Seattle is just like Mars, and other lessons from a 3-D trip

Attendees at the most recent gathering of the Seattle Astronomical Society went on an entertaining and informative 3-D trip to Mars, and learned that Seattle is just like the Red Planet.

Antonio Paris

Our tour guide was Dr. Antonio Paris, chief scientist at the Center for Planetary Science, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at St. Petersburg College in Florida, and author of Mars: Your Personal 3D Journey to the Red Planet (Center for Planetary Science, 2018).

Paris said he loves Mars and expects that humans will be going there sooner than later.

“I suspect that, the way things are going, probably in about 10 to 15 years we’re going to be on Mars,” he said, adding that he doesn’t think anyone is going to go it alone.

“Mars, in my personal opinion, is going to be an international effort, both with corporations as well as the government,” Paris said.

The book was something of a spinoff of an exhibit about Mars that Paris helped put together at the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa. The exhibit proved pretty popular, and the book seemed the next natural step.

Proceeds from book sales support the work of the Center for Planetary Science.

Paris featured fantastic 3-D images of a great many Martian geological features in his presentation. While his Ph.D. is in astronomy, he’s really morphed into something of a rock hound.

“We are primarily geologists that are studying all of the geological features here on Earth,” he said, “and we’re trying to compare and contrast them with what we see on the lunar surface, what we see on Mercury, Venus, and all of the terrestrial planets.”

Paris called the process comparative planetology.

Ripple marks such as those shown in this photo from the 

rover Opportunity were deposited by water moving back 

and forth. Image: NASA/JPL

“If I look at something here on Earth and I can determine how that thing happened,” he said, “and I see the same thing on Mars, I can deduce that the same processes have occurred, most likely.”

That caveat was included on most of his deductions, but the comparisons are pretty compelling. For example, Paris passed around a flat piece of rock with ripple marks on it that he collected in the Canyonlands in Utah. Such ripple marks are created by water moving back and forth over the rock, and the Canyonlands piece looks exactly like stuff the rovers have seen on Mars.

Paris also showed photos of rock formations made when moving or freezing water breaks up bedrock, and wears it down into small pebbles. At least, that’s how it happens on Earth.

This set of images compares the Link outcrop of rocks on Mars
with similar rocks seen on Earth.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS and PSI

“We call that either fragmented sidewalk or conglomerate terrain,” he said. Here in Seattle, especially after our recent cold and snowy weather, we just call it a pothole, and that’s how the Emerald City is like the Red Planet! Potholes all over the place!

Paris does a lot of rock hunting in the American southwest, which has a lot of Mars analog sites that scientists and NASA use in their Mars work. These include Moenkopi in Arizona, Canyonlands, the Mojave Desert, Death Valley, and the Flagstaff area.

The website for the Center for Planetary Science notes that Paris will make a presentation in Portland in September at a time and place not yet published. Dollars to Voodoo Doughnuts it will be with Rose City Astronomers. Stay tuned.

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Buying Paris’s book by clicking the link or book cover image above supports both the Center for Planetary Science and Seattle Astronomy.

Wow! Check out The Planets Online

There’s a great new website about our solar system that will blow your socks off! The Planets Online introduces viewers to a broad range of subjects in a unique, innovative, and entertaining way. The site naturally interweaves information on science, engineering, music, visual design, and technology—it could be a showcase for STEAM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math).

Adrian Wyard

The site is the creation of visual artist Adrian Wyard. Followers of Seattle Astronomy may recall that we wrote about Wyard’s show The Planets Live about three years ago (story here). The concept is that Wyard uses images of celestial objects to accompany and enhance classical music. He’s done it with Gustav Holst’s The Planets, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and Dvorák’s 9th Symphony.

The core of The Planets Online is a video of a performance of The Planets by the Auburn Symphony Orchestra directed by Anthony Spain and featuring the Seattle Pacific University Women’s Choir and Wyard’s visuals. This is no ordinary video, however. If you remember when we used to get our video on plastic disks, think of The Planets Online as a video loaded with special features. As the video plays, a sidebar describes the images and who created them, offers facts about the music, pulls up Wikipedia pages and other sources about the science, throws in tidbits of trivia, and more. You can switch any of these info streams on or off depending on your interests.

