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Season 6 Episode 30: A Jiggly Spot, Animal Shelters, and the Icy Secrets of Mars with Dr. Ali Bramson

• Jason Zackowski • Season 6 • Episode 30

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Unlock the secrets of our solar system as we explore the mesmerizing charm of Jupiter and its iconic Great Red Spot. Our cosmic journey begins with a deep dive into Jupiter's colossal presence, its rapid spin, and the numerous moons that dance around it, including mighty Ganymede. Discover the latest buzz about the "jiggly" motion of the Great Red Spot and what it could mean for our understanding of this ancient storm. Plus, we bring you intriguing tidbits and anecdotes that add a playful twist to our astronomical adventure.

Switching gears, we turn our focus to the compassionate world of animal shelters and the heartwarming tale of Ginger, a resilient cat who found a new home amid life's allergies. We spotlight the dedication of shelter workers and the incredible demands they face, while also highlighting strategies that enhance job satisfaction and reduce turnover. By delving into the job demands-resources model, we shed light on how social support and job crafting can transform the shelter environment into a haven of hope and resilience for both humans and animals.

Our journey extends to the icy realms of Mars with Dr. Ali Bramson, who reveals the Red Planet's frosty secrets. From polar caps to buried equatorial ice, we examine how these fascinating features contribute to our understanding of Mars' climate history. Imagine future missions drilling into these icy layers, unlocking stories from the past much like Earth's ice cores do. And as a delightful sidebar, discover the emotional connections we form with spacecraft, as machines become explorers in our shared quest for knowledge. Join us as we traverse the wonders of space, from Jupiter's storms to Martian frosts, weaving a narrative that connects science with the human spirit.

Dr. Bramson's links:
Purdue!
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Speaker 2:

Hello science enthusiasts. My name is Jason Zukowski. I'm a high school chemistry teacher and a science communicator, but I'm also the dog dad of Bunsen and Beaker, the science dogs on social media. If you love science and you love pets, you've come to the right place. Put on your lab coat, put on your safety glasses and hold on to your tail. This is the Science Podcast. Hello and welcome back to the Science Podcast. We hope you're happy and healthy out there. This is episode 30 of season six. Apologies for the delay. You might still hear it in my voice.

Speaker 2:

I got crazy sick last week and I never really recovered till the weekend, so that whole week was shot. Adam got super sick too, so that bug was going around. Somehow. Chris didn't get it. Her Wolverine healing factor kept her on sick from that. Whatever that bug was Maybe it was a strain of COVID, but we're on the mend.

Speaker 2:

The podcast episode's out. It's the middle of October, so let's get to it. In science news, chris and I are going to talk about how the great red spot of Jupiter is jiggly, jiggly. That's a fun one. In pet science, a new study looked at how to improve the workplace for pet shelter workers, and our guest and Ask an Expert is Dr Ali Bramson, who's going to be talking to us about ice on Mars. Okay, the bad joke Jupiter has more than 60 moons. Their werewolf problem must be enormous. Okay, on with the show, because there's no time Like science time. This week in science news, chris and I are going to be talking about a planet spot, that's the great red spot of Jupiter, and how it's getting a little funky. Chris, what's your favorite planet?

Speaker 3:

Saturn.

Speaker 2:

I know because you love the rings of Saturn.

Speaker 3:

I've always loved Saturn, but you know what, jupiter is super cool as well.

Speaker 2:

Jupiter is my second favorite planet. My first favorite is Earth.

Speaker 3:

Yes, we live here. It has dogs on it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's the only planet that we know for sure has dogs. It's my favorite planet.

Speaker 3:

That makes total sense because you love dogs and the solar system and space.

Speaker 2:

That's right. So something weird is happening to the great red spot of Jupiter. It's jiggling. And before we get to the great red spot, here are some fun facts about our largest planet. Jupiter is so big that all the other planets in the solar system could fit inside it with room to spare, that is mind-boggling.

Speaker 2:

I love that it's so big. It's probably saved us from so many asteroid strikes. That's another fun fact about Jupiter. It scoops up all of these errant things that the Oort belt sends at us, which is like the Oort cloud, which is a band of.

Speaker 3:

It's also the fastest spinner. It has the shortest day of all the planets it just takes 10 hours to complete one rotation and so that makes it pretty special, as it rotates incredibly fast despite its size.

Speaker 2:

That's right. I've told kids before incredibly fast despite its size. That's right. I've told kids before if my class was on Jupiter, it would be over in 10 minutes. And they're like meh and I'm like but we all be dead. And then they're like meh, so that doesn't help anybody.

Speaker 3:

No, but it's fun to think about.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's a whole schwack of moons too that orbit Jupiter. Whack of moons too that orbit Jupiter 79 or more moons, including the four largest Galilean moons, io, europa, ganymede and Callisto, and, we hope, anybody affected by, of course, the Hurricane Milton. The Hurricane Milton put the kibosh on getting the Europa Clipper launched, but a lot of our space friends are eagerly anticipating that launch of the probe to go to Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and check out if there's life there, which is cool because it's a giant frozen ocean.

Speaker 3:

Sweet, but Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system and it's even bigger than Mercury, if you can believe it or not.

Speaker 2:

That's right. It probably was a planet and it got scooped up by Jupiter. Thank you, you're now my moon, not a planet yourself.

Speaker 3:

And another thing that's really cool because it's happening right now, with the auroras happening on Earth. But Jupiter has the strongest magnetic field of any planet in the solar system, so 20,000 times stronger than Earth's and that magnetic field creates spectacular auroras at the poles.

Speaker 2:

Nice, but you'd be dead because Jupiter is a gas giant. You'd have a spectacular show, but there wouldn't be any place to stand, because it's made of hydrogen and helium similar to our sun. There's other trace gases, like methane and ammonia, but most of the outer layer Jupiter is a thick atmosphere consisting of 90% hydrogen and 10% helium.

