 So again, welcome to the November webinar of the NASA Night Sky Network. This month we welcome Erica Blumenfeld to our webinar. Erica is an independent transdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art, science, nature, and culture. I always am fascinated at how all of these things work together or are different ways in which people express their experience with the natural world. And so I'm really excited about having her here with us to help us to think about these different, I guess, modalities in which we respond to the natural world. Her research-based art practice is motivated by the wonder of natural phenomena, and she often works in collaboration with scientists and research institutions, including NASA and many others. Erica is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Smithsonian artist research fellow and has exhibited widely in museums and galleries in the U.S. and abroad. Her work is featured in multiple books and resides in many permanent collections, including the Houston Museum of Fine Art. So please welcome Erica Blumenfeld. Thank you, Brian. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for inviting me to be with you here this evening. Let me just take a quick sec to get sharing so I can show you something. Okay, great. So I'm hoping you can all see the first slide. Looks good. Okay, great. I just need to move some things around on my desktop so I can see. Okay, great. Here we are. So yeah, thank you so much. So again, my name is Erica Blumenfeld, and I'm a transdisciplinary artist, and I'm also the science principal investigator and project lead for Astro Materials 3D. I have a BFA in photography from Person School of Design and MSC in Heritage Conservation Science from University College London, and I've been a full-time professional artist for 25 years. So I'm going to speak for about 45 minutes, I think, but before I demo Astro Materials 3D for you, I thought I would start by taking about 10 minutes or so to talk a bit about my artistic practice and the research in general, and my research in general, and share two other current projects and artworks that I've been working on in tandem with Astro Materials 3D, which seemed thematically relevant to share with this group, and I think also might provide just a better understanding of how Astro Materials 3D grows out of my artistic practice. So I nearly always start my artist talks with this quote, because I feel it evokes the creative imagination and makes us pause to wonder about the connections across the cosmos, and it is this sense of connection across the cosmos, both poetic and literal, that is at the very foundation of my work as an artist. By adopting a somewhat scientific methodology in my artistic process, I have followed a rather non-traditional studio practice. I've had studios and laboratories, observatories, and remote landscapes. My inquiries often lead me to work alongside scientific and research institutions in order to bring both fields of knowledge into a conversation. I think of myself as both a curiosity seeker and a collector of questions. Each of my projects can be tethered back to an initial inquiry. I have a deep deeply research-based art practice, and my work investigates the places where our phenomenological world meets the human experience of wonder and meaning. My inquiries are centered on the places where art, science, and nature and culture converge, and I'm most interested in the question of where humanity finds meaning in our relationship, our sense of belonging to the natural world. One of the responsibilities I feel that artistic knowledge has when in collaboration with scientific knowledge is to nurture and defend the important role that meaning has in the search for understanding the mechanisms of our world. I'm interested in investigating the places where art and science each source and create meaning, and my work looks to the places where the stories of our cosmic connections begin to unfold. My work as a whole intends to study the notion of an embodied relationship with the cosmos that we are in our very chemistry of and from the stars. An idea that although had been pondered for centuries has been proven within my lifetime. The words in these words of Parler-Shopley, we are made of the same stuff as the stars, so when we study astronomy, we are in a way only investigating our remote ancestry and our place in the universe of star stuff. Our very bodies consist of the same chemical elements found in the most distant nebulae, and our activities are guided by the same universal rules. Most of my work is deeply centered around the ideas that in both our species biology and culture making practices, our link to our cosmic heritage is entangled with our relationship with the natural starry night sky. My decades long interest in dark sky preservation and our connection to the cosmos culminated for me in 2012, when I decided to dedicate two years of research to my questions about why we had historically separated nature and culture in global efforts to preserve both natural heritage and cultural heritage. This research led directly to the astro materials 3D idea which I will discuss later, the dissertation that you see here and my sky scrolls project which I will share next. The dissertation discusses how our view of the universe has inspired worldviews, cosmologies, mythologies, art, literature, philosophies and scientific investigation across time, and that the night sky has deeply impacted cultural identity and cultural continuity, becoming inextricably fused with the cultural framework of myriad civilizations. The paper suggests that we need a more universal approach to heritage conservation that moves beyond natural versus cultural debate, and arrives at methods that are inherently inclusive of earth systems. With the health of both nature and culture being linked across many disciplines, there is a need to understand and find solutions for the many consequences that a lack of natural night has on our well-being. Our current biology took millions of years to evolve within our natural day night cycle. This natural knowledge yields synergistic relationships between the biology of evolving species and natural light. Scientific