 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. It's one o'clock on a Monday afternoon, so you must be watching Think Tech Hawaii research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark, and every Monday at one o'clock we bring an example of the research which is being done at the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus, dealing with subjects such as atmospheric sciences, oceanography, earth science, and planetary science. And it's my pleasure today to welcome back to my very best friends because we're going to be talking about planetary science. We have Linda Martell and Jeff Taylor, who are both at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. You've been hosts on this show, so you know the ropes. So welcome back, and I believe we're going to hear an update on PSRD, Planetary Space Research Discoveries. Is that correct, Linda? Yep. We have a big project. We've been doing for 21 years. 21? 21? 21. Yeah. Planetary scientists, I think, think of the earth. It's one of the planets in the little community of the solar system, so we like to think about planetary processes and compare earth with other planets and all the processes that are happening on them. So Planetary Science Research Discoveries reads the research papers about planetary science. We read them, and then we rewrite it for a more general audience. Okay, so this is a web-based informational post thing that you do for the general community, correct? Right, right. So we do have other scientists reading it, but they might not be chemists or physicists. So we try to write it so that anybody outside somebody studying Mars will understand what's going on. What the discoveries are and how they came to be and what they mean for us on earth. And you're not actually doing the research, but you're rephrasing the material which has previously been published, probably quite recently, so that the general scientific community can understand it. And their parents and their families, right? Not just other scientists, but the general public who is interested in science, kind of the same people who would read Scientific American. And I know you've been on this show in the past discussing PSRD, but do you have any understanding how many people might actually be reading this kind of website? So we're looking at monthly hits, around 60,000 a month, which is kind of good for something that's cosmochemical in nature. So we're not so much mission-oriented, but we're looking at the researchers who are taking the data and looking at the rocks and reporting on that. And Linda, by mission, you don't mean you're supported by a NASA space mission per se? Mission would be trying to promote STEM education or mission would be trying to sort of encourage local school kids to do something. Yeah, that's true. Communication, we're now funded by the NASA, what is it called? The Directorate of the Planetary Science. The Emerging Worlds program fundamentally funds us now. And Emerging Worlds, Jeff, is part of NASA's Planetary Research. Planetary research effort, yes. Planetary research effort. And you've been doing this for 21 years? Yeah. Wow. How many articles do you have? So we're closing up to 200. Almost 200, yeah. 200 full-length articles, and the first one, by the way, was the Life on Mars debate from the famous Martian meteorite, whose name is Ellen Hill's 8401 for anyone keeping score. And so, yeah, that was an interesting article. It was one of our more complicated ones. And we tried to give pros and cons of ideas, and there, there was a lot of pros and cons of this asserted discovery. I mean, still a controversy at some level, isn't it, Jeff? Yeah, it is. There is no complete consensus. Well, there actually is a consensus. But the original discoverers are not backing down from them. And what we really learned from it, you know, it was an interesting thing how science worked. We really learned what you have to do, even if you have a sample of a rock from another planet, to prove that there was life in it. Very difficult job. We had HIGP people working on that issue. Ed Scott did a paper on it. We covered it in PSRD. And this issue of water on Mars and life on Mars, of course, is big today. It started us 21 years ago, but it's still carrying through. So you've had about 200 articles in 21 years, so a little less than one article a month is sort of the target. That's what we target, yeah. And, Linda, I think you brought along a slide which just shows the front of your website. If we go to the first slide, we can actually see, of course, here we have the URL at the top left of anybody who's here on scene. So, Jeff, can you just describe a little bit about what we have here? We can see the parts and pieces of it. It has the big prominent thing on the left-hand column is the headline article. That means the one we got up within the past month. And in this case, it's about volcanism and creation of an ancient atmosphere on the moon of all places. And I believe we'll be talking about that in the second half of the show. Yes. And then there's a list of all the most recent articles down there. And then, on the right, you see the Cosmos Spark. These are short reports, and we have over 100 of them now, I think, where we highlight something interesting without going into the depth that we do in the big article. And you can see the title, like the second one. Oh, that's what we're going to talk about next. The Bounty of Iremeterize found on Mars. Yes, I can't wait to get to that one. And the bottom is Apollo 17, source with throw value. This is a review article written by Jack Schmidt and others to go back to the Apollo 17 site, and he reinterprets his field observations in the context of all this vast remote sensing and sample studies that we've done. And I believe one of the co-authors was a former graduate student of ours, Mark Robinson, correct? Yep, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Great. And then falling off the bottom of the screen, we have news and other things as well. Other things. And along the top, you can see this. We archive everything by topic, and you can search it. There's a search thing. There's a subscription. We