We have been looking for evidence of ancient water on Mars for decades hoping to find places where life may have flourished on the red planet. Volcanic rocks, such as those at Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, consist of lava flows, cinder cones, and sometimes spatter bombs. Spatter bombs can form when lava interacts with water, causing an explosion and sending blobs into the air.
Climate is changing — throughout the US Southwest, across the United States, and for the planet as a whole. Temperatures are increasing, rainfall patterns are shifting, and extreme precipitation and heat wave events are becoming more frequent.
Roughly seventy-five billion low-mass stars (a.k.a. M dwarfs) in our galaxy host at least one small planet in the habitable zone (HZ). The stellar ultraviolet (UV) radiation from M dwarfs is strong and highly variable, and impacts planetary atmospheric loss, composition and habitability. These effects are amplified by the extreme proximity of their HZs.
Young stars form with circumstellar disks that provide the raw materials for planets. How these ubiquitous disks form planets and then dissipate to leave mature planetary systems is a remaining major puzzle of exoplanet science. I will describe measurements that help us to understand the lifetime of disks, and therefore the timescales for planet formation. Disks are visible to us by scattering light from their central stars and by emitting light in continuum.
The last decade has provided unexpected lessons in the enormous risks from great subduction earthquakes: Sumatra 2004, Chile 2010, and Japan 2011 were each devastating, resulting in surprising impacts distinct from shallow seismic events. Similar large-magnitude earthquakes are known to occur on the Cascadia subduction zone (CSZ), with the potential of rupturing the entire 1100 km length of the Pacific Northwest plate boundary.
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Pseudotachylyte – glassy rock representing frictional melt – is considered by many geologists to be the only unambiguous indicator of ancient earthquakes. Because its high temperature of formation requires frictional contact between rock surfaces, the presence of fluids in fault zones has been thought to suppress its formation since these fluids would become thermally pressurized during a seismic event and thus reduce the frict
Hundreds of areally extensive, flat-lying rock exposures, or “rock plains”, are preserved in the ancient terrains of Mars, potentially providing a record of surface processes operating during the first billion years of Martian history. These rock plains had previously been interpreted as degraded lava plains, perhaps similar to flood basaltic provinces on Earth or the lunar mare.
The first onboard vision system used in a lander for planetary exploration was the Descent Image Motion Estimation System (DIMES) developed at JPL for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) landings in January of 2004. DIMES used monocular imagery, radar altimetry, and an IMU to estimate the horizontal velocity of the descent system in the last 2 kilometers of descent. The horizontal velocity estimates were used in retrorocket firing logic to reduce horizontal velocity before the airbag impact on the ground.
In astronomy the only way to get a bigger signal is to build a bigger telescope or make a better camera for an existing telescope. While larger telescopes come roughly once every 30 years, better instruments and especially better detectors can be updated much more rapidly, leading to startling advances. I will present my group’s work developing an entirely new kind of camera based on a revolutionary new photon sensor, known as a Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors, or MKIDs.