 And Brian, they and I have actually been working together for about a dozen years on various teacher workshops here in the Bay Area. And so it's always a delight to bring him to our audience, no matter who they are. So Brian works at NASA's Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute where he serves in lead positions for lunar and planetary mapping and modeling, citizen science and outreach. He is a member of the site selection and analysis teams for the resource prospector and lunar mission one missions to the moon and a supporting analysis of potential human landing sites on Mars. Brian was the EPO lead for NASA's Elkross and Ladi lunar missions. Brian has participated in a number of NASA Mars analog field studies working in an extreme environments here on Earth that shares some characteristics with Mars. In 2007 he flew on the Auriga Mak mission to record fragments of comet Kais, maybe it's Kies, Brian can correct me when he gets on, entering Earth's atmosphere. So please welcome Brian Day. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here tonight and a pleasure to show off some of the tools that we're developing. I'll just talk about some of these planetary mapping and modeling tools that we're showcasing. These are done under the auspices of the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute and these tools are actually developed by our crack genius development team down at JPL. This team is led by Emily Law and I really want to take a great deal of pleasure tonight in showing off the brilliant work that they've been doing and boasting about how wonderful they are. We're going to start out tonight looking at Mars and so what we're looking at here is Mars Trek. This is our Mars visualization portal and you can see that we can pan, we can zoom, we can explore the surface of Mars. For instance here we can see Mars' Grand Canyon, Valles Marineris. The neat thing about these tools is as you'll see they allow us to visualize planetary surfaces as seen through the eyes of a variety of instruments aboard a number of spacecraft. And we also have a number of tools we can use. So for instance here using the line tool I can draw a line along a length here, a portion of Valles Marineris and we can actually measure a distance as you can see. So that's useful in and of itself. Let's draw another line. This time what we'll do is we'll go across the chasm something like this and you'll see that we can actually do an elevation plot and we can look at the heights and depths of surface features on Mars. So also very cool but one of the tools that people enjoy the most is this one here. I'm going to draw a box around a particular area and you can see if I click it one of the options here is to generate an STL. That's a file that goes to your 3D printer so if you happen to have a 3D printer you can just draw a bounding box over whatever area you are interested in. I'm going to jump out of the screen share here, hopefully you can see this is an example of a 3D print that came out of this product here. So that's a really neat feature and people are enjoying that immensely. So what we're going to do now is let's take a look at this same area. This is Viking imagery but again let's look through the eyes of a different instrument. So what I can do is I can look at the various layers here and we can go to in this case we'll go to the Mars Global Surveyor and we can see that there's a color dull shade. Laser altimetry view and we're going to load that up here quickly hopefully. I am speaking to you from a hotel in Orlando right now and the internet connection here is perhaps not the best but you can see it's still working and what we've done here this is a laser altimetry view and we're color coding altitude. So blue is lowest, green is higher, orange and red and then gray to successive heights and climbing up to the heights of the great volcanoes of course of Mars. So this is a really neat way to visualize again if we take a look at the details of that we can see there's a nice scale here that explains to you what colors correspond to what altitudes. This is again a great way to really visualize almost in 3D but I do almost 3D when you can really do it so we'll switch to our 3D mode here we have a globe and we can actually look at Valles Marineris in this 3D representation we have game controls so if you happen to be familiar with the standard gaming controls you can go right, left, up, down, zooming in and so what we're going to do here is we're going to just fly right into Valles Marineris now we have a tiling server here so as you zoom in the resolution improves you can just fly right into the valley there what we'll do now is again let's switch to a different view so now we'll go to the Mars Odyssey spacecraft the Themis instrument daytime infrared view and here it tiles in so again we can appreciate the surface as seen through a variety of instruments aboard a variety of spacecraft again let's drop down we can fly right into Valles Marineris as you can see we can even turn our view look down the length of the valley and fly down the valley you can similarly do flyovers of the peaks of the great volcanoes it's really a lot of fun it engages the public in a very spectacular way we also have a series of bookmarks in these bookmarks allow you to go to some of the landing sites that we've been to so for instance we can go to the Curiosity landing site and it's loading again I my apologies for the slow hotel internet here but you can see what we're doing is we're loading the actual view of in this case Gale crater and I'm going to pull back here and give