have 1,500 subscribers in 57 countries that don't pay for the subscription. But every time we have something new going up, they get emailed. In 57 different countries. Yeah. Remarkable. How did you get the word out that this is such a useful source of information? It is word of mouth or internet. Electronic word, yes. Electronic word. And people, it's amazing how we get letters sometimes, emails from the general public. And what they like is that it does go into detail. It doesn't talk down to them, though we try to be very clear. And the people who really want the story go to it. At the same time, scientists in one field, especially like a geophysicist who doesn't know much geochemistry, he'll read these articles because that keeps them up to date on these things without him being bogged down by massive amounts of geochemical jargon. And they're used in astronomy classes, too. Yeah, for undergraduate students studying for their comprehensive exams. We've had numerous people tell us that that's what they do from other places. Well, the topic of today's program is hot topics in PSRD. So, Linda, why don't we go on to the next slide? And you can tell us a little bit about one of the exciting reports which Jeff alluded to on that website. So what do we have here? Can you explain for our viewers what we're looking at here? All those images are the surface of Mars. And the images were taken by cameras on rovers that are on Mars right now, those robotic rovers. So there's no astronauts ever yet on Mars. But up on the top left, it says Meridiani Planum. That was the first meteorite ever to be found on another planetary surface. And what's the sort of scale of that rock? That one, they said, is the size of a basketball. Now, so you have to imagine their cameras on the rovers sort of scanning the landscape. And how would they ever even notice this rock? But a scientist realized that the bounce of light off that rock matched the Martian sky. And he thought, well, the only way to do that is to have something shiny that can bounce that. And they were like, yeah. And they thought, could it be a meteorite? And then, by chemistry, they decided it was an iron-nickel meteorite. And all of the other rocks which we're seeing now are also meteorites? All meteorites, all iron-nickel meteorites. Searing by the rovers driving across the surface. And they are identifying rocks which have fallen from space, because we've had Ed Scott come on the show and talking about meteorites. So what makes them special, apart from the fact that they have a mask? Well, OK, first, so those rovers were never, their mission was never to look for meteorites right on the surface. So it was a special thing to sort of find them and realize that these pieces could make it through the Martian atmosphere and land with some of them breaking up. We were talking about the atmosphere a little bit. Yeah, some atmosphere is pretty thin. And so things that are bigger than a football or something probably don't slow down. And so they would make a little crater. But at the same time, maybe they landed long ago when the atmosphere was thicker. Do we know anything about the age of these rocks? How long they've been on the surface of Mars? Nothing. Nothing. They're looking at the roundness. But we know that there's a lot of sandblasting going on the surface. So they're thinking the roundedness of those rocks are probably just sandblasting. And is this unique? Have we ever found, for example, Geoffrey or Luna scientists, have we ever found a meteorite on the surface of the Moon? We have actually found them on the surface of the Moon. We found some melted iron meteorites in the very first mission. And the cover of the Science Magazine issue describing the rock has a thing. It looks like a mini Moon. It was a very funny iron sulfide thing that crystallized in a funny shape. And you mean back in the 1960s? Back in 1969. And then there was a little bit, several millimeters across, a piece of what we call carbonaceous chondrite. And that is different from most. But now we have so many of those kind of meteorites that we can put it into a group. And its name, and it was the first to give the name of a geologic feature, it's called Bench Crater. We do that in Apollo 12. It was in Apollo 12. But doesn't the fact that you can get the meteorites on the Moon, as well as on Mars, raise some of the interesting possibilities? How does a rock get to one planet, maybe, from the asteroid or another planet? Big catastrophic collisions. And you can guess where I'm leading. I mean, if you can see meteorites on the Moon, the nearest object nearby is the Earth. Could we find a meteorite from the Earth on the Moon? Do you think that there must be? It has been looked at quantitatively, sort of, by how much impact would transfer out of Earth orbit, how much would land on the Moon. The idea is that there could be a few, in any lunar soil, a few parts per million of Earth material. Now, that means you have to look at C1. You have to look at almost a million little particles. But it can be done if you can automate it. And we're not talking about chunks of rock, which is the basketball size, Linda, you were showing us. But we're thinking about little fine grains. Fine grains could be a millimeter or a few millimeters. But could be, imagine if it was driven from the Earth four billion years ago, it could have the first life forms preserved in it. And certainly, you could see parts of the Earth's crust, which are no longer present on the Earth. And even though you have a millimeter-sized object, it is possible to date them, characterize the chemistry, and with all the microanalytical techniques that we have available now. I mean, the whole idea is really exciting that you might be able to have Earth-like materials there. On the moon. And we, as you probably know it, Manoa are working for Lucy as his team of smart people, he, students he worked with, to develop techniques to identify minerals that might be from Earth, and for that matter, anywhere else, and identify them spectrally and go in, take that sample out so we could sample it. And we're working on these things now. The hard part is sampling it