As I watch, I’m also watching the audience and taking in the culture. I am the product of an astronomy education. I am a child of the AAS meeting. These are very different people, but I find this a comfortable culture to immerse myself in for a few days. They dress much more relaxed – jeans and hoodies are randomly warn by elder scientists and the grad students while polo shirts and cargo pants seems to almost be a uniform. They all have computers (mostly Macs), but in the sessions they behave and pay attention to the speaker instead of their email (and they tweat by cell phone). They budget themselves more time to talk, with 15 and 30 minute presentations being a uniform way to do things. Instead of having daily set coffee breaks with food, they provide a constant supply of coffee for free and all food for pay. They talk readily, share readily (at least as I see in public), and they dedicate lots of resources to celebrating their best students. More public awards are being given to students then adults at this meeting. The majority of the hair is not gray. While non-asian/southeast asian minorities are rare, people with all manner of physical disability are here. And people of many nations are here as well.

I like this meeting. It is one of my favorite because it is friendly and I never present during the main conference and I can just sit and learn. I wish I didn’t have to go home tomorrow, but I have to teach. Next year perhaps I’ll have the NSF funding to stay and it will magically line up again with spring break.

Tonight is the poster session and then I head home. I suspect my cell phone battery will die before I head home, but I’ll tweet what I find while I can.

Today I spent my morning sitting in on sessions involving the new data coming down from the Lunar Missions Kaguya, Chang’e-1 and Chandrayaan-1. I’ll be doing the same this afternoon, and right now I’m sitting in a session on “What does the community want in future Moon Missions?”

The first thing I personally learned is I need to learn what more minerals mean and why they matter on the moon. To this end, I have received the following book recommendations: The Lunar Source Book, and New Views on the Moon. I will be beginning for my university to get both as soon as I get home.

Trying to figure out minerals was (and is) an important part of today because so much of the data coming back from the money is tracing out the composition of the moon in a variety of orbiting spectrometers and spectral imagers. In English, there are now instruments orbiting the moon that can separate out the light from different atoms and molecules to study their relative abundances and pinpoint their locations.

The first of these new spectrometers discussed today was the CIXS X-Ray Spectrometer on Chandrayaan-1, and Indian mission that is currently exploring the moon. This little camera (and really, anything that gets launched is probably little), is able to measure the abundances of rock-forming elements like Magnesium, Aluminum, Silicon, Calcium, Titanium, and Iron. Many of these minerals are things that are also useful for building and for life. While the instrument, like all X-Ray telescopes, has bad resolution, it gets great data. It’s resolution is about 25km. To work, it needs the sun to give of X-Rays (something that is normal when the sun is active), so the X-Rays can interact with the lunar surface and get re-emitted up to the detector. Unfortunately, the Sun refuses to be active. A few wimpy flares have allowed instrument testing, and Mg / Al / Si have all been detected. It still annoying not to be able to use the instrument to its fullest potential due to a lack of solar x-rays. This was not expected when this and other X-Ray instruments were launched. Scientists using the KAGUYA X-Ray spectrometer are having similar lack of data issues, thanks to the Sun’s lack of sun spots and related flares.

Luckily, NASA’s Moon Mineral Mapper (M^3) doesn’t need anything to work other then itself. This is to me the neatest flying instrument. Also mounted on Chandrayaan-1, it has a 140 meter per pixel resolution and a 40 km wide field of view. As it scans across the lunar surface, it simultaneously gathers data across a wide range of IR to visible wavelengths. This data can we used to trace out where different minerals exist on the moon (see image above – rainbows are spectral data). For instance, in work presented by C.M. Peters, images cutting across the Orientale Basin show differences in the geology of different places. Working from outside the basin (the Hevelius Formation) in to the Mare Basalts (lava inside the basin), they find the surface composition changes from Feldspathic breccias (Feldspar is a rock that crystallizes from magma) to shocked Anorthosite (a type of feldspar that makes up the light areas of the moon), to unshocked crystalline anorthosite, to high Calcium pyroxene (a rock made of silicate minerals) and pyroclastic (volcanic) rocks in the center. (Do you see why I decided I need to learn more about minerals?)