you a view of kind of a panoramic view as it loads here and you can see that actually we're using several different data products in doing this we'll wait for it to load so we have we have a mixture of imagery here from the widest view is the famous again daytime IR from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft then we have in higher resolution showing the entirety of Gale crater here imagery from the context camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and so let's go ahead and fly you down you can see the central peak there in Gale crater Mount Sharp and we'll let that fill in a little bit here the context camera gives us excellent resolution but then as we approach the vicinity of where curiosity is currently roving we're going to be loading in the data from the high rise camera it gets us down to the best resolution we can achieve achieve from orbit and what we'll do is we'll just go sit down on the ground right next to the rovers hopefully and up we can pan across the terrain looking at the path where the rover has traveled looking back up at Mount Sharp and we can drop down those the dunes here and we will continue to drop down and we'll just put ourselves down on the ground and there's a rovers eye view of Mount Sharp so there are a lot of neat things we can look at in Mars trek let's take a more global view here so again what we're going to do is let's again take a look at this wonderful laser altimetry view and as we do we can see really the amazing early history of Mars as told by the features clearly indicating flowing water so for instance here looking at eris valus and looking at the features that were clearly streamlined by flowing water it doesn't really take a great deal of imagination to realize which direction the water was flowing similarly let's head out to cassé valus and again note the incredible detail here and showing the way the water has flowed now if we take a 3d look at this area and we'll just kind of zoom out a little we notice that there's an interesting dichotomy between the north and south of Mars we have this low area to the north that really is indicative of where we think that there might once possibly have been a Martian ocean so you can see the water having flowed out these many outflow channels into this large basin that really spans the entirety of the northern part of Mars it's been interrupted a little bit here by some volcanic activity but you can see very widespread in this area called the borealis basin people hypothesize might actually represent an impact basin from very very early in Mars's history this would be such a large basin that it is even thought that perhaps this actually excavated down into mantle material so there's a lot of interest in looking at this history of Mars as revealed by these indicators of Mars's wet and perhaps warmer past now because of all of this of course we're very interested in further exploration of Mars and we're starting to actually plan not only additional robotic missions to Mars but human missions to Mars at this point in time roughly 50 sites are being looked at or being investigated now as you saw before we have these wonderful bookmarks that allow you to look at some of our previous landing sites we're in the act of adding to that now with the upcoming 40th anniversary of Viking you'll see you can see Viking there but we're also adding those 50 potential landing sites or roughly 50 potential landing sites and the idea being that you will be able to follow along and understand these particular areas of interest why will we find them so interesting and join us as we go through the selection process now certain aspects of Mars Trek will be actually used by our researchers to help actually analyze these sites there'll be additional tools added so you can explore them in great detail what I'd like to do right now though is give you kind of a sneak peek at a couple of these areas okay of course you can't think of going to Mars without looking at ballas marinara so here we'll zoom in and there's this area of Mars here called melis chasma and it's a portion of ballas marinara and it's one of the areas one of these areas that's being seriously considered and a reason behind that is well it's nice and low which gives us a ample opportunity to use the thicker atmosphere to slow our descent the walls here of the canyon actually much like the walls of the Grand Canyon give you a wonderful stratigraphic column detailing the geologic history of Mars also you'll find that in this area as we zoom in there are places where we see the recurring slope linear where we see that water seems to be flowing just beneath the surface and in large portions of this area here we also find hydrated minerals particularly polyhydrated sulfates they can be as much as 50 water by volume and if you're planning to live and work on Mars that is an irresistible resource because we are going to depend on in situ resource utilization you won't be able to get all your supplies from earth we're going to have to learn how to live off the land on Mars so that's one potential area some place we're not going to go as exciting as they are the tops of these wonderful volcanoes they're just too high and you don't really get a chance to use the atmosphere to slow down so we're looking at lower areas along the cassay valleys here we're looking this is certainly again the history of water is very evident here and of course the reason that we're so tied to water is because you know there's obviously been liquid water flowing here and here on earth wherever we find liquid water even if it's in the boiling