research has confirmed the loss of natural night baselines is causing significant health problems for humans, wildlife, plants, ecosystems, biodiversity in our climate, none of which are unfamiliar to I'm sure all of you. And the link has been made between biological diversity and cultural diversities in both fields of study. The paper considers the intangible quality of humankind's relationship with the night sky as both biological and cultural and ultimately argues that the natural night sky as an entity itself has outstanding universal value, meeting the criteria on multiple counts for selection to the world heritage list. From the moment humans began sharing the power of story, we have shared stories of the stars. And some of our earliest carvings, stones, stone circles in cave art dating tens and even hundreds of thousands of years depict supernova, comet, constellations, lunar cycles, and accurate star charts. My Sky Scrolls project evolved directly out of the dark sky preservation work. The idea arose in 2013 while researching cultural relationships to the cosmos. And I felt inspired to collect people's stories at the night sky as a way to share how meaningful our view of the universe is to each other. The project now is a web-based archive showcasing stories, submissions from people all around the world. Each story is rendered into one of four spiral configurations inspired by galaxy forms that become an interactive 3D model where your own words become part of the stars. Our stories are the cultural evidence of what we hold as meaningful in our hearts and minds and sharing them allows for a kind of social remembering. Story roots us in personal social and cultural experiences and has the ability to move beyond time and place. Studies in neuroscience have shown what traditional knowledge and cultural making practices have known since their onset that story can guide us toward empathy, social justice, and personal transformation when telling our stories to other the part of the brain that regulates moral sensibilities and empathy are illuminated in both speaker and listener. In marking our current personal and global moment through the stories under the stars, our stories can become reflections of each other. Stargazing is something we can do from our backyards, front stoops, rooftops, or windows and especially over these times of isolation and lockdown, stargazing connect us even when we are apart. Looking up at the stars together, our eyes somehow become their own constellation. The website is public and story submissions are accepted from any, from everyone in language and I hope we might consider contributing your own story. There's another work artwork I thought I would share with you briefly. It's a new body of work called Tracing Humanities, which is a new print edition I'm working on investigating where the arts and the sciences each source meaning and it particularly focuses on the story of the women known as the Harvard computers. So some of you may know the story but in the late 1800s, the Harvard Observatory was photographing the entire night sky onto glass plate negatives and began hiring a group of women known as the Harvard Observatory computers to catalog and study the stars from various backgrounds and levels of education and at a time when women struggled for basic rights and freedoms that along roles within the sciences, these women would come to revolutionize the science of astronomy and astrophysics through their discovery study and cataloging of hundreds of thousands of stars, deep space objects and astronomical phenomena. The astronomical photographic plate collection is now being digitized to produce photometry for the study of time domain astronomy and astrophysics. The collection comprises 500,000 glass plate negatives taken from 1882 to 1992. Thousands of them directly annotated with beautiful research-based markings onto the glassy side of the plate inked by the many hands of the Harvard computers. Just to highlight a few of these women, Wilhelmina Fleming, who began her career as the director's housekeeper, was one of the first women officially hired as a computer by the Observatory. Fleming worked on spectra and dwarf stars and developed a classification of stars based on their hydrogen content. She also discovered 310 variable stars, 10 nobi and 59 nebulae, including the famous horse head nebula. Henrietta Levitt was a graduate of Radcliffe College and worked primarily on cataloging the brightness of stars. Her discovery and resulting famous paper studying 1,777 variables in the small and large megalenic clouds led her to discover the period luminosity relationship of certain variable stars. Now known as Levitt's law, her discovery established a standard candle with which to push the boundaries of parallax and triangulation in order to measure the great distances across space and continues to have far-reaching impacts today. Annie Jump Cannon produced a stellar classification system based on the star's temperature and spectra, which became known as the Harvard classification scheme and is still in use today. Cannon was made an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society and was one of the first women to receive an honorary doctorate in math and astronomy. She classified by hand a total of 350,000 stars, discovered 300 variable stars, five nobi, and one binary star system. So I want to thread back to Shapley's statement about star stuff for it holds key meaning for me in thinking about how the materiality of the glass plate collection and the notations and it's profoundly, it's profoundly prophetic, prophetic, poetic, excuse me, truth that in the deep investigative work of the Harvard computers, they were looking into a veritable cosmic looking glass and in notating the plates were inscribing a kind of origin story, the story of the incredible link up of the stellar cosmic chemistry and processes which coalesced in a moment in time when a human being had the knowledge and tools to reflect on the formation of those stars. This is why when I learned that in order to achieve clean scans for the Digitization Project, the glass negatives are wiped clean of the women's notations. My heart ached that these