Speaker 3:

Additionally, there are layers of clouds in Jupiter's upper atmosphere, but they're not clouds like we have on Earth. They're clouds made of ammonia crystals and possibly ammonium hydrosulfide, and that gives the planet its distinct straight patterns of the reddish, brown, orange and white colors.

Speaker 2:

And one of my favorite things to tell kids, because the way the periodic table is set up, hydrogen is on the metal side, it's just above lithium, and kids are like that's stupid. Hydrogen's a gas. Shouldn't it be a non-metal? Shouldn't it be over by helium? And I said true, but the pressure and temperature increase as you go deeper in Jupiter and hydrogen remember Jupiter's 90% hydrogen it gradually turns into liquid, metallic hydrogen and that means that at the core of Jupiter there is an ocean of this weird hydrogen metallic hydrogen that conducts electricity.

Speaker 3:

But you can't go there because you would be dead.

Speaker 2:

That's right. And this brings us, Chris, to the Great Red Spot. What is the Great Red Spot?

Speaker 3:

So the Great Red Spot is a giant storm that's larger than Earth, which has been raging on Jupiter for at least 400 years. It is a massive anti-cyclonic storm and it's still going. It's still ongoing.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the first time we were able to take a look at Jupiter through telescopes, it was spotted, so it's there.

Speaker 3:

And it's also large enough to swallow Earth.

Speaker 2:

That's freaky, deaky and new observations like you said, have shown some interesting surprises. Yeah, so the data comes from Hubble. So Hubble's still doing good work out there. It's a little overshadowed by its big brother, the JWST, or Big Sister, or whatever we want to personify our space telescopes. As and over 90 days, it's collected data on the Great Red Spot, and this data comes from late 2023 to early 2024. And the Great Red Spot started to behave unexpectedly. It started to jiggle, if you can believe it started to jiggle like a bowl of Jell-O, and they use time lapse images which are cool, like how you set your camera up and it it goes for a long time and then speeds it up. They use time laplapsed images from Hubble and it showed that the Great Red Spot was oscillating in size, like getting bigger, smaller, bigger, smaller, bigger, smaller, which is a newly identified phenomenon.

Speaker 3:

Previously data from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. It was known that the GRS moved slightly in longitude, but this size oscillation was surprising because it was previously undocumented. So those high resolution images taken from Hubble show the Great Red Spot expanding and contracting and its speed fluctuating without a clear hydrodynamic explanation.

Speaker 2:

So why do we care about an Earth-sized storm on another planet? Aside from it being super cool, understanding how weather is on other planets could inform our own scientists about how Earth's hurricanes and meteorology can be explained, and we've just been through two devastating hurricanes here on Earth. Knowing more about how weather works is really important to us all. Chris, do they have any idea why we have some jiggly jiggly of the Great Red Spot?

Speaker 3:

According to Mike Wong from UC Berkeley, the Great Red Spot is squeezed between two jet streams which push against it as it changes in size, and because the Great Red Spot is trapped in a southern latitude by these jet streams, that's very unlike Neptune's dark spots, which can drift more freely.

Speaker 2:

Oh, because that one on Neptune. It kind of moves around Neptune where the Great Red Spot is. It really hasn't changed its location.

Speaker 3:

But over the last decade the Great Red Spot has been shrinking, and the team yeah, it's been shrinking and the research team predicts it will stabilize into a smaller, less elongated shape over time. So once it fits inside its latitude band it will be more tightly controlled by the surrounding winds.

Speaker 2:

So less football shaped and more circle shaped, that's cool.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and that's long term.

Speaker 2:

I'm just thinking, sorry, chris, I'm just thinking what if it just disappeared entirely? Wouldn't that change what we think of Jupiter? Because I think of Jupiter with that spot on it. That's the first thing that comes to mind when I picture that big planet.

Speaker 3:

I think of the bands always because those are very distinctive in color and beautiful. But yeah, you're right.

Speaker 2:

That's science news for this week. This week in Pet Science, chris and I are going to look at a study that checked out how the impact of work affected animal shelter workers, and I think the work that animal shelter workers do is pretty important for anybody that loves pets.

Speaker 3:

Absolutely so. We rescued Ginger from an animal shelter. When we saw her she was at one of our favorite stores that we go to, called Bone in the Biscuit for all of our pet needs, and there she was in the cage and Adam and I were there and we saw her and we're like, yeah, we definitely have to have this cat. And then we concocted a plan because Jason's severely allergic to cats but we got her. It all worked out. She's eating the food that bonds to her Fel D1 protein and bonds to the Fel D1 protein, so that makes her an excellent candidate to live here at our home with us with allergic Jason.

Speaker 3:

But we really appreciate all the work that the shelters do to place animals in homes, which is phenomenal. And actually last night I was at bone and biscuit with Bernoulli and they have two kittens there that I went and saw and Bernoulli was looking at them and checking them out and I'm like wonder if we could have this cute kitten. But no, I said no one's enough for us. Ginger is enough, for she's amazing and we love her so much the folks who work in a shelter.

Speaker 2:

Uh, the work that they do is tough. I follow different shelter workers on social media and they have a tough and emotional job. Animals are brought in, sometimes from horrible situations. Sometimes people return the animals, animals that are adopted out. Some animals are unadoptable because of severe reactivity and other issues, and euthanasia is quite common with those animals. So it's a really high stress job.