springs of Yellowstone even if it's beneath the frozen ice cap of Antarctica even if it's in the cooling systems of a nuclear reactor wherever we find liquid water we find life so areas that were once sites of liquid water and may still be sites of liquid water of course of great interest to us now we're going to look at a site this is the dichotomy boundary the Deuteronolus mense it's a mouthful but what we're going to do is we're going to zoom in on this area here that was right on potentially the shore of this ancient possible ancient Martian ocean so as we go along this shore here you'll see that there's this ancient hisperian age crater it's cut through by outflow channels so water has clearly flown flowed through here again the walls preserve a record of the geologic history of Mars but as we zoom in now I'm going to switch views again so let's go to our Mars Odyssey the daytime infrared view and we'll drop in a little closer we'll see something pretty amazing so look at the floor of this crater here looks fairly standard in this area but around the edges of the crater you see these really strange billowy landforms and especially look here this tongue of material sticking out let's get a little closer and as we look we begin to realize that what we're looking at here are actually debris covered glaciers so this site which is only about 39 degrees in latitude so it's not in the extreme north but it has ample supplies of water now of course there was the original question do these represent rock glaciers essentially fossil glaciers where the rock that was rock debris lying on top of them is left behind and the ice beneath his long sense melt or these true debris covered glaciers and fortunately some of our ground penetrating radar equipment in orbit the charade instrument has actually been able to penetrate this area and see that in fact what we have here is a few meters of rock covering in some cases hundreds of meters of ice so these are actually active glaciers and uh i'm gonna pull down here we'll pull back and look at another example look at this beautiful tongue of glacial flow right here very very impressive so these are the types of areas these are just a few i mean there are close to 50 of these just amazingly fascinating sites and last fall we spent a number of fascinating days down in houston going over these sites and you can see why people are so excited so this is a view of mars trek here and i know we don't have a whole lot more time here but i'm going to show you some more of our portals we're going to jump now to vesta this is the asteroid vesta and we have a portal for vesta it's vesta track dot jpl dot nasa dot gov and again very similarly you can pan you can zoom and you can look at some of the fascinating history of vesta so let's do that right now what we're going to do is here we'll switch to a south polar view and let's bring up again some chemistry to really show this off so we'll do this color hill shade view again and here this helps us actually better visualize something that happened to vesta in the distant past you can see that there's this large i mean very large impact basin here rea sylvia about a billion years ago a significant asteroid hit the south pole of vesta and nearly resulted in the disruption of vesta uh we'll see evidence of the havoc that was caused by that a little bit later on here but you can use this to really visualize the size so you can of course use the tools to measure it if you want so we can measure across here and we can see 563 kilometers it's a big impact basin but if we look closely we can see that it overlies another similar basin this is venenia about two billion years old and we see that vesta has now twice survived severe insult to its south polar regions so what we'll do here is let's go back to our global view and in looking at our global view you can see these striations going across the surface these are graven essentially cracks that were formed that actually span the surface span the equatorial region let's go to a 3d view here and you can see how these encircle vesta also you can see the distinctly uh non-circular shape of vesta vesta when it initially formed in its early days did achieve hydrostatic equilibrium and so it was spherical but now you can see a good chunk of the southern portion of vesta is in fact missing and that is because of those large impacts we looked at uh we can actually find the scattered debris of that as we look in telescopes there's a whole asteroid family called vestoids that represent that debris from the south polar region of vesta that has been spattered across the solar system and some of that trail of debris has even intersected the earth and we find it here on the ground in the form of meteorites specifically the diogenites the eukrites and the howardites those types of meteorites all represent material from vesta the howardites are regolith breccia from the surface the eukrite represent surface lava flows and the diogenite rock from deeper down so again the cool thing here is being able to spin uh vesto like a globe there are lots of stories to be told so we can see these duvalia falsae here these cracks going across the surface um here's a very eye-catching feature here these three craters uh often referred to as the snowman and what we'll do now is we'll zoom in on the lower crater there crater marsha now we think of vesto as being just a rocky body but there is evidence that there is ice mixed in with this rock and that evidence takes the form of a really interesting unusual land form so i'm going to try and zoom in on that here and you'll notice right