representations of their searching and explorations of the stars were now erased. I immediately began to wonder how I might preserve the women's notations through art and find a way to return their marks to the stars once again. Through an artist in residence with Island Press this year, I've been working with the photographs of the plate markings that were taken before the marks were removed from the plates and I'm essentially doing the opposite. So I'm digitally removing the stars from the marks, maintaining the composition of the marks within the boundary of the plate. The print edition we are currently producing will include six plates that I felt convey the incredible language of exploration that these women developed in their research. And then the marks are gilded in 24 karat gold leaf and rest on the top of a sunlit exposed cyanotype chinkolay which are materials that both harken back to the stars. And these are some of the final works. The marks are the material evidence of both their passion and their devotion to their research and also to the stars themselves. Thinking of their lifelong mark making as the poetic gestures of exploration and imagining that in one sense perhaps they were the first humans to touch the stars tracing as they were light across the cosmos. To render their marks in gold, an element that is formed in the collision of neutron stars seemed the perfect material with which to return their marks to the stars by retracing them with star matter. So it is exactly this link with the evolution of star matter and the elements of our universe, the stuff and stories of cosmic processes that led to my interest in rocks from space and to the astro materials 3D project. I like to think of rocks as scrolls of knowledge passed down through the cosmic planetary and geologic ages that tell the story of primordial formation. In picking up a rock we gaze into its complex structure to know something of its secrets awaiting its tone of cosmic riddles to unravel. If one knows the language written in the stone the answers begin to emerge. So in 2013 I approached NASA to propose the astro materials 3D project because I had this idea. Might it be possible to hold a rock in one's hands that tells the story of the whole cosmos? Although this is a poetic idea, NASA's astro materials collections tell this story yet very few people have access to these incredible samples and the stories that they reveal to the scientists who study them. But what if you could have access to these rocks virtually? These questions led to years of development in order to make a 3D virtual model of NASA's space rocks collections. How did we do it? Our interdisciplinary team uses three primary technologies. High resolution precision photography where in NASA's curation clean room facilities I am manually taking around 240 to 480 photographs at angles across the entire surface of the rock using a high resolution camera. Then these photographs are imported into a structure from motion software and are reconstructed using photogrammatic principles that are tailored to each rock's individual characteristics. At the same time we scan each of the rocks interior using x-ray computed tomography which gives us the data we need to create the one-to-one volumetric model of the original rock as well as providing a preliminary view of what these rocks are made of. The astro materials 3D explorer application uses a combination of sprite graphics in the browser canvas and on-demand high resolution downloads. The data is rendered in real-time within the user's browser using a 3JS 3D library on a web GL platform. This technology enables our high performance hardware accelerated 3D visualizations providing high fidelity data that is streamed on-demand and produces the very high quality sample visualizations at the lowest possible bandwidth and computer processing power. The mission of the astro materials 3D project is to put NASA's rocks from space into the hands of researchers, educators, educators, students and the general public virtually in order to share their incredible stories through research-grade information-rich interactive visualizations. So I'm going to pause and I'm going to head over to the website to give you a tour. One quick second to so welcome to astro materials 3D a virtual library for exploration and research of NASA's space rocks collection. So right from the very beginning of this website we wanted people to we wanted people to have a visceral experience with the rocks and where they're from and the idea of where these rocks are from and their origin stories is a really important thread throughout this whole website and so when you land at the home page you can already immediately begin to interact with the sample that comes up and every time you visit the site the sample is different and then it's sort of a choose your own adventure style you can go to the Antarctic meteorite collection or the Apollo lunar collection which are the two collections we have on view right now and so I'm going to take us first over to the lunar collection and so here we are you can immediately see each of the six surface mission locations and this allows you to select further which mission you might want to see samples from and we have a few samples currently we have a 20 samples total in the on the site so there's 10 in the samples and 10 meteorite samples and we're about to be launching another 20 samples for the next month so stay tuned but so you can scroll through each of them and see the art gallery page as well of the samples that are available currently in each of the missions and up to Apollo centers so I'm going to head back to this sample here 600639 comma zero and head to its sample details page which again allows you to interact with the model directly from the sample page and we did this because the explorer application really requires a robust computer technology and so we wanted people from any of their smart devices to be able to interact with the rocks right from the rocks detail page so as you scroll down you'll see every rock tells a story and this is a really important part of the project where I write an origin story for each of the samples that describe it's where it came