Work like this, and like that presented by R.O. Green, show the potential this instrument has to allow us to understand the surface of the moon in new details. This data for the first time allows us to carefully map the geophysics as well as the morphology (Craters and volcanoes, etc). Also working on the problem of composition is the SELENE SP abd GRS on KAGUYA.

In addition, other mission instruments have been working to measure gravitational pull as a function of position (and thus the density distribution of lunar materials), the radiation environment around the moon, the distribution of magnetic materials, and even to make temperature maps (where it is cold, there is the potential for volatiles like Oxygen.

Between now and next year I need to learn mineralogy…

What I can appreciate no matter what are the gorgeous HiDef images taken by KAGUYA. Check them out here and here.

The night is starting with Steph Stockman (geosteph on twitter), the nes SMD Lead for Education and Public Outreach. It’s nice to see her up there looking like a geologist instead of the past person who was a bit hard to approach in her expensive suit, expensive hair, and very professional everything, down to make up and nails. Don’t get me wrong, the last person was friendly. She just made me feel like a slob every time I talked to her.

Steph is updating us on what is coming in the future. A new NASA ROSES EPO call will be coming with NOI due May 1 and proposals dues 7/1. Eek! I did this last year (and got one too!) There will also be E/PO supplements available to people with science based ROSES grants. Intriguingly, Outreach supliments are $10k/year and Education are $15k per year. I’m not entirely sure how the separate outreach from education, but I suspect informal education (like Astronomy Cast) is outreach, while K-12 school programs are education, but that projects in science centers are a bit ambiguous.

Next up is IYA: NASA has an Object of the Month, and while this is the year of “Astronomy,” we’re using the general populous term that includes planets, rather then the science term which tends to exclude the solar system.

Quick and to the point, Steph is now done and has been replaced by someone whose name was stated way to fast and was thus missed. He will be talking about missions.

The National Academy has a series of studies going on that effect the direction of NASA. These panels are made up by unpaid (and hopefully unbiased) scientists who work to define the future of our field. Those of interest to planetary science include:
A Radioisotope Power Supply Study: In June Radioisotope Power Supply report finally expected out NEO Survey and Deflection study: There were meetings in January and February about Near Earth Asteroids and how to deflect them. A mitigation Panel has been formed and will be meeting march 3 – April 1 in DC
A Planetary Protection panel for Mars: (um, wow) This panel looks at how should we manage and handle Mars samples and what can we do to not do bad things with Mars by covering it in spacecraft. Report for delivery in May.

Now we’re on to non-Mars, Non-Moon missions. There are a lot: Mercury, Venus, Comets, Asteroids, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto/Kuiper belt all have missions now or, in the case of Jupiter, in the near future. The most exciting to me is Juno, a mission that will go back to explore Jupiter and that will precede a mission to explore Europa (with its sub-surface water).

Now looking at the Moon, we can see 6 new missions to all occur between now and 2016. Mars has many ongoing missions (Odessey, Phoenix (maybe), Mars Rovers, and Mars Express, and another 5 new missions will be sent between now and 2020, including sample return and the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL).

MSL should be launched in 2011 (Oct or Dec) for a cost of $223 Million + slippage costs (another $400 million!). Launch slip will be funded by the Mars Exploration Program by redistributing funding from other programs (yuck) causing the 2016 mission with ESA to get some money yanked. ESA is making the redistribution possible (thank you ESA). One additional bad thing about this slip. Juno is supposed to launch in Aug of 2011 and MSL needs the same launch pad. Turning the pad around for October is hard, but NASA and military are working together to solve the problem.