Speaker 3:

So this study used something called the job demands resources model, and that analyzes the relationship between job demands, job resources, workplace well-being, so exhaustion and engagement, job performance and turnover intentions. What this specific study investigated was job crafting behaviors, so how employees proactively modify their work and how those behaviors predict being, after considering the effects of job demands and resources. There were 142 surveyed participants in that a variety of job crafting behaviors were reported, which include finding growth opportunities, minimizing demands and seeking feedback.

Speaker 2:

One of the things the study noted was that if your engagement in work was positive, that related to positive job performance. Low engagement and exhaustion were related to intentions to leave the organization. This is something I've heard before, that turnover is quite high for folks that work in shelters I've mentioned before. It can be a very tough place to work and perhaps you just get exhausted and not engage with your work and you look for something else.

Speaker 3:

And another thing that could improve worker well-being and potentially reduce staff attrition are interventions that reduce job demands and increase job resources.

Speaker 2:

You mentioned at the start that job crafting was really important in the study. So workers who actively sought growth and feedback reported higher engagement, and higher engagement was linked to a more positive job performance. Interventions that provided flexibility and encouraged that job crafting helped other top-down interventions. But, chris, there were some things that really affected folks in shelters. What did the study find?

Speaker 3:

The study found that animal shelter work includes some significant stressors, and these stressors include exposure to animal suffering and euthanasia. Additionally high emotional and cognitive demands on the job and work pressure. And limited control over tasks.

Speaker 2:

So those factors can lead to job strain burnout and intentions to leave yeah, I don't know that seeing animals suffer and like being part of the whole euthanasia aspect that I it's part of shelters with dogs that are. They're coming in, they come in and they're. They are absolutely suffering and in pain or they're unplaceable due to behavior issues. That would be killer for me. I don't know if I could do that. That would be just awful for me.

Speaker 3:

But, despite challenges, many animal shelter workers reported high job satisfaction and engagement, and that came from interacting with animals and the ability to grow their skills.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I've seen that in TikTok videos. Like the best part of their job, they would always say, is they get to interact with the animals that are there, and it may push down some of the other negative parts there.

Speaker 3:

And connecting with your colleagues. So social support from those colleagues was a key resource that promotes engagement and it actually buffers against those negative job demands, and having a supportive work environment can reduce stress and improve well-being, which highlights the importance of those peer support programs and opportunities for reflection.

Speaker 2:

So the study had some final conclusions and I guess if you're listening to our show and you do have some input at a shelter that you work at or you are the person that runs the show, here are the recommendations Limiting work hours or providing counseling services can help improve wellbeing. So this job was extremely emotionally taxing and cognitively demanding and having people work too many hours really impacted their job satisfaction. And then also think of ways to encourage job crafting. So that's like teaching modeling showing growth-oriented behaviors that improves worker engagement and reduces turnover overall. I like that term job crafting. Have you ever heard of that before, chris? Like the term job crafting.

Speaker 3:

I haven't. I'm sure I've witnessed it, but I haven't heard of it described at that. But I really like that. I like the idea that you can maybe be a little bit involved in your work.

Speaker 2:

I feel like we tell kids to advocate for themselves, right.

Speaker 2:

Like if something's not working or you don't get it, have the courage to advocate for yourself, and, in a way, that's what job crafting is. You're an adult and you're advocating for yourself Because, man, if you're good at your job at a shelter, you're not only where you improve your own well-being in that job, but you're critically important to all those animals that are there too. I can't imagine that type of job. If that's a job that you do and you're listening, my hat is off to you.

Speaker 3:

It's very difficult doing that job.

Speaker 2:

All right, that's Pet Science for this week. Hello everybody, here's some ways you can keep the science podcast free. Number one in our show notes sign up to be a member of our Paw Pack Plus community. It's an amazing community of folks who love pets and folks who love science. We have tons of bonus Bunsen and Beaker content there and we have live streams every Sunday with our community. It's tons of fun. Also, think about checking out our merch store. We've got the Bunsen stuffy, the Beaker stuffy and now the ginger stuffy. That's right, ginger, the science cat, has a little replica. It's adorable. It's so soft, with the giant fluffy tail, safety glasses and a lab coat. And number three if you're listening to the podcast on any place that rates podcasts, give us a great rating and tell your family and friends to listen too. Okay, on with the show. Back to the interviews. It's time for Ask an Expert on the Science Podcast, and I have planetary scientist and professor of planetary science at Purdue University, dr Allie Bramson, with me today. Doc, how are you doing?

Speaker 1:

Hi great.

Speaker 2:

It's great to be here, yay, where are you in the world? Where are you calling into the show from?

Speaker 1:

I am currently at my home in Indiana, near Purdue's campus.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so relatively, is it? Is your commute a thing and a half? Do you have to fight traffic, or is it not bad?

Speaker 1:

No, we're in a very much like Midwest college town, vibes, where I forget the traffic is a thing.

Speaker 2:

Oh, that's sweet.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, but I was just at a conference in the LA, like Pasadena area, and so that reminded me that, yes, traffic is a thing for a lot of people.

Speaker 2:

We are very lucky where we live in the world. Our rush hour is about five minutes right before six o'clock, and sometimes the worst type of traffic is when the farmers are crossing the road with their cattle.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think I live like 12 minutes from campus, like north in the cornfields, and people are like you live so far away from campus. I'm like it's a 12 minute drive with no traffic, it's fine.

Speaker 2:

Oh, that's decent, so I introduce you. You have a doctorate. Can you talk to us about your training in science?

