Extreme Planetary Tourism

Explore the Solar System

– but Bring Your Adventure Gear

Some years ago my friend and colleague Paul Hodge, Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at the University of Washington, wrote a book called Higher Than Everest: An Adventurer’s Guide to the Solar System, that took the reader out to some of the most dangerous, gorgeous, and adventurous places in the solar system. I gobbled that book up because I could sit there and read it and dream about what it would be like to visit those worlds. To be sure, it would be the most extreme touristic adventure you could imagine: traversing the baking hot plains of Mercury, finding a way to dip into the Venus atmosphere and study that incredible surface; exploring Mars; braving the extreme hazards of the Jovian and Saturnian systems; warming up to Uranus and Neptune; and making one’s way to Pluto and the hinted-at treasury of other worlds that exist beyond Neptune. It would be the trip of a lifetime, if only one could fit all of that into one lifetime!

A computer-generated scene of the Galileo probe passing Io during its mission. Courtesy National Geographic.

Well, fast-forward more than a decade, and National Geographic TV has created a series called “A Traveler’s Guide to the Planets” that extends the adventure of planetary exploration  into the video realm and really makes you feel like you’re there on those other worlds.

It’s a three-night series that begins on February 14th. The folks at Nat Geo were kind enough to send me copies of two of the programs (about Jupiter and Saturn, respectively, which air on the 14th)  for preview. The presentations cover the exploration of the planets in a pretty exciting and visually stimulating way. For example, there are some really nice CG sequences set on Jupiter’s moon Io that look for all the world as if you’re standing right there, witnessing those volcanic eruptions against the backdrop of Jupiter rising over the not-too-distant horizon.

The presentations also include interesting interviews and commentary from planetary scientists like Torrance Johnson and Bob Pappalardo — both of who have worked extensively exploring the planets using remote probes such as the Voyager and Galileo spacecraft. Each hour takes you TO the planets, exploring via CG and animation just what it would be like to visit those worlds. That’s one of the coolest parts of the series — and I hope that “you are there” feeling will inspire people to learn more about the worlds of the solar system.

I’ve often wondered what our next generation of planetary explorers will find when they finally get themselves (or their spacecraft) “out there” again – with the newest instruments to help them gather data. I’m sure they’ll find wonderful things — as this series illustrates.  I hope that at least some of the audience members who see these shows will be inspired enough to join those missions of the future! There’s much to learn from the past, as these programs demonstrate — and more to find in the years to come!

It’s Classified

Galaxies in the Young Universe

For a long time, well before the invention, creation, and deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope, classifying galaxies was easy for the closest ones and quite a bit tougher for the more distant ones. When I say “classify” I mean determining a galaxy’s size and shape and structure — its morphology.  There are several main shapes: spiral, elliptical, lenticular, irregular — and within those classifications you get subclasses like barred spirals and so forth.  There was also a class of galaxies called “peculiar” because they looked — well, peculiar.

Making out the shape of a distant, dim blob of light is difficult unless you have a really good, strong telescope able to look out through the guck. So, until we had such observatories as Hubble and Gemini and Spitzer and European Southern Observatory and others, it was easier to determine the morphology of galaxies that were easier to see. That also meant astronomers classified galaxies that were closer to us. Edwin Hubble, for whom the HST is named, developed a classification scheme that astronomers came to call the “tuning fork” diagram because it … looks like a tuning fork. Nearby galaxies were observed and fit into this scheme and that helped astronomers talk definitively about the structure and characteristics of, oh say, a barred spiral galaxy and compare it to the characteristics of an elliptical galaxy.

Data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey show that galaxies at a time when the universe was about half its present age, looked different than galaxies today. Courtesy HST and Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Click to galacticate.

But, the burning question always has remained — what are more distant galaxies like? Do they follow the same morphological classification scheme? And if so, what does that tell us about the time in which they formed and in which we observe them? Remember: when we look at distant galaxies, we are seeing them as they appeared very long ago. Looking at a galaxy that is six billion light-years away only tells us what it looked like roughly six billion years ago. Did galaxies conform to the same kinds of shapes they do in the closer and more recent universe? That was a question that modern telescopes were designed to answer.  Scientists used data from both Hubble Space Telescope and the ground-based Sloan Digital Sky Survey to create a tuning fork for the more distant universe.  The image above shows the tuning fork for the local galaxies in the top section. The bottom section is a classification of more distant galaxies that lie some six billion light-years away.

Even just a quick look at the image will show that the nearby galaxies — also known as the “local universe” is mostly (about 72 percent) spiral galaxies.  Another 15 percent are lenticular (labeled S0), and only three percent are ellipticals (indicated by the letter E).

Now, look at the bottom half of the image and you see that among the galaxies as they existed half the age of the universe ago, there are way more peculiar galaxies (more than half, actually). Ellipticals are just about four percent, 31 percent are spirals, and 13 percent are lenticular.

Astronomers think that many of the pecular galaxies will evolve to become spirals through galaxy mergers.  That process of interaction and merger is how the Andromeda Galaxy was formed, and indeed, our own galaxy is in process of gobbling up smaller, dwarf companions.

So, what’s the take-away message from this work?  There are a couple: Classification is more than just make-work.   Classification helps us trace the history of galaxy formation. Ultimately, it brings us back to the present-day universe and helps us understand why it looks the way it does.  If you want to read more about the observations behind this result, check out the Hubble Europe web page story.

The Miniature Universe

The Microcosmos Shows Us the Very Small

A Miniature Universe Under a Scanning Electron Microscope

We as astronomers are always looking out to space, to see the latest and greatest among the planets, stars, and galaxies. But, what’s out there isn’t the sum total of the cosmos. There’s a lot right here to study, too — and it takes an understanding of biology, chemistry, physics, and geology to appreciate the whole cosmos — even the planet we inhabit.

Have you ever wondered what happens when we turn our fantastic technology inward, to look at the universe of the very small? Say, what a rock looks like if you break it up into its component elements? Or, whether that piece of rock you found is a meteorite or an Earth rock? Or, what your hair or skin cells look like, up close and personal?  Of course, we know about atoms and molecules that make up all of the matter we can detect (the so-called “baryonic matter”).  But, what do they look like when combined, say, if we could look at a rock under a scanning electron microscope?

Gullies on the rim of a crater on Mars. Courtesy HiRISE camera on Mars Reconnaissance/NASA.

A piece of granite as seen under a scanning electron microscope. Courtesy ASPEX Corp.

The results often look as otherworldly as scenes from Mars or one of the moons of Jupiter. That micro-universe, the miniature cosmos, is what a number of scientists (like geologists and biologists and physicists) study at a level that is too small for our eyes to detect. And the images they produce using high-resolution microscopes and scanning devices are amazing!

Have you ever wondered what common, everyday objects look like under a scanning electron microscope?  Well, you have a chance to find out. Here’s how:  I got an email about my image of Mars and Moon posted a few days ago from a reader who works for a ASPEX, a company that makes this kind of equipment for use in research. He alerted me to a cool project his company is doing with scanning electron microscopes called Send us Your Sample, and it does just what you think the name suggests — scans a sample of whatever you send in.  There are instructions on the page linked above that tell you what to send and how to submit it. So, if you’ve ever wanted to know what a piece of dirt or candy or a dust bunny or whatever — looks like at high magnification, go to their website and put in an entry.

I understand the project is going on for another month and it seems like it would be a very cool way for schoolkids (for example) to learn more about the structure of things we see every day.  It’s a part of science that you need to know and understand if you’re going to know and understand the cosmos. Check it out!