automatically. We haven't gotten that far yet, but I think we will be able to. Okay, well, unfortunately we're getting towards a break now. And that was just one of the two hot topics. So we'll have to leave this particular discussion there, Jeff. But let me just remind the viewers, you are watching Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark, and I guess today are Linda Martell and Jeff Taylor, who are both at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. And we'll be back in about a minute's time. I'm Ethan Allen, host of a likable science on Think Tech Hawaii. Every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., I hope you'll join me for a likable science, where we'll dig into science, dig into the meat of science, dig into the joy and delight of science. We'll discover why science is indeed fun, why science is interesting, why people should care about science, and care about the research that's being done out there. It's all great, it's all entertaining, it's all educational, so I hope to join me for a likable science. Living in this crazy world, so far up in the confusion, nothing is making sense for me anyway. There's got to be solutions, how to make a brighter day. And welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark, and my guests today are Linda Martell and Jeff Taylor, who work together on planetary research discoveries, CSRD. I've missed something out, but you are both researchers, Jeff, you're a professor at the university, and Linda, you help with the web design as well as some of the- I'm an academic support, so I- You're an academic support. Helping with many NASA grants and proposals and doing a lot of outreach. You do all the work, and Jeff takes all the fight, right? Yeah, that's not true. I thought it would be okay with me. All right, so we saw on the first slide that there's a new hot topic, which is ancient lunar atmosphere. So I want to delve into this particular topic in the second half of the show. And Jeff, I think you brought along some other illustrations, so if we can go on to the next slide. This looks familiar even to me. Did anybody see the work that they call it last night? The Super Moon? Super Moon. I was clouded out, but- I was great from where I lived. Oh, very good. Anyway, the moon is an airless body. It has, the atmosphere it has isn't even officially called an atmosphere because the molecules in it do not collide with each other. So it's called an exosphere. And it lacks an atmosphere because the moon is so small, lacks a gravity to retain the atmosphere. To retain the atmosphere, but that doesn't mean it never had one. And no one quite looked at this before. We see all those, this is the picture of the nearest side of the moon. You see those dark areas. Those are called the maria. And they're formed by lava eruptions. And the most efficient way of transferring, say, water and other volatile species like sulfur dioxide from the interior to the surface is in lava flow. And so these lavas when they came up may have put quite copious amounts of material. And the next illustration, if it goes on the next slide, will emphasize the point that the volcanoes are pretty smelly, gassy kinds of places to work, right? They are. And in fact, the picture on the left shows our host wisely protecting himself from noxious gases. And you can see the gases coming up when the volcanic feature on the right, which is in, where is that? That's the Pueblo Fent in about 2002. Yeah. So these things put out really quite a lot of gas. And there is a lot of gas in the atmosphere. And it's reasonable to assume that lunar lavas, when we had volcanic eruptions early in lunar history, would have been degassing the same amount or? Probably less than what the earth does because the moon has less water. It does not have no water like we used to think, but it does have less water per eruption than maybe by a factor of 10. Because we had Lionel Wilson about three weeks ago on the show and he was talking about lunar lava flows and fire fountains. He didn't actually discuss much about the gas content of the magmas. Yeah. And we still don't know for sure. All we know is that the interior of the moon, the water in the interior of the moon is not uniformly distributed. And presumably this changes as a function of time? Does not all lunar lava flows at the same age? No. What really counts, it does change. You use up some when you erupt the lava, but most of the interior probably has not generated a lava. And so that water is whatever the primary water was. However, the ones that did erupt, if they erupt with enough volume in a given time, that may make a temporary atmosphere. But we're talking millions of years ago. I'm talking billions of active. The PSRD article, which is the hot topic on the website right now. Can you walk us through what kinds of, first of all, who was doing this research? Because it's not necessarily done at Manoa. But then what kinds of ideas are presented on the website? Oh, yeah. So the authors of this are Deborah Needham. And she's at NASA Goddard. Marshall. Marshall, sorry. NASA Marshall Social Center. And Dave Kring, who's at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. So Jeff wrote the article based on their paper. And it steps through what they mapped out as lava flows at different time sequences to try to get an idea of volumes and of gas release. And you know, on these articles too, after Jeff does this great job of turning it into interesting, more common, you know, speak words, we pass it through those authors to get there okay. And first of all, approval because this is their idea. Did we get everything straight? Did we miss anything? And before it ever goes out to the public, just didn't. Just to cover yourselves and also to make sure it's scientific. Let's make sure it's right because we, you can inadvertently, because even I'm not an expert in everything. I know it's hard to believe, but you may oversimplify too much to the point where you make it wrong. And that's why we run it by the author. So that anybody reading our website knows it's authoritative and we've got it down. And we have a glossary, which is always very handy. A