from and the science that has been done with the sample and I'm going to read you one of these a bit later but I wanted to just show you the rest of this page which also includes a little animation of the XCT imagery so we got again anybody on smart devices can have an opportunity to kind of flip through the inside of each of these rocks and then we provide the links to the curation details page which is provides the scientific data that has been accumulated for this rock and its characteristics so but let's let's open the the astro materials 3d explorer which is a custom application software that runs directly in the browser and so when I open this tomorrow then you have this incredible space to view and interact with the sample and so this sample is the highest resolution sample that we a 3d model that we currently have in the viewer it was it was created with 480 different angles which is it's twice what we were normally doing the increased number and also used a much higher resolution camera 100 megapixel camera so you can zoom in to great extent here and really see you know the detail of this rock and even some of the slight color casts of some of the crystals this incredible glassy surface and and get a real sense of what it would be like to to put this rock in your hands so in our console we have information about the rock that's basically sourced from the details page so you can always thread back to its story or understand where it's collected and how it's classified we also provide all of the the processing details so you know here again 100 megapixel camera this case it was 475 photos with a total size of 267 gigabytes of data collected for the exterior model and then the interior model sorry the 3d model of those images how much time it took to process so this case modeling time was 280 hours of the computer crunching on the algorithms to create this 3d model here and the mesh size is you know almost two gigabytes that's not we're not seeing this here you're seeing the web resolution but in our next release you will be able to download both the full and the web resolution meshes for your own purposes and so right now you can also you can actually download the xct data so that's available here on the unprocessed 16 bit x y tips but the real heart of of the project was really combining the exterior and the interior models into a single coordinate system that you can interrogate and and work in great detail so I can slice into this rock in any of these six directions here and then I can start to see the xct data and let's see here we go that's what I was trying to find so um as you as you look through then you really start to see the different classes and you know you can get a sense of of what it's made of here there's this gorgeous an orthocytic class here and you can you can actually look at at the rock edgewise so if there's a class that you wanted to see from from different directions you could do that you can look at it edgewise if you are interested in looking at everything really in mind with detail you can you can actually go slice by slice and then you can at any time take a picture which actually just opens up the the full resolution version of the xct and then you can at any point take pictures of the rock in the window in the viewer if you are interested in doing that and okay so before I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to I'm going to head back over to the homepage and we're going to go check out the Antarctic rewrite collection and I'm going to show you some other samples so this is the Antarctic rewrite collection homepage which basically lands you in the inner solar system and we really want it again for people to have this great feeling of of where these rocks come from and where everything is kind of is located so again you can you can see how many rocks we've got these wonderful rocks from Mars and Vesta which I'll be showing you shortly we've got a K type asteroid and also an N type asteroid but I want to show you this sample here okay so I want to read you the story because this rock is so amazing it's one of my favorites and I felt like this this story would be fun to share so so I'm going to let it spin here in in the viewer and I'm going to I'm going to read you the story so the distinctive story written in the cosmic chemistry of meteorite GRO 17063 is waiting to be discovered it was found in Antarctica by the AMS Met team during the 2017 expedition and is newly available to the research community for study what we do know about this rock story comes from its initial classification analysis which found that it is a type of meteorite known as a cr2 chondrate indicating it is an ancient meteorite whose formation story is perhaps the most wondrous of all meteorites this is because cr meteorites contained in them the oldest known material in our solar system material that formed before our solar system even existed known as pre solar grains these microscopic interstellar dust particles were formed in the atmospheres of other stars pre solar grains are the intact remnant material from older stars that survived the interstellar medium survived the coalescing of the nebula cloud from which our solar system emerged and survived the ignition of our own sun these grains are older than 4.571 billion years as a cr2 chondrate this hand-sized space rock may also reveal new details that could help us expand our knowledge about the earliest processes that occurred in the protoplanetary gifts chondrals which are this which are sphere shaped droplets that are created out of the solar nebula to form the first planetesimals appear to be abundant in this rock chondrites preserve the precise precise evidence of their chemical and of the chemical and physical processes that were occurring as it formed including temperature variation and alteration from a previous interaction during initial classification analysis calcium aluminum rich inclusions or cais were also discovered in this rock cais were among the very first solids to form out of the nebula cloud that birthed the sun cr2 chondrates are also known to have a wide range of diverse organic compounds including amino acids and other biotic ingredients with all the stories