Discovery Programs are the most interesting. In the past, they had held off on allowing any applications that required a radioisotope power supply (RPS). Now starting to look at possibilities. These could go anywhere – inner or outer solar system – and found that really good mission ideas and objectives exist that need RPS’s. It is acknowledged that getting these going soon is a priority. The next call will go out with the question: Are RPS stirling engines required, optional, or not necessary. A call is being drafted. Watch the NASA websites…

On the hope that Stirling RPS generators are allowed, there is a briefing Wednesday at this conference (Sadly, I’ll be home teaching thermo very ironically that night).

NASA and ESA are also looking for Outer Planets Flagship missions. They have given priority to a Europa mission fir a 2020 launch, with a Titan mission to follow. (I would like to note, about half the people in this room will be retired by the time data is returned, and I will be very gray. Sometimes timelines are depressing).

Now looking at Astrobiology. A couple years ago the program lost 50% of its funding. Today, NASA is committed to rebuilding the field. rebuilding from FY07 $34.2 Million budget, to a FY09 $49.5 million budget. This isn’t the $60 million of the past, but it is getting there. Specifically looking for small space missions and secondary payloads in other missions. First launch is scheduled for 2010.

And finally – The NASA Conference Travel & Support update. Last year congress lost its mind and capped NASA’s ability to send people and exhibits to conferences and to have its own conferences. As a result, NASA had to cancel all conferences it sponsored! This limited the ability of NASA to communicate results and information to the public. Shortly after Congress opened its 2009 session, the cap was removed on domestic expenses, but there is still a cap on NASA employees traveling to international conferences (which makes ESA collaborations hard). NASA is working to revise its policies to make things make more sense. This is good!

Next person: Mike Orgo (sp????) who will give an impromptu monologue. His goal is to change the NASA mission from “science OR exploration” to “science AND exploration.”

He will update us on LRO and LCROSS. Launch is set to May 21 if the currently prepared launch goes off soon (which it should). Data will get archived in the Planetary Data System and NASA is working with mission scientists to guarantee data is in the most useful form. Additionally, next week it will be announced which hemisphere the LCROSS mission will attack (or at least throw itself at). Mission planning is being done in concert with science missions from Japan and India that are providing data for site selection. Two tiers of 25 targets each have been passed to a panel of scientists to help provide a sanity check of “are all the targets in the correct tier” and “did we miss anything.” Final target will be selected when exact launch and more data is all in hand.

All is good. We could just use one more launch pad…

The also calculated a habitability index for the various sites landers have explored on Mars. If a site has a probability of supporting life greater than 50%, it is considered reasonable to go looking for life using dedicated experiments.

To calculate the Habitability Index, they create something similar to the Drake Equation. Here, the habitability index is the product of the probability that liquid water has been present, the probability of a biologically abailable energy source, the probability that chemical building blocks available, and the probability that the environment is benign and nontoxic.

The problem is there is no way to assign an absolute value for any factor. The best that can be done is to make an educated guess from multiple approaches and to compare sites that do not have similar measurement types. This gets really complicated when direct measurements of each of the probabilities isn’t actually made and theory must be invoked (for instance, Phoenix didn’t get all the needed data). Additionally, data that does exist often has more than one interpretation.

All that said, let’s consider the situation at the Mars Phoenix site:

Liquid Water – Evidence: segregated ice, macroscopic evidence for melting at some time. Additionally the volume fraction of ice in soil exceeds what the pore space would allow via vapor deposition, and minerals that can only form in liquid water are present (eg carbonates at 5% level).

Energy: Solar and chemical energies are both good, but there is a need for shielding from UV for life to use solar energy (It’s a bit destructive to organics). Shielding in the form of transparent glassy grains that block UV and admit other wavelengths were found, and this offers a chance for tiny hiding life. Also, on Earth perchlorate is metabolized by many chemoautotrophs and could be chemical source for life on Mars as well.

