-Jim Bell

This is the only Perseverance report LPI so far. It's a year old when I write this. Some things are no longer relevant, for example it was announced this week that Percy will hold it's samples and deliver them to a MAV alone. 

So lets get down to it.

See this? It's named Kodiak. It was imaged Apr 2021, and this LPI came out May 2021. So I was nervous as heck watching this LPI, becasue that's cross-bedding in the middle of Kodiak and it's been driving me crazy since I first saw it. 

Cross-bedding is fossilized sand dunes. The image of Kodiak has cross-bedding, with flat layers above and below, in a delta, as a mesa. All of that tells a story, and the story is quite typical of real-Mars and flies hard in the face of fantasy-Mars.

1. There was a crater.
2. The crater filled with a kilometre of silt.
3. The flat layers on the bottom of Kodiak were lain first.
4. The cross-bedding second.
5. More flat layers third.
6. Everything around it got eroded to leave the Kodiak mesa.  

That means, that while the silt was getting laid down, there was a time, a big chunk of time, when the basin was completely dry. So dry, that sand dunes had time to spread, grow, get fossilized, and then covered by wet layers. Meaning that wet periods in Hesperian Mars were intermittent, not consistent. And wet can mean ice. 

This is expected to a point, it's especially remarkable because it is very hard evidence. You still have to date the layers to make sure they really went in that order, geology can trick you if you don't double check. But Jezero is flagrantly Hesperian same as Gale crater is, so its never been at all plausible the delta was really from a rain-powered river. The question is if it's glacial, or eon-episodic due to something on the scale of Mars tilting or receiving an impact. Get it? That's real-Mars.

My fear was that this LPI came too soon and the team would sit on such a detail without comment till they could all push a paper through peer-review. 

• At 11:40 Kodiak is first mentioned. 
• 38:40 is a mind-twisting slide ambiguously showing what may be tilted strata, probably the delta-slope, but could be something else.
• At 40:40 he finally gets around to Kodiak, mentioning some debate about possible aeolian vs fluvio lacustrine and delteak structures. I believe they can settle all that by comparing grain sizes of the strata. 

And that's it. The rest of the LPI from that time is great too, but the Kodiak stuff is what's compelling me personally. There is much in that 1-6 I wrote above that is still debatable, and I have not heard any good update since. There's some stuff about Ingenuity and the route planning they have been using in the rest of the vid. 

-Motoo Ito

Sometimes, in the back of my mind, laying on a derelict car and staring into the sky over Kaibab, I wonder if one can tell what a brief shooting star is made of? Shouldn't one be able to tell from just the light? Then I think of current and post-missions to C-types, and I know a hard, satisfying answer is coming, if not available somewhere now.  

C-types are like Bennu and Ryugu are supposed to be porous rubble piles. Accumulations, basically dust-bunnies that have been at it for a long time. Early on Ryugu was suspected to be related to two other asteroids, Polana and Eulalia, because they have similar orbital resonance features. Basically they can be wound back to a point where they may have collided or been one object. Therefore Ryugu may be a fragment or debris pile of Eulalia. Eulalia is bigger but otherwise poorly studied, and may have been an early planetesimal. That idea is still sitting on the table with this LPI not seeming to alter it.

This LPI involves a lot a procedure. It's best for someone looking from a technologist perspective. But Hayabusa is primarily a JAXA mission and so it's a great intro to JAXA as well. That's a big deal, ESA and JAXA are taking on better missions with higher science returns. Arguably they have surpassed Roscosmos already and JUICE is one of the most exciting upcoming probes, an ESA mission.    

• At 30:40 the slides get good. A nice sliced sample, with coloration, labeling and a close-up. You get a strong sense of what you can and cant expect to extract from common C-types, fictionally or realistically. 
• All the following slides are about as good, with some fun molecules coming out such as odd halides and globules. 
• He's got some really dry nerd jokes all over the place in here. Math nerds especially may appreciate, which is generally true all over because the best parts of this LPI involve a variety of clever graphs.

I like to say, 'there is nothing hard about science except scale and terminology.' My friends often point out that I tend to be verbose when I do. However I stand by the claim, usually when verbosity gets in the way of teaching. 

For example click-bait. We all hate it. I regret that I let myself get involved with writing such garbage for a time. Science Daily tends to avoid it to the extent market forces permit. Judging by this wonderful article, the market forces are quite formidable. 

It's about bio-medicine, but invokes the term "nano-robot." Not quite hyperbole, and not quite a misrepresentation. But we are talking about DNA origami, not a glass and metal device. 

Say you were in some future, fifty to a century. Would you call this stuff nano-robotic then? Or would it just be medicine. Probably the latter, and nano-robotics would mean something specific and different, whereas you can kind of say they overlap now.

