A particularly brutal winter, especially because Nashville’s idea of dealing with snow is throwing salt everywhere and call it a day.
When I was a freshman, I would come to this spot outside North House to study and enjoy nature.
I said, “Excuse Me” to the tree as I walked past on my way to the Commons Center.
Hey! Rivers Cornelson signing on. This webpage is to be the start of my perfectly formatted astronomy blog. The picture above is from my time with Moondance Adventures, website linked here.
Here is a photo I took at Joshua Tree National Park, this is one of my favorite astrophotography pictures I have taken over the years.
I’d like to share a neat shrine I visited in Miyajima, Japan. The Itsukushima Shrine isn’t accessible at high tide and looks to be floating in the water. But, at low tide, you can walk right up to it.
The evidence of space’s inspirational power is everywhere! Maybe you wanted to be an astronaut. Maybe you cried with your best friend watching E.T., grew up watching Star Trek with your family or dragged a date to see The Martian when it came out.
This awe is powerful. It keeps us pushing the boundaries of where a human can go, how far a satellite can reach, and how patiently we can monitor the stars.
I don’t need never-before-seen worlds to inspire this awe (though those are nice too). I have already seen plenty of things from my place on Earth to rattled me and made me realize how incomprehensibly big and far everything is. Eclipses, in particular, grab me when I think about how perfectly lined up the sun, moon, and Earth are. But I’m sure I don’t need to explain why eclipses was so captivating. Instead, I will leave you with this picture from last summer’s solar eclipse.
My name is Jiayu Kang and I am from Nanjing, China. I am a freshman at Vanderbilt.
Nice to meet you:)
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It’s 2019!
On Saturday, May 5, NASA is launching its newest Mars lander. The Mars InSight lander is set to arrive at Mars in November. This spacecraft is a first of its kind because it will be launched from the West Coast unlike other launches to Mars. More importantly, however, this lander is unique because it will attempt to peer beneath the surface of Mars; past rovers have only been able to explore their surroundings and at most collect samples and drill into the topsoil. Unlike the past rovers, the InSight lander will stay still, rather than moving around Mars’s surface, so that it can measure the internal properties of Mars. One thing the Insight lander is set to look for is marsquakes, or seismic activity on Mars. Earthquakes on Earth are caused by plate tectonics, whereas marsquakes are caused by volcanism. When a marsquake occurs, the InSight will be able to take a picture of Mars’s interior for astronomers on Earth to see. The goal is that greater study of Mars’s interior will be able to give us more insight into how Mars was formed. We have a general idea about how rocky terrestrial planets like Mars were formed, but we would like to learn more about how Mars came to be the cold, geologically dead world it is today.
Illustration of InSight from NASA
Some of the information to be gathered includes the thickness of Mars’s crust and the composition of its mantle and core. In particular, three main experiments will be conducted by InSight. The Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure will track marsquakes and internal activity. This will tell us more about Mars’s history and structure. The Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package will measure the movement of heat under Mars’s surface. This will tell us more about how Mars’s interior has evolved over time. The Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment will use radio signals to detect rotational wobbles. This will tell us more about the properties of the core and the interaction between the core and the mantle. It is the hope of scientists that with the results from this mission, we will be able to better understand how and why Mars formed the way it did and what it would take for worlds similar to Mars to form, whether they be terrestrial worlds in our own solar system or even exoplanets in other star systems. Fascinatingly enough, these studies of Mars’s interior will help the scientific community learn about planetary formation and evolution that extends beyond our own solar neighborhood!
Many people think about our future of exploring the solar system and perhaps nearby star systems and imagine finding bacterial life or perhaps even fossils or ruins of life that has gone extinct. While this would imply that life exists much more plentifully than expected across our galaxy, it might not actually bode well for the future of humanity.
A visual representation of the Great Filter stopping nearly all developing civilizations.
A caveat to Fermi’s Paradox is often referred to as The Great Filter. This theory suggests that the reason we have no evidence of life outside of our own planet is that there is some obstacle to becoming a galaxy-spanning species which is virtually insurmountable. These obstacles can generally be thought of as the elements of Drake’s Equation. In other words, one of the elements of the equation such as the probability of life becoming intelligent is essentially zero.
Applying this concept to our future exploration, finding the ruins of some other civilization might imply that our species is destined for a very similar fate. Finding fossils of less advanced life, on the other hand, might actually bode well for our eventual colonization of the stars near our home.
Hypoliths are photosynthetic bacteria that inhabit the desert. Despite the Namib desert in Namibia being one of the most extreme environments on Earth, hypoliths thrive under quartz rock under these harsh conditions. This desert can go years without rain and it is subject to constant solar radiation and scorching heat. With very little water and no trees or shrubs in sight, the fact that this desert has life at all is amazing. Living under the rocks protects the hypoliths from ultraviolet radiation and wind scouring. The rocks are also translucent, allowing light to penetrate, and trap moisture. What hypoliths and other extremophiles can tell us is where to look and where not to look for life on other planets. Mars may be cold, but it features a desert environment that is also subject to brutal solar radiation. Therefore, Mars may be a good place to look for bacterial life.
Picture from Xochitl Garcia
We may not find quartz rock on Mars, but if we wanted to find life, we may look for areas in which only a certain amount of light can infiltrate, which would create hospitable conditions for life. Although it’s probably best not to interfere with the natural environments of other planets, it would be interesting to see if hypoliths or other extremophiles would be able to survive on Mars or other planets if we were to deposit colonies there. Out of anything we have here on Earth, extremophiles give us the most insight about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, so I hope further research into them continues to teach us more about what may be out there in our expansive universe.