here this strange really interestingly shaped morphology here this is an example of what we call pitted terrain and what this appears to be is an area where ice beneath the surface was heated probably by a meteorite impact perhaps the impact here that uh was caused by that caused marsha and that ice was volatilized and erupted as gas forming this strange pitted terrain again there are other examples of this across the surface of vesta we can take a look at this again using uh our different layers so we can if we take a look at our mineralogy ratio here and wait for it to load we can see that that area this area actually does stand out so there's clearly something interesting going on here but of course one of the most fun things to do is to actually use the controls here to fly around and so we'll do that briefly here so again you can just fly along the craters this is all data from nasa's dawn mission it allows you to skim we can skim the surface here in pretty amazing detail now some of the new things that are going to be coming out is we're going to be looking at adding some additional data layers in the near future tim stubbs has done some wonderful research that is going to provide us with uh illumination and temperature maps again that has great bearing on potential ice deposits as we look across vesta so now i'm going to switch to the moon and this is this is actually our original portal lunar mapping and modeling portal lmmp.nasa.gov and again we can of course pan and zoom across the moon and what we'll do here is for instance let's zoom in on this case the area where apollo 15 visited looking at hadley rill and we can go into great detail but what i want to do here is take a little bit of a broader view and look at this the sinuous rail stretching across here and we can actually see the tail of volcanism we can see the actual eruptive centers here from which the rail flowed and of course we can use our tools a little bit different interface here but we can use the tools to again measure the distance there that's yeah that's five and a half kilometers across that is a good sized vent there so this tells us a really interesting story you can tell it say telescopes if you're doing a star party this is something that is visible in telescopes at the right time of uh sun angle and you can see going from the heights of the apodine mounds out into the vast lava planes of marae imbrium but this shows dramatically uh the flow of lava perhaps a little bit easier to visualize in the telescope this can be a little bit challenging but the the greatest example of a sinuous rail is schroder's valley and let's head over to that i'll zoom out a little and here this is a very easy uh real to see again the greatest example the largest example of the sinuous rail on the surface of the moon right near the crater artis tarikus you can see the eruptive vanderite here it's been named the cobra head for fairly obvious reasons and so again this is a good example of volcanic activity on the moon now neither of these rills that we've looked at actually very much resemblance to what we would term a volcano uh and with all these vast lava fields here across marae imbrium and here you would expect gee well where are the volcanoes well there are volcanoes as a matter of fact right here we are looking at one of the most spectacular groups of volcanoes on the surface of the moon hmm doesn't look that spectacular does it but again we can change our view so instead of looking uh this is uh the white area camera on lunar reconnaissance orbiter now let's go ahead and again use the tool of laser altimetry and here we can see um there the volcanoes pop into view these are the marias hills so again i'm going to and what we can do is when we look at our layers we can turn that view on and off we can see that that laser altimetry really helps now again we can measure the size of one of these volcanoes nine kilometers okay that's nothing compared to what we uh what we see on mars it's not like the great shields of mars the great shields here on earth on venus these are small volcanoes and they're very low profile that's why they don't show up so well in the whack images the typical volcano on mars is a very very very low shield but these are small shields and the question is and has been for a while well where are the great shields you have venus and earth and mars with these great shield volcanoes why would the saltic volcanism on the moon be so different well it turns out those shields are there and let's demonstrate that we'll draw a line through the volcanic complex here and we'll do an elevation plot and again i'm enjoying the speed of my internet connection here but here we can see that as a matter of fact this whole complex of domes is sitting upon a very hard to see large broad shield here we're seeing it show up with great vertical exaggeration here but this is one of several examples of the fact that we do have large shields on the moon they are very very very low profile because of the fact that the magma erupting on the surface of the moon the typical lava flowing across the surface had very low silica content and that meant it had very low viscosity it was very similar to say the viscosity of olive oil at room temperature and it's pretty hard to build a steep mountain out of something like that but using a tool like lmmp we're able to actually visualize that large shield that underlies this complex of small cones if you've ever been to say helo in the on the big island of hawaii and you've looked up at manakea and you've seen the cinder cones atop the broad shield of manakea this is