And that's kind of the point I'm getting to. If you write fiction stuff in the future, do you try to immerse your audience by writing how they would talk, or how you think your audience will receive it? I think the second option is shallow and ultimately wrong. You never have full control on how someone else interprets things. But you can put a lot of depth into a writing by including some assumptions in it. If you lived on Ganymede, you would not want to call 'Luna', "The Moon," so if you only write Luna, it implies the context. 

Setting that point aside though, this article linked above is something to ponder. It is another example of a trail-head, something emerging now that will be a big deal in the future. In Sweet it will be so eschewed so deeply that it wont be addressed in such click-baity terminology, but just casually implied leading one to be able to ponder all the prerequisites to get to there, from here. 

"Wild-2 was a repository largely unprocessed proto-solar nebular materials." -Scott Sandford

Sandford mentions early that he intends this talk to cover the mission more and mission results less, which is code for he hasn't updated his lecture over the years. The stardust probe completed its part of the mission in 2006, so many of these slides are a tad dusty. But he does in fact work his way to good results.  

• At 17:30 a good 'dust-ballistics' reference.
• The slide at 21:30 and the next few are good resources. Turns out smoother comets have been around the sun more often.
• At 29:20 we finally get a look at some results. Aerogel busted up the frail comet dust. 
• At 32:25 we get a beautiful dust grain sample with three distinct textures. 
• Pretty much everything up to the summary at 41:40 is golden, actual mission results, well presented. Sandford apparently has a talent for under-selling.
  

This LPI was a happy surprise. I went into it starved for what it actually contained. Missions like Bepi and Stardust are a new thing, and have a new feel to the accompanying lectures. The emphasis on particulates is fulfilling especially because it applies elsewhere. Think, if you cut out a block of Callisto, would you expect it would be homogeneous?    

 Eva L. Scheller

When it comes to Mars specifically, I don’t know what I would do without LPI’s. General media misrepresents Mars seemingly intentionally at times. It becomes really tough to know whats really going on. Enter LPI’s, and a light comes on. If you love X-Y graphs, this ones a treat. 

• What a wonderful slide at 6:50. Just a quick recap. phyllosilicates are especially notable because lavas on Earth work through cycles of melting and producing more phyllosilicates, which have a lower melting temperature but higher buoyancy. That's Earth, on Mars, the phyllosilicate heavy strata seem to be the default.   
• Slide at 13:30. Note how much more hydrated Noachian Mars is than Hesperian. That fact alone is such a big deal for so very many reasons. Among them is that Noachian Mars tends to be greatly elevated, and liquid water should run downhill. Also, elevated means profoundly less atmosphere for explorers to parachute with. That’s part of why probes tend to go to Hesperian or Amazonian locations.  
• Slide at 36:50, is one to take to heart. What goes into Mars, stays there.
• The slide at 40:20 is an image worth archiving. 
  

Back in the day it was more open to debate that the Hesperian might have had actual liquid water exposed to the sun for long periods. Nowadays the question of "warm wet Hesperian" is a matter of if some was still liquid under an ice cap or not. That's what this video is getting at subtly. At the time I post this the LPI is a year old, so Percy had just landed. Everywhere Percy can go is Hesperian, but there are some Noachian possibilities towards end-mission. Among Percy's top priorities is to see whats really going on with these shoreline deposits. How icy. 

It's amazing what a scientist can figure out with just a deuterium to hydrogen ratio, but the spirit of this video is to mark a prediction, that Percy is currently at the time of this post, testing. 

"I like to call it, carcinogenic sand, it's made entirely of organic molecules." -Catherine Neish 

Catherine Neish is an engineer. Among other differences, engineers tend to have slides of a lot more group photos than scientists do. In general if you watch a lot of LPI's, you get a strong feel for engineer videos, and this certainly is a great one.

This is a teaser for the upcoming dragonfly mission. A probe that was way too good to pass up, New-Frontiers, cheap and novel, and going to Titan!

We all have our favorites, and when picking worlds that make me glassy-eyed Titan and Europa are my top two. They are just so dynamic with complex chemistry, and potentially even more complex chemistry. Starting at 21:36 you can really see what I mean if you don't already know. Titan has very fun chemistry involved. What's possible and what is happening seem to be lining up from what we've seen so far, and that is even more exciting, because what's possible can get a lot more weird.

• Everyone take a moment and look at the slide at 24:20. That takes a lot out of reddittor guesswork.
• At 28:15 the slide is funny. 
• At 34:00 The "sand seas near salt crater and silk." Commit this bit of poetry to memory.  

Until Dragonfly actually deploys, I cannot imagine a better reference video. 

"We are so ignorant about the abiotic processes in the atmosphere that we cannot immediately exclude the claims that life exists today." -Joseph O'Rourke

One of the most painful things about Venus news is that even in LPI's, the speaker usually wastes a lot of time before getting to anything good. There's the rub though. If we knew jack about Venus the phosphine discovery would have been easily confirmable or disprovable. Thus we need to know more no matter what. This one does not start to go over anything interesting till 20:00. Starting slow and ending on a flurry of good stuff is pretty normal, and here we go.