that this rock still holds within its composition this remarkable meteorite could get revealed new details about the pre-solar environment the formation timeline and processes in the early in the early solar system and perhaps even new insight into the pre-biotic material that contributed to the origin of life so I want to show you the interior of this rock because it's just stunning so nearly every one of these round round like shapes are chondrals this this rock is literally filled with them which I find so remarkable and is is one of the great joys for me in learning about cosmic chemistry and the processes that formed them and not being able to understand a little bit of what I'm seeing so one of the things that I want to share with you is this great feature where you can add custom pins so for example you could add a pin here and and make a comment and add another one here and then you can type the comments in here and then save and share and send that link to a colleague or a friend and and start a conversation about what you see or just share something amazing that you see and it will from that link pull up exactly where you left it with your comments in there which depends exactly sliced to where you have them and so we're really excited more about to release the next version of this which will be massive curated pins so some of our scientists have come together and started adding information and details about the rocks and we'll be sharing their knowledge with us so that we can start to understand for those of us who aren't where this is in our science we can start to understand the amazing science and the stories they reveal so I want to show you one other feature and then I'm going to wrap up so you can have time for questions but I want to do this with another sample which is right here so this is a piece of Vesta which is asteroid and so I I don't know if anybody has 3D glasses but if you do you can see some really cool stuff so and you can always access this so you can always come back to see you see this in anime but we wanted to do have different ways of viewing besides just the regular ambient light so one of that is in the spotlight which you can see really gives you a bit more contrast and just a little bit more ability to see the surface detail and these incredible flow lines that occurred as the rock was flying through the atmosphere and then if you if you want and if you can you can also look at them in the 3D animal space and I have to say this is really fun so we also give you ways to see the sample the scale of the sample you can look at it with a grid plane if that's a way that you want to see it and then if you don't want to use a mouse or if you want to just go directly to the X you know Y or Z sides which are entirely dependent on how it was scanned so the CT data is what's orienting the rock but this just this is sort of our little our way to give you a way to move the rock around the space so that you can frame it in the right way in your view depending on how how big or small your screen is so just to also mention if you come back here and you want a refresher of how how to find things you can do you can do our our guided tour which will kind of go through each of each of the features on the site and just the way that I just did for you I'm going to jump back to yes okay sorry I have to keep moving you guys around so I can see the whole frame okay so I'm going to go to the about page which just offers some additional information about the project the technology again just a brief overview if you ever want to come back in and read about that again we have a great FAQs which actually will be updating with new information soon when we do this next release but you can find it out about how to site the project or how to you know how to use or acquire the XCT imagery and then also any troubleshooting issues and then lists of our publications and then I always like to end with the team which which really is is really like our movie credits there are so many incredible minds that went into developing this whole project and you know this is coming up on nine years in the making so there's an enormous number of humans to to thank and certainly NASA and the ARIES department that that houses this so I'm gonna I'm gonna pause there I think we still have about 15 minutes and I would love your questions and any conversation you may have well we do indeed have a few questions and I'm guessing that a few more will come in after once they see that we've got some working on here so so we have a couple questions from William and the first is have these techniques led to any new discoveries or any of the researchers using this and using it to find out new stuff for their research? Amazingly yes so I so some of these are papers that are still in development so I can't fully disclose them because they're they're they're still waiting to be published but basically what I can say is that there's been several several different new studies that are looking at the XCT data that we've released in the lunar samples that are looking at new understandings of the volcanic processes volcanism which is really exciting and so so we will be we will be listing those in our in our publications when they're in their made public but but yes it's it's we're getting feedback from some PI's lunar PI's and rewrite scientists that that they're able to do preliminary investigation. We have another PI that's using one of the samples in the meteorites to as a proxy for the mission looking at different samples so it's it's it's in development it's it's still unfolding and we're excited to actually be able to report the the work that's coming out since we've released it and we will be reporting that to the community. So it's kind of a follow-up to that are there any particular areas of research that would benefit the most from this the techniques that you're developing? Well so what we're hoping is that I mean it's a great question and it's and it's sort of a broad question because I think it depends on who's looking right so if you think about it from as an educational tool for students of any age that you know it's already having impact in student environments and