sociable glossary is what I've seen, that's really good. Well, let's run through this sequence of events. This sequence of events. You've got a number of slides here. So on the left hand side, of course, is the moon. Yes, there's a series of them. The moon is showing the same picture before the near side, the one we see from when we look up at the full moon from the earth. And what it will show is by colors, what lava flow came in in approximately half a billion year increments, starting about 3.6 billion years ago. And time in billions of years of the bottom on the right hand diagram is time before the present. Before the present. Right. So if we go to the next one, that read each new sequence has read lava because they just went in and they're red hot after all. And the graph on the right shows the volume of Mari basalt in cubic kilometers and in that time interval. So in the time interval of greater than 3.6 billion years ago, we had like one and a half million cubic kilometers erupted. And therefore, that would put in a certain amount based on the assumed water. And by the way, sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide which actually are bigger in abundance than water. And so we don't confuse the viewers. GA is billions of years. Billions of years. All right. And that's one thing. And part of Lady Gaga's name. Let's take a look at the next time step then. So now the red ones are the new ones added. And notice the big peak on the right is now five and a half million metric tons in a half a billion year period, which is when you start adding up the amount of all these gases, which is what Needham and Kring did in that interval, it is enough in this is the key interval here to make an atmosphere that is a traditional atmosphere that is collisional. That is the molecules bump into each other. And it is harder to escape. The escape rate goes up because of more gas. But the amount is retained. And they estimate that it would be retained for 70 million years that the moon would have an atmosphere whose pressure is bigger than the current atmospheric pressure on Mars. And almost 1% of what the Earth's atmospheric pressure is now. And compositionally, would it include oxygen or nature? No, it would be carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and probably water vapor. And everything else would be in small amounts. And it would not be breathable. So maybe more like Venus rather than the Earth's atmosphere. Yeah, and yes. OK, and one final thing on this particular diagram, Jeff, the red patches, which are the more recent larvas in this time period, aren't in the same locality as the purple one. So did the center of volcanic activity change as we look at the moon a few times? It does change, but there is some overlap. I bet if we look at the next one. Yeah, let's go on to the next one. See, there's a red one in that big, that's the man the moon's right eye, that there's young flows on top of older flows. So we do get a lot of that. And that messes up the volume estimate, by the way, because you don't know, especially the volume in a given time period, because how many older ones are covered, and you just don't know for sure what's underneath them. It requires good geological, photogeology look. And it goes without saying that we're only seeing volcanic lava flows in the basins. You always see it. You're not seeing it occurring in the pylons. Not everywhere, yeah. Yeah. And I think we can run through one more slide. That's the youngest one. Notice the big peak is early on between around 3.4 to 3.6 is really where the action takes place in volcanism on the moon. And if you go to the next one, it shows a neat graph that is from the one after that. And there's virtually nothing for, say, 3.3 billion years ago to the present day. Yeah. And so the next one shows a graph of this atmospheric pressure in PA is Pascals. And that is about 1,000 of that unit is about one atmosphere, which is what the Earth's atmospheric pressure is, right, when atmospheric pressure. And 1% of the Earth's atmospheric pressure. So it's 10,000, 100,000 of this year. Why having a lunar atmosphere? Why is that an important attribute to the understatement? Well, besides the fact that it changes the way we look at the moon, you can't look at the moon the same through time. It's not the same in the past as it is now. So that's kind of interesting in itself. But the other thing is all those volatiles that came out might have migrated through places where it was permanently shadowed even then and collected in the lunar polar traps. And maybe some of them, we know they're a gas at the lunar poles in permanently shadowed regions. So if we were ever to send a lander to the lunar poles and maybe take an ice core, what I think you're saying, Jeff, is that we might be able to see a record of the atmospheric of the degassing? The degassing of the moon. And then when other processes like solar wind, putting hydrogen on a lunar surface, maybe that's a component. Maybe impactors that have a different nature of sulfur isotopes or hydrogen isotopes over time. Maybe they give a different signal so that there is a history of the moon's volcanism and bombardment possibly preserved at the pole. Just as, say, if you take a Greenland or an Antarctic ice core, present day. Good analogy, yes. Isn't that interesting? I mean, this is the whole idea. Isn't that so amazing to me? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And alas, we've already come to the end of the show. I just want to thank you, Linda and Jeff. It's been a great pleasure having you on the show. This is the first time all three of us have been on the show together. Let me just remind the viewers, you have been watching Think Tech Hawaii research in Manare. I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark, and my guests today have been Linda Martel and Jeff Taylor who collaboratively work on planetary science research discoveries, which is just one of the websites which you can find at the University of Hawaii's website. So thank you again for joining us and come back again next week when we'll have another interesting guest to present to you. Goodbye for now.