Chemistry: The presence of Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Hydrogen, Phosphorus, and Sulfer are all thought to be needed. At this stage C and O are known to exist, but we’re not sure Nitrogen is there – can’t get a reading on nitrate with lots of percholorate around. Phosphorus also was not seen with Phoenix’s wet chemistry lab, but it couldn’t have been seen with the WCL setup. Sulfer is possible; the data is still work being worked on and early results are ambiguous. While not everything we’d like to see were there, many biologically interesting Ions were located (Na+, K+ Ca+ Mg2+ Cl- C004-).

Benign and NonToxic: They found the pH levels are non stressful, and the environment contained no poisens. All is good.

Put together, they feel that at the pole, there is the highest value for the habitability index- searching for life justified.

NOTE – this value is for now and it is hapitable *today.*

Kind of cool. Yes?

His talk focused on who planets are defined and classified. As we gear up for this summer’s IAU General Assembly, many folks are wondering if (hoping really) they will clarify what is and is not a planet.

As a starting point he explained that the discussion originated from the IAU trying to sort our who had the responsibility of naming Michael Brown’s then new discovery of an object that is bigger than Pluto. Should the small body committee name it? Should the planet committee name it? Or…? Well, clearly someone had to decide what a planet is and is not.

The criteria that was landed on and voted on, however, aren’t the most sensible. Here they are:
1) A celestial body that is in orbit around the Sun (but this precludes exosolar planets from being “planets”)
2) Has sufficient mass so that it assumes a round hydrostatic equilibrium configuration (this means it’s bigger than the asteroid Juno, and most Moons count)
3) It has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit (Ummmm – there is random stuff in the orbits of *all* the planets.)

Let’s look at this last criteria a bit more closely within our modern understanding of the solar system. Prior to 1992 we didn’t have evidence there was a Kuiper Belt and we didn’t have evidence of other planets. Our understanding of planets was based on our own 8 planets + Pluto. Once we started realizing the dynamic range of planets (and stars) are very different, we needed to reconsider everything.

Mass is an easy criteria to consider. Can an object know it is large? The answer is simply yes. Once an object gets large enough gravity makes it round. Period. This is a good starting criteria for “Could be a planet.” Keep lumping on mass and eventually they start burning stuff in their cores. That would define the “Could be a star” boundary.

But mass does not effect the other criteria. An object of a given mass doesn’t always orbit the Sun (look at Ganymede and Titan – both very planet-like moons).

What it takes to clear an orbit via either scattering or accretion also depends on the size of the star and how far an object is from the object it orbits. In our solar system, if you stuck the Earth out at 40 AU (Pluto’s mean distance) it could not clear its orbit! It would fail the “What’s a planet?” criteria for the exact same reason as Pluto! In general, as the mass of the star goes up, planets must grow, and as planets move further from the star, they must be bigger to clear their orbits. (For those into the numbers, for a planet to clear it’s orbit it must have a mass where M_planet > ~G^(-3/4)T_system M_star^(1/4) a_planet^(9/4) )

Why is it do hard to define a planet? Well, the problem comes with finding a starting point and finding consensus. Today’s criteria aren’t really based on anything that describes the geophysics of the object. A brown dwarf star could get classified as a planet! As we rethink our definitions, Stern encourages us to each find our own way of looking at this problem and to look at intrinsic characteristics that distinguish planets based on their physical properties. If you look out at the largest Kuiper Belt objects (Pluto and its roughly same size friends, all of which are over 800 km in diameter) you find a set of objects that are all like the terrestrial worlds in terms of similar formation, sometimes have atmospheres, sometimes having moons, and otherwise looking and acting very different from their asteroidal cousins.

People tried very hard to get Stern to make a recommendation on what should and should not be a planet. He gave us two bits of advice: Make up our own minds, and do not let the “Well if there are too many planets my kid won’t remember all their names” issue bias us (after all, we have more than 12 states in the union).

So go forth and think. And tell your local IAU representative what you think should make a planet.