Speaker 1:

introduce you uh, you have a doctorate. Can you talk to us about your training in science? I have a phd in planetary sciences, which I got after going to college in actually like astrophysics, so that was what my bachelor's degree was in and throughout that time so I always knew I wanted to do space and study space. I had no idea what that meant for a career and in my undergraduate time, luckily, I had professors and people who were like oh, if you want to be a scientist, you should get involved in research where you're at the forefront of creating new knowledge and that's what you need to do Get in the lab.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, start actually doing science, not just learning what science has already taught us. And so, yeah, through doing research I learned that, okay, to continue on in that path, you have to go to grad school and do the PhD thing. And yeah, so I did a PhD after my bachelor's, where you really that's where you do the training to become a scientist. I view it almost a little like the equivalent of a med school, but for doing a doctorate in science you do the PhD and actually there's a step after that most people do, called a postdoc, so postdoctoral training, and that's like the residency of science, where you've got that degree, but you just do a little bit more training to become that independent scientist before you become a big girl scientist and go off and become the principal investigator and a professor and all that.

Speaker 2:

So all in on astrophysics. Early were you a space kid growing up. Were you into that when you were young.

Speaker 1:

Oh yeah.

Speaker 2:

So that's your origin story.

Speaker 1:

Yes, I can't even remember my origin story. Apparently, when I was like three or four, I was already going around saying I'm going to be an astronaut, I'm going to be an astronaut. My parents have no idea where it came from, but I just started saying I'm going to be an astronaut and it was. It got so bad that, like in middle school I started, or even earlier than that, sometime in elementary school I started signing my name Allie FA Bramson on all my homework assignments and my teachers were like at first they were like what is FA? Is that like your middle initials? Or I was like it stands for future astronaut, duh, yeah.

Speaker 1:

So I was obsessed and I didn't again, I didn't really know what a career in like in the space sciences meant. When you're growing up and you're like I love space and everybody's, oh, then you want to be an astronaut. And so it was really like late high school when I learned that it wasn't necessarily like going into space. That is what I wanted to do. It was studying space and being a space scientist, and so that helped shape, especially learning that, like, a lot of astronauts actually come from like military backgrounds and a lot of our like pilots Sally Ride was really one of my big inspirations.

Speaker 1:

And I learned that yes, she's amazing, and I learned she had a degree in physics and that she was like a mission specialist and was the scientist on board, and so that helped actually guide my decision to then major in physics and astrophysics in undergrad.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's a good point you make. One of our most famous astronauts in Canada I'm Canadian is Commander Chris Hadfield, and he was like a test fighter pilot guy, right, like one of the best Canada had going. That's how he got to be an astronaut. But Canada's first astronaut in outer space, roberta Bondar. She had two doctorates or something wild, so she was assigned to start the way. Nice, but we love Sally Ride, yep.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and the other.

Speaker 2:

it was Alan Shepard, right? He was the first American male in space, I believe, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, neil Armstrong. I guess, as a Purdue person, I need to make sure you know this that Purdue, neil Armstrong went to Purdue, and so we've got statues of him all over campus, and the building next to mine is named Armstrong Hall, and so he's one of many astronaut alums, so I feel really lucky to be getting to do what I do at Purdue that has this legacy of being the cradle of astronauts.

Speaker 2:

When you were young and even now. Do you like consume space content like both written and movies and TV shows? Do you like space that way, or does that make you a little angry because they always get it wrong in TV shows and movies?

Speaker 1:

No, I think, like the Martian, for example, did a really good job. Like for the most part, I tend to really like watching space shows and movies and things that take place in space, and usually I can suspend my disbelief of things. So sometimes I'm like, oh, that's not right. That's not right either. Oh, I just watched For All Mankind and I loved it.

Speaker 2:

so much I was going to ask you about. For All Mankind it's so good. That is one of the best TV shows I've ever seen in my life, like I didn't even know it was a thing, and then somebody who was an astrophysicist I interviewed suggested it and I binge watched the whole thing. Yes, yeah. And that's where sometimes watching that stuff almost crosses over with work a little bit, because I was watching it and they go. I know where you're going. Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 1:

I'm so sorry, I don't want to give spoilers, but at some point they show a diagram up on the screen and I was like, oh, I know what that's from. I was a reviewer of the publication that came from.

Speaker 2:

Crazy, that is so wild yeah.

Speaker 1:

But yeah. I look for all my time.

Speaker 2:

Are you all cut up? Are you just waiting for the next season?

Speaker 1:

Oh yeah, Eagerly waiting.

Speaker 2:

That's so cool. Sorry for everybody at home, we can blame a future guest for getting me obsessed with that TV show. At home, we can blame a future guest for getting me obsessed with that TV show. So your specialty, at least from reading your bio and doing background, is ice. But not ice on Earth, correct? It'd be Martian ice.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, so I did my PhD dissertation work on understanding the ice on Mars. Okay, so two questions what was the draw for ice on Mars and is there ice on Mars? Could you tell us a little bit about that, for folks?

Speaker 1:

that aren't into outer space and haven't been keeping up. Yeah, so I'll answer your second question first. So there's definitely ice on.

Speaker 2:

Mars.

Speaker 1:

There's two big polar caps actually on each of the poles, at the North Pole and the South Pole. They each have these like over a mile thick deposits of ice. No way, yeah. And if you combine the ice from those poles it has about the same amount of ice as Greenland has here on Earth. So it's pretty substantial, okay.

Speaker 2:

I didn't know that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and actually a couple decades ago it was thought like, oh, are these polar caps?

Speaker 1:

Are they made of carbon dioxide ice?

Speaker 1:

But we now know that they are mostly water ice actually, that they are mostly water ice actually, and we know that from we have density estimates of them, like how electromagnetic waves interact with the material.

Speaker 1:

We have just like direct observations and we, yeah, so we know that the polar caps are mostly water ice, though actually in the south there was this was just discovered, like about 10 years ago or so there's a deposit of carbon dioxide ice that's sequestered within the water ice and if that carbon dioxide ice was released, like back into the martian atmosphere, it would double the atmospheric pressure of Mars. So I find that to be fun that there's actually, like at the South Pole, both carbon dioxide ice and water ice. But really 9% of what's there is water ice. And we also know actually this is also something that's really come about in the last 10 to 15 years is how much buried ice water ice there is, even away from the poles. So down at latitudes closer to the equator there's ice, but it's buried under a little bit of like dirt and debris and stuff that's helping to protect it.