Here’s a little preview video of The Planets Online.


We expect you might spend a good deal of time with the site.

There are live performances of Wyard’s work coming up this spring in Florida, Virginia, and Texas. The last northwest live performances were back in April, May, and October last year. If you missed those, you can have a little fun—and learn a few things—with The Planets Online.

Destination Moon exhibit taking shape at Museum of Flight

The helmet and gloves used by Buzz Aldrin when he walked on
the Moon, from the Destination Moon exhibit in St.
Louis. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

With less than a month to go until its opening, the Destination Moon exhibit about the Apollo 11 mission is taking shape at the Museum of Flight. Museum staff announced in a news release this week that the helmet and gloves used by astronaut Buzz Aldrin during his walk on the Moon have been installed in the space. The centerpiece of the exhibit is the Apollo 11 command module Columbia, but it will feature many other artifacts of the historic mission.

I saw the exhibit when it was in St. Louis last summer (story here) and it was great. It opens at the Museum of Flight April 13 and runs through September 2, a stretch of dates that includes the 50th anniversary of the July 20, 1969 “giant leap for mankind.”

There will be some differences in the exhibit from when it was in St. Louis. For example, the Museum of Flight release notes that the helmet and gloves display will include a magnifying glass so that museum visitors can read the to-do list on Aldrin’s glove reminding him of his tasks during the moonwalk. A key item on the list: get a photograph of a boot print on the Moon!

Shelley Sterns-Blackburn, ELY, Inc, and Lisa Young, Conservator
at National Air and Space Museum make some final
adjustments to spacesuit gloves worn by Buzz Aldrin while
on the surface of the Moon. Aldrin’s helmet and visor
are in place on the left. Photo Ted Huetter/The Museum of Flight.

Tickets for all dates of the exhibit are now on sale on the Museum of Flight website. Tickets are $10, or $5 for museum members, and must be purchased in addition to museum general admission, which is $25 for adults, $21 for seniors, and $16 for youth. Kids under 4 years of age are admitted free.

In addition, there is a free member preview of the exhibit scheduled for Sunday, April 7, which sounds like an excellent reason to join up today. Several free days are planned during the run of the exhibit, though no details on those have yet been published.
When I saw the exhibit at the St. Louis Science Center I went on a weekday afternoon and there were no lines or crowds; I just walked up and bought a ticket. Weekends might be a different story.

I can’t wait to see it again!

Black holes and LIGO on Bainbridge Island

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory—LIGO—is leading scientists to discoveries at an impressive clip. Just two years ago we wrote about UW Bothell physics professor Joey Shapiro Key’s talk to the Seattle Astronomical Society about the detection of gravitational waves from the merger of two stellar-mass black holes—a discovery that won the Nobel Prize. Last week at Bainbridge Island Open Mic Science Key talked about LIGO, its latest detections, and plans for even bigger science in the future.

Joey Shapiro Key

Interferometers are a simple idea. They have two perpendicular arms of equal length. Laser light is split into the two arms, hits mirrors at the far ends, and returns to the source. If something changes the length of an arm, the light waves interfere with each other. LIGO in Hanford and a twin observatory in Louisiana are huge observatories with arms four kilometers long, and they are making amazing measurements.

“When we detect the gravitational waves they are quite pristine, even from billions of light years away,” Key explained. “But it was a challenge because gravitational waves interact so weakly with matter—that’s why they’re so pristine when they reach us—they’re very hard to detect.”

How hard? Einstein, who thought up the notion of gravitational waves and did the math to explain how they would work, thought the effect was too small to ever detect. It took a century to develop the technology to do it. LIGO can detect unbelievably minute changes in the length of its arms when a wave passes through.

“This is the most sensitive measuring device in the world,” Key said of LIGO. “For those four-kilometer arms, the change in the length in the arms we measure is a thousand times smaller than the width of a proton in the center of an atom.”


Simulation by SXS

The big discovery by LIGO since Key’s previous talk came in August of 2017.

“We detected a gravitational-wave signal from two neutron stars colliding, followed immediately by a detection of a gamma-ray burst by NASA’s Fermi satellite, and this set off a worldwide search for the source of that gravitational wave signal,” Key said. More than half a dozen observatories were involved in the work, observing the event in many wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum and pinning down the galaxy in which the collision occurred.