somewhat reminiscent of that now let's see what else we can see because again here in the case of uh lmmp which is our original and fullest featured portal we have over 700 layers of data uh just here looking at lro you can see we have just all kinds of data here uh what i'm going to do here is pull up a gravity map so now we're looking at this same area but this is a gravity map showing red is higher local gravity green lower and blue lowest and what this allows us to do is take a really interesting look because one of the things we can do here is you'll notice we can have multiple layers up and within the layers we can actually adjust the transparency so now i've got for instance i've stacked layers so i've got the gravity sitting on top of the laser altimetry and i can adjust the transparency of the gravity map so i can see the laser altimetry beneath and so now we can see both the surface features and this gravimetric representation which allows us to look below the surface and actually visualize the now solidified plug of un erupted magma sitting beneath this volcanic structure so this is a really powerful aspect of these tools the ability to stack multiple layers and adjust them adjust the transparency so that you can essentially mine the data that you want out of the combined union of all of these layers that's really very powerful and as you can imagine it can be an act of some creativity stacking and adjusting the layers just right to show the information you want now as you can well imagine at some point after going through all that work you might want to save that or even share that with your friends and as a matter of fact you can do that because within our portals you can generate a url that encodes exactly what you have done here so the zoom levels the location the layers the adjustment to the layers and so you just copy that url then you can put it in an email send it to your friends and this is one of the really different aspects to these portals is that these are all purely web browser based you do not have to install any additional software so all they have to do is once they get that url they can just paste it into their browser and boom it takes them right to the data that you had arranged you can see the layers the adjustments it makes it very easy to share similarly let's zoom out here and I'm going to let's head down to a different area is looking at some of the stories we can tell here is marihumorum right here and let's look at the edge of marihumorum and as we do we see this series of concentric arcuate rills here the hippolus rills and these are actually graven these are extensional features and what happened is as the impact basin that formed marihumorum eventually started filling with lava and that great burden of lava as it filled in here weighed down this surface on the crust and this whole area sank and as it sank the regions around the edge were stretched and broken in these concentric rills we can see similar features happening over on the other side here a little more subtly but they are there so there are stories here that are very interesting to tell in terms of an active history on the moon and just as you would have extensional forces here causing these cracks because all this material sank you would expect to have compressional features forming and sure enough here they are in the form of these wrinkle ridges that were essentially formed by thrust faulting by this material all this sinking crust of now solidified magma sinking down and bunching together so there are some real utilities to doing this in the field if you're doing say a star party a lot of times you will find that people looking through a telescope may have trouble focusing on what it is that you're trying to describe to them so having a screen up like this where you can point out to them what it is they're going to see and then you can actually use this to help tell the stories of what is going on so that's again very very exciting very useful there are a lot of changes coming about to all of these portals a lot of things that are going to be happening soon in terms of lmmp we you'll notice that the interface here is a little bit different than what you saw with best then mars we will be migrating lmmp to the same interface in addition we're going to be adding a lot more data you know hey we've got over 700 layers now but we're adding more specifically polar data supporting the resource prospector mission we're going to be adding a lot of very exciting data from diviner a lot of new interesting things coming much greater coverage by the knack the narrow angle camera so there's a lot coming to lmmp i mentioned how best the track is going to be getting the new layers for temperature and illumination and mars track of course is going to be dramatically enhanced with the ability to do analysis of and to follow along as we explore the exploration zones the proposed human landing sites on mars so keep an eye on all of these projects all of these products there are a lot of exciting things to come so um let's see i see we're getting a little bit on in time here do we want to open this up for q and a at this point brian i think so i think we've got a number of really good questions here and so let's see what we've got and so kind of go back in time a little bit to mars and so we have a question from durin was the curiosity path that was shown in the visual visualization current and up to date and uh it was thought that uh curiosity was actually closer to mount shark than what was shown it is and i am right now working on the updates to both curiosity and opportunity so