Speaker 2:

And we know the red dirt, the red dirty stuff on the earth, the red dirty stuff.

Speaker 1:

Yep, that helps insulate it and protect it. But one way that we know it's there is because we've got cameras orbiting Mars that take pictures all the time of the Martian surface and we'll have an image and it's just the dry, reddish, dusty surface, reddish dusty surface. And then we'll come back in another orbit and take another picture of that same area and all of a sudden, boom, there's an impact crater there. Brand new meteorite that hit this planet made a brand new impact crater and in some of these areas it actually exposes and excavates that water ice and so all the ejecta around it is like bright white.

Speaker 2:

it's really cool so the universe throws a little rock and you guys get data from that exactly.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, universe so yeah just like.

Speaker 2:

Are you sitting back? I don't even know if you have a lab, I'm very ignorant. I'm sorry you're sitting in your lab or by your computer and you're just like you're rubbing your hands back and forth hoping they just.

Speaker 1:

The universe chucks some rocks at mars, yeah, at this point, so we know of like hundreds of these impacts that have happened oh, okay and at this point it's like fairly automated. So the people that the camera teams there's like algorithms and they'll, they'll like, search their data when stuff comes down to look for these like signatures of the new impacts. So it's from oh, we know of a couple to now that there's hundreds and we've actually been able to constrain. How often is Mars getting hit by rocks flying through space at the present day?

Speaker 2:

That's so cool. Okay, so that's like the ice that's under the dirt. What tech like? How do you know? How do you know about the polar ice? Obviously, I know you can take pictures of it, but how do you know? There's so much of it. That's where my quandary is.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so part of it is. You can just see that there's these massive deposits on the surface that rise up. We call it topography, or what is? The yeah. So it's like there's topographic signatures associated with these things where they rise up above the surface and make up these big, thick deposits that sit on the surface.

Speaker 1:

And one of the great ways that we study these things, and one of the techniques that I use in my studies, is using radar, and so radar can actually penetrate into the subsurface and so you send down a radar wave from the spacecraft and that radar wave, part of it bounces off the surface, but part of that radar wave can go into the subsurface, where then it interacts with the ice and then it bounces off of other interfaces, like the interface at the bottom of the ice, and so we can use how that electromagnetic wave interacts with that material to figure out how thick it is and how pure the ice is, and that's how we know that it's probably there's maybe like 3% dust in amongst these ice deposits. It's 97% ice.

Speaker 2:

It's really pure ice, that's wild and then, based on data from earth, how the radar goes through, a thing you can cross reference to see if you're right or not. Am I on the right track or no?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, so that's actually another aspect of things that I do is related to analog studies. So I was in Iceland just a couple of weeks ago and we were looking at buried ice deposits with radar here on earth where we can go and actually dig it up and confirm that it's there and at certain depths. But we know that rocky material will interact with the radar wave in a certain way and we know that ice interacts with the radar wave in a certain way, and we know that ice interacts with the radar wave in a certain way. So when you see that radar wave make it all the way to the bottom of that deposit and make it back out, basically without getting absorbed by the material, then you know that it's really ice rich.

Speaker 2:

Oh, like rocks or sponges or the dust in there. Eat some of the radar or something like that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

That's a very unscientific terms.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, but no.

Speaker 2:

I don't know.

Speaker 1:

That's the way to think about it. Yeah, we call the word like we say, attenuation, like how much it attenuates the signal, but it's basically yeah, how much is the material eating up that signal and preventing it from making it through the material and bouncing back out to the spacecraft?

Speaker 2:

Wow. So you were in Iceland and my question is going to be like, if astronaut in the future lands there, would that area of Mars be similar to, for example, like I've been to, Churchill, Manitoba, like the tundra? Or would it be more similar to the glaciers that maybe Iceland is famous for?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, Mars is basically like a really dry, dusty desert. Basically everywhere there are remnant glaciers that we see. They're not necessarily, we don't know that they're flowing today. They seem pretty stagnant but they show all of these flow lines and like lobes and they look like glaciers just visibly but there's like debris that's covering them. And so one thought is, and one of the reasons why I'm really interested in finding the buried ice at the lower latitudes is because for sending astronauts, we want to know what is the lowest, the closest to the equator you could send an astronaut and that they would have water resources, Because we know there's all this water at the poles, right, but you don't want to go to the poles because the poles, like on earth, are extremely cold and also in winter it's just night for months at a time. The sun does not rise above the horizon.

Speaker 2:

That's rough.

Speaker 1:

I can see why they decided.

Speaker 2:

The author of the Martian didn't have them land there. It would be pretty boring.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, and then like your solar-powered devices aren't having you oh right now. He'd be screwed. Yeah, you're totally screwed. So, yeah, some of the research that I do is basically like using radar, using these other techniques that we call remote sensing. So how do we sense something on a planet remotely, so like from a spacecraft? How do we remotely sense these buried ice deposits that are at these lower latitudes, such that astronauts could go have warmer temperatures, have consistent sunlight year round and have a better time setting up their new habitat?

Speaker 2:

I got you, so there's an. Obviously it sounds like from what you said there's so much water in this ice that would easily support a small group of humans easily. But if you send them too far north or south they'd freeze to death and have no sunlight and it's useless.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and not just that, but actually a bunch of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere condenses out as frost onto the pole every winter. So if you're at the pole and winter comes, you would get buried by meters of carbon dioxide ice before it then goes away when the sun comes back up in the spring. So you would also get buried by carbon dioxide, like by dry ice which would also yeah.