“This is the first ever multi-messenger detection with gravitational waves where we’re doing observations using gravitational waves and light,” Key said. Being able to see light from the event taught us a lot.

“We really learned from this one in particular that most of the heavy elements in our universe, including what solar systems are made of, what planets are made of, and what we are made of, comes from neutron stars colliding and kilonova events,” Key noted.

Just as light has a wide range of wavelengths, so do gravitational waves. Key said LIGO can only detect a limited slice of those wavelengths. It would be not able to find gravitational waves from the collisions of supermassive black holes or from the early universe. That will take a different tool.

“The future of gravitational wave astronomy lies in experiments such as LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, that will do laser interferometry in space,” Key said. LISA is a joint venture between NASA and the European Space Agency, but there will be a bit of a wait for it. LISA’s planned launch isn’t until 2034. In the meantime, LIGO has plenty to do, with planned upgrades that will make the detector even more sensitive.

“We really are in a brand new era of gravitational wave astronomy, and there’s a lot to be discovered,” Key said.

Hanging out with comet hunter David Levy

One of the great perks of membership in the Seattle Astronomical Society is that the speakers at its annual banquet are typically dynamite. This year’s event featured one of the giants of astronomy, David H. Levy, who has discovered 22 comets, including the famous Shoemaker-Levy 9 that slammed into Jupiter in 1994.

Levy’s talk was highly autobiographical, which is fitting because his own autobiography, A Nightwatchman’s Journey: The Road Not Taken, is scheduled to come out this summer. Levy’s story is not necessarily complete, however; he’s still at it.

“Astronomers never really retire; you certainly don’t retire from being an amateur astronomer because it’s in your blood, it’s what you do, it’s what you live for,” Levy noted.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to discover another comet,” he said. “I’m still searching, because the search is so much fun!”

Several events from his youth seemed to steer Levy to a life in astronomy. Leslie Peltier discovered the Comet Kesak-Peltier in June of 1954 when Levy was about six years old. Later, when he was in high school, Levy was assigned to do a report on a book of his choosing. He picked Starlight Nights: The Adventures of a Star-Gazer, an autobiography of Peltier that had just been released. Levy couldn’t put it down, and it remains his all-time favorite book.

His parents sent him to Twin Lake Camp for three summers, and he didn’t like it much, but one year while returning to his cabin after a fireworks display he saw a shooting star and took it as an omen.

Then, in 1960 Levy had to do a public speech on any topic. He chose comets. Just before graduation, Levy crashed while riding his bicycle and broke his arm. A cousin gave him a book about the solar system as a get-well present. He devoured it.

“Any doubt that I was going to be interested in the night sky after that was erased,” Levy said. “All there was to do was astronomy.”

Seattle Astronomy’s Greg Scheiderer (left) visited with
comet hunter and author David H. Levy at the Seattle
Astronomical Society banquet Jan. 27.

Like many astronomers amateur and professional, Levy has kept a log book with notes about all of his observing sessions. His dates back to 1959 when he saw a partial solar eclipse, and as of the end of January included an amazing 20,922 sessions.

“Each one of them I cherish,” Levy smiled, noting about note-taking that, “If you don’t write it down, you haven’t done it.”

His first session looking for comets is dated December 17, 1965. It was nearly 19 years until he found his first in 1984. He’d logged a half dozen by 1990. Most of his comet hunting was visual in the early days, but it was around 1990 that he started doing photographic searches in partnership with Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker. One of the comets they discovered together is Shoemaker-Levy 9.

The gag among comet hunters is that to get famous your discovery has to become really bright. Shoemaker-Levy 9 didn’t do that, but the spectacular collision of its fragments with Jupiter in 1994 was a historic event.

“What it’s famous for is what it taught us,” Levy said “In colliding with Jupiter, it gave Earth a lesson in the origin of life.”

“It doesn’t prove that a comet collision means that life is going to start on a world,” he added. “What it does show is that when comets collide with a world, life eventually can start. It doesn’t mean that it does, but it’s one of the ways it does.”

“We’re all the progeny of comets,” Levy said.

His presentation was enjoyable and his autobiography promises to be an engaging read. It will be his 35th book. Watch for news about it in this space later this year.