you will be seeing those along with the biking uh uh depictions very soon here okay so we have another question that um jeffrey found the talk about the glaciers interesting but doesn't the ice just turn to gas in the low air pressure uh no it doesn't uh interesting enough if it's cold enough it will not sublimate so again of course mars has the ice caps uh that uh you have the carbon dioxide certainly does turn to gas very frequently and seasonally but uh in the case of the water it is cold enough that it is uh in this case below the sublimation point and so that ice remains as ice and one of the challenges ahead of us will be to take that in this case when it's that cold it is really hard ice and turn that into a usable resource and one of the discussions that's going on now is how do you how do you liberate the water from that ice and it could be something as simple as once you expose it scrape the rock off of it um maybe you do something as simple as put a big black tarp over it and allow that tarp to actually cause the temperature to rise and be able to claim some of that water okay well staying with the theme of water um we have a question that how can they see the water flowing beneath the surface uh that's very good so we have the ability um if you can bear with me i'm going to see if i can pull up and find a movie so i will uh i'm gonna talk here as i look and there are some interesting things that we find on the surface of mars we find these ancient ancient views of where water has flowed but then we also see in some cases fresh-looking gullies and let me see here if i can actually and i'm having trouble finding it right now but let's let's just discuss it so and and we can i'll provide some pictures a little bit later here um oh wait a second here just a second view normal here we go i am going to be able to show this i think okay and sure screen so here we can see some actually fresh-looking gullies on the surface of mars and some of these gullies if we look we actually see seasonal changes so from one season to the other we see these new deposits but here's where it gets really spectacular is where we see over seasonal these seasonal changes over time here resulting in you can see these dark streets moving down the slope of the uh hill there and we've come to realize that that is indicative of water flowing just beneath the surface and actually being whipped up to the surface through the sand there and we see deposits of uh again hydrated materials salts that are coming out of this flowing water so this is this is really exciting is again we have known that the surface of mars is this really really terrible desert but in a number of places for instance uh the phoenix slander it was able to scoop the ground and see ice just beneath the surface but that was very high up in northern latitudes as we drop down some of that water season or some of that ice seasonally does turn to liquid water and can flow at a low enough altitude and again protected beneath the surface of the ground there so this is this is really exciting stuff and so these areas of we call these right here recurring slope linea and these recurring slope linea are grabbing everyone's attention right now they're interesting from a biological standpoint hey if you're going to look for water this is probably where you want to dig a hole or if you're going to look for life this is where you're probably going to want to dig a hole and also this could conceivably be a very valuable resource for people living and working on mars so okay so we've got another question uh kind of sticking with the idea of rocks on on mars without rock samples how can we actually tell the age of the features on mars oh very good um we can make inferences by looking at crater by doing crater counts so one of the things that we have come to realize is that fresher newer real estate like the areas around the volcanoes uh is going to have a much lower density of impact craters than you would have in some of the older areas so let's take a look um i will jump to back to mars track and let me share my screen so let's zoom out again i'm going to oops as we zoom out we can see that this highland area is more densely cratered than this area here where we had water flowing across the surface so we would infer that this is newer terrain than this area here this is actually uh this area here is arabia terra this is actually one of the uh older areas on the surface of mars and you can tell that because this area has been exposed for a long time over the billions of years the meteoroid impacts have continued and have continued to be recorded whereas here the flowing of water has erased a lot of that so this is newer terrain and so by making some assumptions about the rate of impacts we can assign ages now it's certainly a lot rougher in the case of mars than it is on the moon where we actually were able to calibrate those relative dates that we saw from crater counting on the moon with actual samples that were brought back from the moon and then we were able to get actual hard dates that we could then calibrate those relative dates with we want to bring back samples from mars that will allow us to do that calibration and really get our dating of features much more precise from mars excellent question so uh i apologize to some of you in advance that we're not going to be able to get to everyone's question we do have several questions i want to kind of turn to uh kind of the portals themselves here a number of people were asking about uh the potential of new ones such as our ones for venus in the works Pluto perhaps Saturn jupiter