise Lunar Gravity Map Yet - Universe Today
GRAIL Mission, a Smashing Success -- NLSI/SSERVI podcast
Dawn Mission on Approach to Ceres -- NBCNews
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Transcript
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Fraser Cain: Astronomy Cast Episode 361, Maria Zuber. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, your weekly facts based journey through the Cosmos. We help you understand not only what we know but how we know what we know.
My name is Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the Director of CosmoQuest. Hey, Pamela, how are you doing?
Pamela Gay: I’m doing well. How are you doing, Frazier?
Fraser Cain: Great. We’re recording this just moments before Newtonmas. So – which is December 25th.
Pamela Gay: There are three days of Die Hard remaining.
Fraser Cain: Three days of Die Hard remaining.
Pamela Gay: There’s the five Die Hard episodes. And instead of the 12 days of Christmas or the ten days of Cards against Humanity, we’re celebrating the five days of Die Hard in our house.
Fraser Cain: Nerds. But I know the feeling. Now, do we have any announcements this week, any you want to mention, you want to plug?
Pamela Gay: If you need a year-end tax donation help, we can provide you a tax donation in the United States through SIUE for your donations to Cosmo Quest in the European Union, for your donations to 365 Days of Astronomy. And you know, Astronomy Cast is also here in the US, and we’re just trying to figure out how to make the next year happen. And we are losing some of our sponsors, so if your company is interested in sponsoring our shows, drop me an email, info@astronomycast.com.
Fraser Cain: Perfect. Okay. Let’s get cracking.
Maria Zuber is one of the hardest working scientists in planetary exploration. Being a part of six different space missions to explore the solar system, and currently, she’s the lead investigator for NASA’s ground mission. All right, Pamela, so who is Maria Zuber and why did you select her?
Pamela Gay: I selected her because she’s someone that I think no one knows her name well enough. When you ask for big names in Planetary Science, Allen Stern’s name always comes up. Karen Porka’s name always comes up.
Fraser Cain: Steve Squires.
Pamela Gay: Yeah. There’s all these – Jim Bell – there’s just certain names that come up over and over and over again. But then when you go to a conference and you look to see who takes the podium over and over again to present research session after session, object after object, it’s this woman from MIT. And I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about her. And unfortunately, I’ve never actually heard anyone say a word about her.
But as you pointed out, she’s part of a large number of missions, and I’ve simply been consistently impressed with what she does and how well she carries herself and carries her mission. So I wanted to bring her up as part of the Series.
Fraser Cain: All right. So, let’s start with the missions because I think that’s – you know, that’s where her entire body of work has – has really recently really played out. So where do you want to – which mission do you want to start with?
Pamela Gay: Well,Astronomy Castno