Phoenix Lander on Polygon Structure as seen by HiRISE

(disclosure: I left my cellular internet dongle in my room, so I’m twittering sessions live and posting blog entries on a semi random basis when I can go out and find internet)

I’m leaning against the back wall of a packed ballroom filled with the brim with silent and attentive geophysicists who are absorbing all they can about the Mars Phoenix Lander.

This fairly large (5,5m or 18 ft long) and heavy (350kg or 770lb) spacecraft parachuted to the surface of Mars on May 25, 2008 and poked, prodded and dug into the surface until it froze to death on November 10. While this seems like a short period, the original plan was to wind up operations in August, so the craft had been living on borrowed time. While it is unexpected that the craft will be able to turn back off when it thaws in the next Martian Spring, the lander is programmed to phone home should it survive.

If you want to go back and see what the mission knew in the moment, it’s all recorded on twitter. Check out: http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix

Today is all about what we can now say with certainty.

The session started with a broad overview of the results everyone was waiting to hear: Is there evidence of past liquid water and is their the possibility Mars can (at other temperatures) support life. The answer is a qualified yes.

For Water:

• The soil Phoenix dug up was clotted/cemented (this is geology speak for what happens when you mix dirt and water, stir, and then let it “dry” out.)
• There is Calcium Carbonate at 3-4% level in some of the samples. This is a mineral that only forms in wet environments
• In addition to Calcium Carbonate, there are other aqueous minerals
• And, to give the most obvious case, there is water ice 5cm below the surface, and this ice is segmented in the same way as a stream that has frozen and thawed and refrozen

For Habitability:

• There are the materials needed to process energy and to get nutrients from the environment
• The 1-2% perchlorate is not a life killer
• The 7.7 pH is friendly

It just happens to be a bit too cold at the moment…

Additional work looking at the variation of ice with depth found that it matches models, and that based on the fact that the rocks aren’t frozen into the ice, but rather are capable of getting flung out of place by casual assualt by alien space laboratories, the ice is old. (Over time the ice contracts, loosening around the rocks).

There was also work that showed that the fascinating polygon structures surrounding the lander are likely caused by seasonal cracking that occurs when the ice contracts and sand and small rocks fall in between the gaps in the ice. The “flat” part of each polygon typically measured 4-5 meters in diameter and have multiple lumps and peaks indicating there is multiple events building these structures. Unlike on Earth, where these can be caused by frost heaves, these patterns are caused by sand wedges.

Sadly, I know need to go play scientist and be part of a telecon. More to come on the other side…

One thing LPSC seriously does right is they offer their schedule and abstracts as PDFs online, and when LPSC says abstract, they really mean short paper. Prior to take off I happily downloaded pdfs of all the sessions I’m most interested in. I have to admit to being on a mission to learn about small dead things: Moon, Mercury, and a bit of Mars. With so many missions just starting to spit out science and so many missions getting ready to make their way between worlds, I’ve decided it’s time for a crash course in planetology. I foresee an Astronomy Cast on crater counts somewhere in my future…

This trip it will be just me. Astronomy Cast is currently waiting (mostly patiently) to hear back from the National Science Foundation regarding a grant to support a new round of Astronomy Cast Live. This means that while I hope to blog and Twitter my heart out, I just won’t be able to put out as much coverage as I’ve done at past meetings. Still, some is better then none. Right?

Here is a basic schedule of what to expect.
- Tomorrow is the Education Forum that precedes the main meeting. I’ll be there along with Mary Lynne Dittmar giving workshops on IYA related New Media, including Second Life, podcasting, blogging, Twittering, and more.
- Monday: It’s all Phoenix all the time (maybe – there is also a session on the Origin and Evolution of the Moon I hope to float in and out of).
- Tuesday: Moon Moon Moon. There are back to back to back sessions on Lunar missions today and tomorrow.
- Wednesday: Sadly I have to fly home early to teach Wednesday night back in Edwardsville. Hopefully I’ll find some other bloggers at the meeting and be able to pass on their URLs to you.

For today though, it’s a couple of flights and then a bit of recording of Astronomy Cast.

See you on the other side…