educational environments that we we've been carrying back from educators of you know students moving this in in the classroom and and educators using this in the classroom is a way to like learn um and and then we have the researchers who you know ultimately as we continue to release new samples um and the collection grows I think this will become more so but being able to provide researchers who may want to submit proposals to NASA to do um sample research um they have an opportunity to do preliminary analysis well not analysis but it's preliminary investigation that can help them select regions within a particular sample that they might want to to propose so one of the one of the ways or one of the ideas that we had going into this was that we wanted to provide researchers with a way to do what we call targeted sample selection which you know a researcher could go inside of a rock and see a class that might actually benefit their particular research and and make a request from from being able to see it on the site um does that answer your question I don't know you never I guess you never know it it was so uh here's a good question I like this one Samantha is wondering will the site work with a VR headset instead of the 3d glasses or is that in the works perhaps well yes um it has been it has been a long time hope and and obsession of ours to be able to um provide these provide this in a in a VR and an AR capability and we've we've done initial um development on that and I'm not I can't say exactly when that might be released but um but it is definitely something that we're hoping and just uh hoping to do and we're interested in doing so here's a good question too I I like this one uh as a former you know school teacher that I always am interested in this um are there any university or high school level labs available yet or are you planning on doing any sort of educational component um with some sample investigations that teachers could use that's a good question I um I'm not sure if the question is about like actual samples or or relating to like the virtual samples but but what I can say is that there are educational um resources available now so there's so there there are actually Paige could probably speak to this far better than I can um because she she has this this this part of I don't know if she wants to come on and and and join us but but but yes I mean there are there are things in the works there are um educational um there are educational programs being developed that use the website and also the material from the website but in a in a more class classroom setting Paige did you want did you want to jump on? Sure I can just very quickly say and and hello everyone um the Astro Materials 3D we do find absolutely fantastic and so we have been working on developing some interactive materials in which we're starting with the basics about these moon rocks and then later the meteorites as well to give students of many ages sort of a base knowledge about the samples and then we will extend those activities and interactives into interactives utilizing the Astro Materials 3D component so these will be coming soon we've started some initial development uh and so more will come soon so we look forward to sharing those things. That kind of brings up a an interesting question that just occurred to me and so we've got these rovers up on mars that are taking all kinds of images it seems like that would be interesting I was wondering whether or not any of the images that they take do they take enough images to be able to send back and then render them into a 3D without having the actual sample you could just take the imagery and and turn that imagery into the sort of thing that you're producing yeah that's a great question I mean they do they do stitch together all kinds of photos from from the rovers and they get we get full landscapes I don't know if they have the the capacity to do like whole rocks where you could get like the whole sample but we certainly we've certainly thought about it I mean the idea that you know sending sending's you know the capability to do this on another surface in a way is sort of like you know you can do curation from other planets virtually right because we could have a system that that imaged the rock and perhaps even did CT analysis and send that data back so I think it's certainly plausible and it's a great idea. Something for the next rover I suppose I was thinking of things up there and so Albert is wondering how can they how do they know from what space object these rocks are from and so you kind of you know say where these rocks are from in the astro materials there but how do we know that? That is a great question and since I'm not a planetary scientist I'm going to do my best to answer that question in the way that I can which is basically that the chemical analysis that the researchers do and the scientists do eventually accumulate enough information where they can understand the kinds of similarities that they've seen and compare it against you know basically readings that have been done from from spacecraft so so being able to understand what the composition of an asteroid is versus the composition of a rock you know a meteorite then they can start to make comparisons and so for example that's how they were able to discover that the samples they had you know one of the meteorites they had was from Mars was basically reading you know taking isotopic measurements and and then on the ground in the rock inside of a little vesicle or I think it was actually a glass a glass spiral and then they compared it to the atmospheric readings of Mars and and those compositions were similar and they were able to determine that this rock actually came from that planet body and so that's that's how that's how they um that's my understanding of how they are okay mark has a question about perhaps some additional data scans that might be doing he's wondering would polarize reflectivity view scans or various spectral range scans be a possible future extension or the benefit to researchers if you thought about doing these other sorts of scans other than just visual yeah that's an excellent question um so we are currently um so I'm in the