Speaker 2:

For people who go to a restaurant. It's like the smoke, the little cubes they put into a drink and it makes it a vapor.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, or like at Halloween, when you've got like your witch's brew, you go and buy this dry ice. It goes yeah, it doesn't melt into the liquid phase, it just goes purely from ice to vapor. And that's actually what happens with both carbon dioxide ice and water ice on Mars today. It doesn't pass through. Neither of them pass through a liquid phase, so they're just alternating between ice solid form and gas vapor form.

Speaker 2:

Ain't nobody got time for liquid. I tell you, skip that, yeah, okay. So is this a form of weather? Does it rain carbon dioxide or not? Rain hail or does it just like frost?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, okay, yeah, so there's no rain on Mars today because the atmospheric pressure so what phase something is in depends on both its temperature and its pressure. So this might be trigger warning. If people didn't like their chemistry classes you can think of, like your phase diagram of temperature and pressure, those dictate if something's a solid, a liquid or a gas. And given the current pressure on Mars, which is about 1% of Earth's atmosphere, current pressure on Mars, which is about 1% of Earth's atmosphere, water can only really pass between gas and solid, and so it doesn't rain. It's just either vapor in the atmosphere and then it gets cold enough that it just condenses out as frost directly onto the surface, and then it warms up again and then it sublimates, which is the term we use for when it goes instead of melting. We say sublimates because it goes directly back into that vapor phase, and so it's coming and going with the seasons and the temperature between those two phases, and that's what happens with the carbon dioxide as well. It's passing back and forth.

Speaker 1:

But we think that in Mars' past billions of years ago, earlier on in Mars's history, that there was a lot of liquid water, because we have evidence there's, like riverbeds and deltas and all these stream channels that are carved into the rocks at Mars, that they are exactly what you form from liquid water running over the surface here on Earth. And so we know there actually used to be liquid water on Mars. And so that tells us scientists that the atmospheric pressure used to be greater, such that in Mars' past it had more of an atmosphere that could have supported water in that liquid phase. So it probably rained on Mars in the past, but it doesn't anymore, right?

Speaker 2:

okay, okay, all right. So this is. This is great. Thank you for explaining that. Like I've got an image of my head. Like on some days in the winter where I live there's this type of frost that forms in the morning on all of the trees, called horror frost. It's super pretty actually, for people who are from a warmer climate never probably get to see it. So that's the idea. It just there's water in you. It just there's water in you. Know that there's water in the atmosphere and it turns to a solid on everything and then you'd get buried by this if you're too far north or south, wow, that's wild. And then, like in the martian, there's obviously storms. That's why they had to leave. Yeah, are they a dry, dusty storm, like they're not bringing any precipitation with it or hailstones or anything like that?

Speaker 1:

Correct. Yeah, they're dust storms. There's a lot of dust on Mars. You've got that reddish dust that gives Mars its reddish color. That's still a question that scientists are trying to answer is what causes a dust storm on mars to go global? So you get all these little dust storms, but every few years you get one that just grows wildly large and takes over the whole planet and we don't know why didn't one of those take out the little rope, one of the little rovers it? Did, it, did all right opportunity.

Speaker 2:

I forget it was the saddest little story.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think it was opportunity. Yeah, it couldn't see the sun because the atmosphere was so dusty that no sunlight could make it through the atmosphere down to the surface to recharge its solar panels.

Speaker 2:

Does NASA do it on purpose and give them things faces to make people care more about them, because they all have like little googly eyed faces.

Speaker 1:

I know they're so adorable and I know their cameras.

Speaker 2:

I just feel like they like oh, we need to make people care more about the robert rovers, let's make, let's give them the cutest face ever, and then when you lose them, everybody's like oh god, we, just, I love that rover yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, there's a documentary I've been meaning to watch called Goodnight Oppie. Oh my gosh, I need to make sure I'm in the right mindset to be able to get through that. But yeah, it explores the Opportunity rover mission and its ultimate death, and I'm sure that I'm'm gonna cry whenever I come around to watching it yeah, there's a.

Speaker 2:

I used to be I used to follow this account a lot more actively on twitter. There's like the sarcastic rover account. Yeah, you saw that one and yeah, it's pretty personified as this, like just disgruntled robot stuck on mars poking rocks, and I feel bad for some days or like the xkcd comic where it's have I been a good rover?

Speaker 1:

oh my gosh, I'm gonna cry. But yeah, certainly these spacecraft become. Whether I work a lot on orbiters, so these satellites that are orbiting high above the surface, and then there's the rovers, and the rovers talk to the orbiters to send their data back to earth and like all of these things, I feel like we end up personifying because they they become just like such an important part of our scientific journeys. Without them, that's how we get our data and, yeah, I think definitely there's a personification of the spacecraft that happens.

Speaker 2:

Do you use the phrase like? We need to talk to it? Talk to me Like I've heard other people refer to that. What's when they're sending data to satellite or even the rovers hey, what's? What are they saying today? That's a personification. Like the data, is a form of language.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1:

Do you have any nicknames for some of the orbiters or some of the satellites? Oh, I guess we don't. So I work a lot on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is mouthful, and it definitely I had to type that out enough in my dissertation that I actually learned how to spell the word reconnaissance correctly the RCO do you shorten it? I guess we say like MRO for Mars.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so we often NASA, and we use so many acronyms. It's all about acronyms all the time. So there's MRO and I also work with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is LRO, and, yeah, acronyms upon acronyms. Sometimes there's even acronyms within the acronyms. It gets a little, yeah, acronym heavy.

