In this exclusive to Astronomy.com, science writer Lauren Cahoon shares the sights and sounds of the 2008 Division for Planetary Science meeting.
Take it away, Lauren:
It’s been an eventful 5 days at the 40th Division for Planetary Sciences meeting, with roughly 800 astronomers from all over the world convening in the small town of Ithaca, New York. While there have been hundreds of intriguing talks, I’ve been forced to select a sample that looked particularly enticing, which included updates on the recent MESSENGER flybys of Mercury, the Mars Rover projects, and the Cassini-Huygens data on Saturn and Titan.
New Views from Mercury
On Tuesday afternoon, Sean Solomon, principal investigator for the MESSENGER mission, briefed the audience on the spacecraft’s October 6 flyby, which has now helped to document 96 percent of the planet’s surface — up from a paltry 45 percent before MESSENGER’s first flyby in January 2008. Solomon showed never-before-seen images of long-elusive Mercury that pointed to widespread volcanism, plus other unidentified surface formations. “This doesn’t look like anything we’ve ever seen,” said Solomon about an image of a distinctive depression on Mercury’s surface. “This mission has a lot left to produce.”
Earlier that morning, Larry Nittler, another MESSENGER team member, gave updates on the chemical make up of the planet. While admitting that it’s “still essentially unknown,” he noted that MESSENGER detected possible hints of potassium. If the mineral is present, Nittler said, it rules out one of the competing theories of Mercury’s formation — that it was formed due to blasts from a newly-formed Sun’s solar wind.
Mars Missions: Still Roving
On the Mars front, Cornell University’s Steven Squyres of the Spirit and Opportunity missions delineated Opportunity’s 4-mile trek across the martian plains to the serrated edge of Victoria Crater, showcasing photos of “spectacular patterns” of the sandstone layers exposed in the crater. Squyres and his team have compared the banding patterns in Victoria Crater with the patterns in another formation, Duck Bay. They concluded that the same ancient body of water, stretching at least 4 miles, must have created both the stratification patterns. Opportunity’s next journey will be to the comparatively enormous Endeavour, a 13.7-mile-wide crater that lies a full 7.5 miles away. Opportunity has only traveled 7.5 miles in its entire lifetime, so this next trek stands as a challenge. “What the heck,” said Squyres with a laugh. He thinks the team is up for the task. “We’re smarter, and our rovers are smarter.” While Opportunity is on the move, Spirit has been parked in low-power mode due to the martian winter, but it will be on the move again shortly.
Peter Smith of the Phoenix Mission gave an update on that craft’s status — the big news here has already been reported: Water ice lies just a few robotic-arm scrapes below the martian soil. However, Smith showed pictures of a mysterious new development: Small whitish-colored “blobs” have formed on the struts of the Phoenix craft, and they seem to be growing. Smith says they’re unsure what this strange build-up is — whether it’s ice, dust or something else altogether remains to be seen.
Titan, Moon of Mystery
The liveliest talks all focused on Titan, thanks to the boatload of new data brought back from the Cassini-Huygens mission. Every presentation seemed to contradict the one that came before it — sparking debates over the nature of the moon’s liquid ethane and methane (a “mud puddle” versus meters-deep lakes) or whether cryovolcanism is an active force in the moon’s surface formations.
Titan has already received attention for being a potential hot spot for prebiotic molecules — and possibly life. Tom Spilker of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) noted that because of Titan’s potential store of subsurface liquid, it has “huge astrobiology potential.” On the other hand, Alexander Hayes, a graduate student also at JPL who studies Titan, was slightly more cynical. “You’re sitting at 95 degrees Kelvin.” Hayes said. “You need energy to create life.”
While such freezing temperatures (95 Kelvin is –289° Fahrenheit) might prevent life from sparking up, Catherine Neish with the University of Arizona presented lab research that demonstrated how easy it might have been to create prebiotic molecules on Titan. She noted that liquid water was present for at least 100 to 10,000 years during the moon’s history — long enough for the necessary reactions to take place to create oxygenated molecules. Could that have been enough to trigger microbial life? Only future missions will tell.
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Great, thanks, Lauren!!
Lauren Cahoon is a graduate student at Boston University’s science journalism program. She’s written about a variety of subjects, such as octopus intelligence, the ethics of tree plantations, and religion’s effect on the brain. She also interned at NOVA and the Harvard Medical School’s Focus
magazine. The science-writing life provided many glamorous experiences, including wading through shin-deep mud at the starting line of the Boston Marathon, watching army ants devour a live worm, and photographing a bunch of camera-shy flounder fish.