process of developing this uh technology for small sample capabilities so right now most of the samples that I've imaged are our hand-sized samples um that are in the collection you know maybe down to you know a small uh you know like a limer or maybe even a a coin or something but but nothing below you know 10 centimeters or thereabouts so um creating a keep the capability for small samples between you know like a millimeter to to a centimeter is an entirely different capability and so so we're in development with that now and in addition to that because most of the samples that will be coming back from future missions and current missions are in particularly important to understand the spectral information we are trying to develop a capability to create at least multi-spectral imaging um if not hyperspectral imaging of of certain samples so that we could provide that that data to researchers as well okay so Gregory is wondering because there are some um well-known meteorite samples out there such as a mergerson and and oryende and so a lot of people who don't have access to those might want to be able to you know image these any thought of adding some of these classic examples to the uh the database that's a great question I I mean right now it's it's it's NASA's official collection right so these are you know these are the Apollo lunar samples that were collected from surface missions on the moon and then it's the Antarctic meteorite collection which are collected every year and have been since the 70s um in Antarctica and and so those are so we're keeping to those those collections right now um the new samples will release are also from these two collections and we're hoping that in the future we'll be able to not only add additional samples from existing collections and other existing other types of existing collections but also the current and future missions whether we are able to include other samples outside of NASA's collection um I can't I can't say the moment but um but I know that those you know mergerson in particular has been a really important um sample to so much of the community that um I don't know perhaps it's worth perhaps it's worth asking about yeah oh I bet that there's a sample of it someplace in NASA's collection somebody somewhere probably has a piece of it so I know I know the person to ask okay so um so I think that we have time for one more question and we're going to go with this one from Melinda she says uh you know how is going with the Antarctic the recreating of the women's glass calculations are absolutely beautiful can the images be downloaded and so you know where can where can people see some of this stuff that you know you've experienced thank you um yeah thank you very much for for that um my gosh going to the Antarctic is I could talk for another hour about that um but it was it was an incredible experience and um yeah I think one of the most profound experiences of my life for sure um and with the the women um the Harvard computers so in terms of seeing seeing images of my work you can certainly go to my website there's images there um I don't have images up yet of this project from the um the Harvard computers because it's still it's still in progress but um but the dash project which is the which is the Harvard's Harvard's digitization project is online as is their their information about their photographic astronomical photographic collection and so um I my understanding is that the the dash site has been down for a little while but I'm assuming it's coming back up and yeah that's that's how I've been seeing um that's how I've had access to to these images these images are are of their plates and um and of their markings prior to the plate being wiped are all available to the public through through the dash website all right well thank you so much this is absolutely wonderful this is a great presentation I I love one of the things you said very early on about how in a lot of ways and it kind of touched me about looking at these samples really gives us the sense of of our home planet and our home where we come from and gives us a better connection with where we are and I think that that's something that we miss out on a lot if uh if we don't have a chance to go out and look at these things I think astronomers and in general and amateurs in particular who are always out viewing the night sky have a little bit better sense of our place in the cosmos than uh even some of the researchers but I think that this is something that's adding to that sense of where we are and uh you know where we came from I guess you might say I think that you're exactly right and it and it it reminds me of a comment that you made at the beginning too when I was asking about you know um I was asking about your background and and you were talking about how you know I was saying oh you changed it from from rocks to you know from space to rocks and you're like but we are in space and I love this this idea that we remember that we are part of you're part of this earth and we are part of an earth is part of space so that we're not separated from any of it um this idea that there are linkages that we can point to these evidences that teach us and show us how connected we are across the cosmos um it's just really starting and you're right um the amateurs astronomers are know that very very well and then there is a famous quote from John Muir or two that uh you know go out and trees and stars and rocks and it turns out that everything is hitched together that's uh that's a you know really gross paraphrase of what he said but uh you know even you know different people have recognized that over the years so it's uh it's important it is important well that's all for tonight everyone thank you Erica for joining this evening and thank you everyone for tuning in join us for our next webinar on Tuesday December 7th only a couple of weeks away when Jerry Bonnell from NASA's astronomy picture of the day will share with us the best of apod for 2021 you also go to find an archive of all of these webinars on the night sky network website as well as on YouTube so keep looking up and we will see you next week or next month in two weeks uh so good night everyone oh