Speaker 2:

That makes sense, because when you send those things away, aren't they folded up like little pieces of origami and they unfold?

Speaker 3:

themselves.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that makes sense mummy and they unfold themselves. Very compact and it has a story within a story.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's a cool way to think about it.

Speaker 2:

One more question, doc, before we move to some of our standard ones and we gloss over it. But you were in Iceland. How was that? Was that an experience and a half? Have you been before?

Speaker 1:

I have been before. This was, I think, my fifth time going.

Speaker 2:

Oh, okay, it's nothing new then.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so this was a new site. So we went to the Hekla volcano because there was a study that our team saw from like 2007 that said that there was snowpack that was on the flanks of the mountain when it last erupted in 2000. And the ash and the debris and what we call tephra so all of the like pumice and stuff that got spewed out of the volcano actually landed on the snow and it helped protect it, and so the snowpack was still around as of 2007. So seven years later, the sort of seasonal snow that was there was still there because it was protected by this material which sounds very familiar with. We've got snow and ice that's protected in the mid latitudes of Mars, and so we wanted to go and try to find and see if that seasonal snowpack was still protected, if it was still there, and take radar data of it to better understand that detectability of buried ice deposits here on Earth as an analog for how we can detect these shallow ice deposits on Mars.

Speaker 2:

Oh, that's so cool that there's something similar on Earth to what you're dealing with on Mars. I love that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and we actually found. We found what's called like a pore filling ice layer, which we weren't necessarily sure if we were going to see, let alone see it in the radar data. But it's where, within all of the pumice, there was ice grains that cemented at depth, at like tens of 40 centimeters or so. There was actually, all of a sudden, ice grains in between all of the pumice cementing it together, so it fills into the pore spaces, which is why we call it pore ice, and we think there's a lot of pore ice on Mars, and so we now have a good analog site for understanding this pore filling ice on Earth and Mars.

Speaker 2:

So the next question is that like what in the future, as we wrap up this in the future, what are some of the goals that you have for ice on Mars? What are some of the things you're looking at long-term?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so continuing the quest for what is the lowest latitude buried ice deposit on Mars, where is the place that's most tropical that we can send our astronauts to is something that I'm very interested in and always trying to plug away at. I'm also. I've been doing a lot of work, me and my research group, on the polar ice caps, always trying to plug away at I'm also I've been doing a lot of work, me and my research group, on the polar ice caps, trying to understand the. So the ice caps that I talked about that are like a kilometer or two thick. They're made up of all these ice layers. So you can see in depressions and cliffs, that sort of carve through the ice. There's all these layers like light, dark light, dark light, dark layers and of different dust contents within the ice that show off these layers, and so we think that each of these layers was put down during a different time in Mars's history. And, yeah, these, this layer, it's basically like an ice core.

Speaker 2:

I was going to say it's like an ice core on Mars. I love it.

Speaker 1:

But on Mars.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

So we're also doing a lot of work trying to decipher what those layers mean. How do you form a layer? When in Mars' history did that ice get deposited, and how do we relate that to the climate cycles of Mars, so that we can better understand the climate history of another planet?

Speaker 2:

Because those ice cores on Earth are critical to understanding our ancient climate.

Speaker 1:

The ice cores, some of the ice layers, so the ice it centers, is what we call it when it fuses together from snow into fern, into ice, and eventually it closes off the pore space that's in the snow and you're left with these little bubbles that are trapped within the ice, and those bubbles contain the gas of the atmosphere.

Speaker 2:

At that time oh, I bet you'd love a rover to land there and do some drilling.

Speaker 1:

Oh my God, it would be. It's a dream. I want that so badly.

Speaker 2:

Early face or something like that. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

We use ice cores on earth that's how we know what the atmospheric conditions were like in the past is because we can extract basically a sample of our atmosphere from these ice cores. So if we could do something like that on Mars, oh my gosh.

Speaker 2:

That's so cool.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so that's another thing I'm working on with Mars ice, and then also something that I'm really interested in kind of long-term in my career is helping develop new mission concepts. So this is related to what we were just talking about actually with well, could we send a future rover there to go sample the ice? So I'm doing work to try to help think through what should some of the next Mars missions look like and what science should they be prioritizing.

Speaker 2:

I feel like that would be a good. I could talk about this forever and maybe this is the last thing I'm going to just say I feel like that would be a good first step to a drilling rover to land on like Europa. Yeah, to send a drilling rover first to Mars to like, really work the technology out.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, especially so the InSight mission. I don't know if you recall that mission, but it was a mission that had a seismometer on board and it was at Mars the last few years and it it um is no longer with us, but it had a drill and it was going to try to drill a couple of meters into the ground to measure the heat flow that was coming out of like the interior of Mars, and it only made it like 10 centimeters or so and then the drill got like stuck and it couldn't make it any further. So I think there's still a lot of technology development that needs to happen that people are working on trying to figure out how do we like? Drilling is hard work and even just drilling on earth you go through all these drill bits, and so how do you do that in a robotic, automated fashion on a different planet where you don't have people there to just fix the drill bit and replace it and all the parts? And yeah, there's a lot of work for thinking about how we would drill.

Speaker 2:

So you're saying Michael Bay was onto something by sending Bruce Willis to outer space?

Speaker 1:

Oh gosh, that's a. I'm just teasing. I'm just teasing, that's a movie. That's a teasing. I'm just that's a, that's a movie.

Speaker 2:

That's a Armageddon, everybody. So yeah. In between teaching contacts or sorry, in between teaching contracts. I did work in Alberta's oil patch. Oh it's pretty complicated. You're right to. There's a lot of work and moving parts to get something down into the earth, to get oil or gas for sure.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that could be a good like when we send humans one day like the question is that a task that is better done by humans or by robots? That's something that will have tbd chat.