some of the other bodies in the solar system so yes we are thinking of a number of additional portals that we want to work on you can imagine a few of them are fairly obvious we've got of course we've we've done Vesta well the dawn mission has also gone to series and uh i'll let you know we've developed our team has developed a prototype for series and so that's one you can expect to see Pluto is blowing everyone's mind right now so we are absolutely thinking about that another one that really fascinates me is Mars's moon Phobos that has great potential as a stepping stone to Mars Mercury we've got some great data from the messenger mission so yes there are definitely plans to do more of these right now it's a matter of prioritization and with the resource prospector mission coming up and with our focus on looking at human landing sites on Mars right now those are two two top priorities but we certainly have our eyes on additional destinations and you certainly can't expect to see more of these portals in the future so here's an interesting question that Jim brought up it kind of in response or in response to that or a follow-up to that the Voyager data that went by some of the say some of the bodies like Miranda that are orbiting Uranus and Neptune is there enough data in the Voyager data to be able to reproduce some of these mapping projects one of the problems that we face as we look across the solar system and you know a prime example is Pluto when we did not go into orbit around an object we have really a very partial view if you look at the data we have say for Pluto or any of these bodies that we've essentially just done flybys of then in those cases we will have perhaps one hemisphere in really good resolution and the rest of the body in far less good resolution so there's a qualitative difference that arises when you do a flyby as is done by Voyager or in case of Pluto by New Horizons versus orbital missions like what we have going around Mars right now with LRO is giving us around the moon what Don has done with Vesta and Ceres so it isn't that we can't do them and in a number of cases we will but it is a lot easier and the results are typically a lot better when you have an orbital mission okay I know that we're just a little bit past time do you mind hanging in there for a few more questions we've got a few more that I'd like to throw out there if you no problem please okay so in in the one with Vesta one of them noticed that there was a starfield in the background was that realistic or was that a one that was you know added in virtually so to speak you know I am so proud of that team at JPL and that is one as a astronomer myself that was one of the first things I looked at and what did this team of software engineers do and you know something they accurately depicted the sky so you will if you can tear your eyes away from Vesta you will in fact see an accurate representation of the background stars so we have another one staying with Vesta for a moment here Jeffrey noted that northern hemisphere of Vesta also appears dented was there an impact then or have you inferred anything that went on with the northern hemisphere of Vesta all of Vesta has taken a beating but the magnitude of what happened near the south pole of Vesta far exceeds anything that occurred elsewhere across the surface one of the things you'll notice too is the topology of Vesta seems a little more pronounced at the south pole or excuse me at the north pole because of shadows and that was the actual duration of dawn's visit at Vesta quite frankly during a good chunk of that visit the north pole was in shadow and so you didn't see a lot of the north pole but toward the end of Vesta's our dawn's visit at Vesta the sun started coming out and giving some illumination to the north polar region but the shadows there are definitely more pronounced and so the the variation in terrain is somewhat more pronounced too so here's a couple of me kind of a lump a couple in here together and you'll probably be able to sort this out uh robert asks with a lower gravity level on mars would water flow have as much impact abrasion wise on the surface all things being equal as it does on earth which then would kind of maybe lead into another question that cliff asks is about is a valos marineris an erosional feature which that's certainly related to the ability of water to cut down through or is it something else say a rifty okay so gravity is definitely involved in rheology the nature of flow uh the gravity on mars is about one third what we experience here on earth that being said as we look at these great outflow channels we see evidence that there was in fact a very strong ability for flowing water to carve the landscape so even in spite of the lesser amount of gravity the amount of water that was traveling through and in some cases the number of cases this seems to be a cataclysmic release of water perhaps related to perhaps surface ice being heated by say a large meteorite impact and releasing a magnificent deluge of a flood that would really leave its mark on the landscape as it went traveling downhill so yes as a matter of fact water can even in the reduced gravity of mars do an excellent job of carving and shaping terrain uh does that include valos marineris valos marineris unlike the grand canyon does not seem to be primarily an erosional feature it is more likely a crustal event perhaps tectonic uh we think that there may be a relation to the large tharsis bulge that big collection of giant volcanoes just the northwest of valos marineris that may not be a chance alignment we don't have plate