Speaker 2:

gpt is a ways to go, I think, before that can take over drilling. Thanks for sharing a little bit about what you study. It's so fascinating. We have a couple standard questions we ask all our guests about, and our listeners love these ones, and the first one is if you could share a pet story from your life with us.

Speaker 1:

Yes, I have a dog named Apollo. Yes, very fitting after the moon exploration program, but he was actually a ring bearer at my wedding and I got married to another Mars scientist. We actually met both doing Mars science during my PhD and so we had a. Mars themed wedding and our dog Apollo was the ring bearer, so it was very nerdy.

Speaker 2:

Red and looked like Mars. Was it a yes, really yes.

Speaker 1:

So our color scheme was hematite, which is the mineral on Mars that makes it look red, and our cake was decorated like these polar layered deposits on Mars.

Speaker 2:

This might be a personal question Were you married recently or was decorated like these polar layered deposits on Mars? This might be a personal question. Were you married recently or was this like quite a while ago?

Speaker 1:

This was two years ago, so not that long ago.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I just feel like there's so much more acceptance for the like really letting your passion come through with weddings. Yeah, but that was not the case when I got married many years ago.

Speaker 1:

Oh yeah.

Speaker 2:

But I would love if I was to get married again, and I wouldn't because I have my wife. I love my wife very much, but I would love a themed wedding like that so much. That's so sweet.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it was a great excuse to throw a Mars themed party, and we had. Oh, our signature cocktail was sunset on Mars and it had like edible glitter in it.

Speaker 2:

So cool. What type of dog is Apollo?

Speaker 1:

That is a whole story in and of itself. We adopted him from his litter was found on the streets of Tucson, arizona, and they thought that they were like a black lab mix and we did the doggy DNA test and it turns out he's zero percent black lab oh okay. He's mostly australian. He's mostly chow and australian cattle dog oh okay, but then lots of other stuff. So he yeah, he is an adorable little mutt that is a mix and a half.

Speaker 2:

Does he have a blue tongue?

Speaker 1:

he does. So we suspected because he's got the blue tongue and he's got the furrier kind of thicker chest and yeah. So we suspected the chow, but we did not expect that the australian cattle dog would be in there but it makes sense now, because he likes to herd us around and keep the pack together got a little bit of bluey in them.

Speaker 2:

There you go, very cool. Well, thanks for sharing your pet story with us.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, thanks for asking.

Speaker 2:

And we love to close with challenging our guests to give us a super fact. It's something that you know, that when you tell people it blows their mind a bit.

Speaker 1:

Ooh.

Speaker 2:

I said a couple of things today that I'm just going to be pondering for the rest of the week. But do you have anything in the tank for us?

Speaker 1:

I think. So, speaking back to Mars, the we've got on the Mars reconnaissance orbiter. There's a camera called high rise and it's one of the instruments on board that I got to work on during my PhD, but it takes images at 30 centimeters per pixel. Even though this thing is flying 300 kilometers above the surface, it can resolve 30 centimeters per pixel on the surface. So, like your desk, it could see on the surface of Mars with this camera, which I just find mind blowing, that we have the ability and the technology to take that higher resolution of images of another planet. But not actually not just that, but actually there's a.

Speaker 1:

If you go, if you Google search like high rise camera Mars, there's a website where you can make an account and you can actually add targets into our database for us to potentially take new data on Mars. So we consider public targets all the time and take data for members of the public that just put in targets of oh, I want to see this area because it looks cool. Members of the public that just put in targets of oh, I want to see this area because it looks cool, and so you can actually go and request high-rise images. And these images make, by the way gorgeous desktop backgrounds, phone backgrounds, print them out. It's all publicly available, all the data, because it's through NASA, so it's public. They make gorgeous wall art I love. The high-rise camera is just amazing and I would totally encourage anybody to go and look it up. It's H I R I S? E and stands for like that. It's an acronym, of course.

Speaker 2:

It's the acronym on the acronym, there you go. Yeah, but yeah, I just find the fact that we have this resolution of another planet just to be amazing okay, we'll see if we can find a link and put that in the show notes for everybody to click through, just for fun, oh awesome yeah, that's very cool, but I'm a little annoyed with the quality of my phone.

Speaker 2:

Then get with the program. If nasa can do this you've been out for a while you can. I guess phones aren't millions and millions of dollars. Yeah, touche, I've just talked to myself. Allie, thank you so much for being a guest today. Let's talk about space, mars, ice, apollo. It was a really fun conversation and we learned a lot. I hope everybody listening feels that too.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for being here. Yeah, I'm happy to be here.

Speaker 2:

Are you on social media anywhere? Do you have socials for people to check out?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I am. I'm on Twitter, or X, or whatever it's called these days. No, it's Twitter At Allie A-L-I. Bramson B-R-A-M-S-O-N, so just my name. Bramson B-R-A-M-S-O-N, so just my name.

Speaker 2:

Gotcha, and again we'll have a link to Ali's Twitter account in the show notes. Cool, Best of luck in the future and I really hope when a decade or so they land Drilly McDrill face in one of those piles, we'll all be thinking about you I hope so too.

Speaker 1:

Like I said, that would just be a scientist's dream come true.

Speaker 2:

All right, have yourself a great night. Thanks you too. No family section today. Adam is still under the weather and he's very busy with school right now, so we'll catch up with the shenanigans next week. On the science podcast, I'd like to thank Dr Ellie Bramson, who was our guest this week, and again a big shout out to our paid community, the Paw Pack. The Paw Pack helps us do what we do and it keeps the Science Podcast free. We would love for you to sign up. Check out the link in the show notes. Let's hear those names, chris.

Speaker 3:

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Speaker 1:

For science, empathy and cuteness.