tectonics on mars the way we do here on earth and as a result uh hot spot volcanism builds up much larger volcanoes than it does here on earth if you take a look at our largest volcanoes in hawaii the plate movement has dragged that out into a chain of volcanoes but if the plate isn't moving as in the case of mars then that just builds up into these truly gigantic volcanoes that they can weigh down on the crust and actually fracture the crust and that may well be what we're seeing there at valos marineris is primarily a fracture in the crust perhaps caused by that loading in the tharsis bulge that said uh there was clearly some subsequent alteration of that area by flowing water so water did play a role flowing water did play a role in what we see in valos marineris but it was not the original cause okay so kind of uh shifting gears just a little bit but still uh following the water so to speak um if a form or forms of life are discovered on mars what protective actions would be taken to ensure these would not be detrimental to humans either on the mission or potentially brought back to earth that's a very good point um so nasa has an active planetary protection program there's actually a person whose business card reads planetary protection officer how's that for a cool business card but basically um we want to be very careful about what we might bring back from mars but also it works both ways we want to be careful about what we might introduce to mars if you look at the history of commingling of different species here on earth it hasn't necessarily been always a good story think of you know when the european explorers ended up first coming to the new world and the spread of diseases that in europe some defenses had been built up against but which were entirely new and absolutely devastating uh here in the new world and again across the pacific um if we introduce our bugs to mars it could be devastating to any life that's there and similarly we want to be very careful about any life that uh uh we might bring back from mars so in terms of the materials that we are sending to mars if you take a look at our so look at the sterilization procedures that are gone through for uh when mars 2020 lands and it starts digging holes man the the the sterilization procedure is really really really very detailed we want to make sure that we don't introduce any of our bugs there to damage what might be there or also to confound our experiments you know it's that's a long way to go to study bacteria that we bring with us similarly the question exists is what do we do with the materials that we bring back from from mars and how do we handle them there is of course very careful quarantine procedures for the materials that were brought back from the moon and the moon is a far far far less likely placed to actually contain any kind of biological activity um some suggestions have been done in terms of looking at uh processing some of these samples perhaps in other locations so perhaps uh in a location on the moon or even phobos where uh you can set up a lab to do study but then uh if there is a breach it's not going to get out into a viable environment so uh you have a number of plans that are in place and being worked on by uh nasa planetary protection okay well let's go for one more question and then we'll call it good this is uh this is great uh so a few of the people on do work with some planetariums around and they were and uh darin was interested whether or not these can be projected onto a planetary dome what sort of projectors might be needed what kind of rendering they might need to do to the images to be able to put them on a dome what a wonderful outstanding excellent question and that's a great one to end on um i want to point out that that what you have been looking at here are just a few of the clients that have been developed for this very robust back end we have developed other clients besides these web clients so there's a touch table client done a hyperwall client uh prototype for say oculus 3d goggles and etc so we're looking today at the web plant but the real real magic behind this is the back end is the data and the serving of the data and as a matter of fact the way that we handle this the team of jpl has developed a number of uh back end web services and apis that make the data available to uh outside systems beyond these clients and so we've been working with the american museum of natural history and the hayden planetarium there and the california academy of science and their morrison planetarium and we're able to actually serve this data to the planetarium and one of the things that uh the california academy of science has been doing is they actually have had held some workshops and will probably continue to do so for planetariums across the country and around the world showing them how to take this data and integrate it into their planetarium shows so it goes beyond just projecting the web browser onto the dome you can actually access the data behind all of this and bring it into your planetarium system and show it in the full fidelity that your planetarium is capable of okay well thank you very much brine this is uh absolutely fantastic um that's all we have for tonight all of you will be able to find this telecon along with many others on the next sky network under the outreach resources section on the nsn website just search for webinar we'll also post tonight's presentation on the next sky network youtube page by the end of the week you can also find other resources and activities on this webinar's dedicated research page and now for our raffle david