• At 20:00 he's got a nice slide mapping two varieties of crater and volcano distribution. We've all seen the random distribution of craters dating Venus surface before, but this slide has a subdivision by implying pristine craters are younger than those that are infilled. 
• At 26:55 he starts getting into counterarguments about a stagnant-lid. He shows beautiful slides noting possible subduction. He will return to this idea when wrapping up. 
  
• At 39:37 there's a great slide showing a current hypothesis, the "squishy-lid" as opposed to a stagnant-lid. 
• The big reveal he saves for the end involves a possibility of a Basal Magma Ocean (BMO). The implications are pretty huge. If Venus lithosphere is floating, it follows physics more like Titan than Earth. And there are more dynamo possibilities. This is why he titles his lecture as he did. If a BMO then Venus is cooling slower than Earth, if not... then Venus should behave more Earth-like. 

What this LPI really is, it's one of those occasions where someone asks questions and halfheartedly implies predictions right before a probe tests the premise. So this LPI is a part of the VERITAS mission, setting up hypothesis to be tortured. There's a lot of innuendo in this lecture as he invokes the name of Sue Smrekar a few times. He's often not coming out and saying stuff, but he's tempted.   

One thing that planetary scientists are all thinking but not telling the general public for reasons that are probably more condescending than secret, is granite. We don't actually know how tectonics started on Earth. There are many old professors who will die on the hill they've been on all their lives. It all comes down to when and where granite started forming, and exactly how, the exact chemical process. Finding any granite at all on Venus, or absolutely none, is key to forwarding a debate that many have built their lives around. 

But then there's another thing, the resurfacing event, millions not billions of years ago. This isn't unrelated to the search for granite, and because of it, the absence of granite will have a great big asterisk no matter what, but there's a cool catch that I want to call attention to. 

In Natalie Starkey's book Fire & Ice she writes that Olympus Mons is so massive, its bulk would melt and sink were it on Earth... Now we have a mechanism to test for the Venus resurfacing. How epic is that? 

"Studying the surface is really one of our best kind of windows into the subsurface"-Mark Fox-Powell

So right off the bat this LPI is interesting. It covers one of the things that fascinate me most in planetary science, what I like to call ice-minerals. Unexplored features of the outer solar-system that are only recently beginning to be studied. 

• Starting with a slide at 10:00, well, after his opening slide, but he goes into it at 10:00, the "brine veins" that I'm so happy to see. These features exist in ices that one might think were homogeneous. The outer system worlds are literally made out of them, and are poorly understood at this time.
• Slide at 12:00. Salts. The more stuff is suspended in the ice, the more amorphous it can be. It comes down to a question of 'what is the exact stuff,' but this means potential ice strata!
• Just look at all that ice structure on the slide at 15:00.
• At 24:20 there are implications for how the science can science other science. You can infer many things about temperature and history by looking at structure. 
• at 38:00 he takes a much different yet equally interesting turn and talks about Axel Heiburg island and its salty diapirs. Axel Heiburg is double interesting, because it is just north of Devon Island, oft described as the most Mars-like place on Earth.

There's much more. Such a good LPI. I've never seen this Mark Fox-Powell before but he hit on some rare things that interest me. There's some implications to astro-biology, however I dislike dwelling on that click-baity stuff. There's interpretations of if the water of Enceladus' plumes will freeze into a glass configuration, or salt. Much of the context seems to be aimed at a return mission to Enceladus and Saturn. I hope all my readers support any probe proposal by default. 

Zombie fly fungus lures healthy male flies to mate with female corpses

A unique fungus survives by 'bewitching' male flies into mating with dead female flies. The longer a female fly carcass has lain and rotted, the greater the male's lust.

Link to Science Daily article. 

I use something similar to this in Sweet, however maybe I should use this exact example in Suffer. It's kind of a little too on-point with Venusian lore. 

Essentially the fungus is a fly STD, that happens to manipulate the behavior of the fly while consuming it. So the fungus takes turns infecting a female, then a male, and repeat. Little wonder it appears, in the end, splitting the abdomen of the fly. The fungus' name is Entomophthora Muscae. 

 It wouldn't be that bad of a book if this was the nineteen-fifties. Even then it lacks that certain charm. 

There are two things in science that are difficult, only two. The first is scale, and the second is terminology. This book is first and foremost, guilty of obfuscating its intended information with gratuitous name-dropping and narcissistic terminology. The kind scholars looking to name stuff after themselves are known for. It falls far short of the non-fiction standard set by Andy Knoll (who is among the many names dropped within). Ultimately, it's just bad at teaching, and the thing it should be able to teach is connecting mineralogy to evolution. Only two families of minerals dependent on biological evolution are even mentioned, and neither is elaborated. There is no reason for anyone who is not named within, or obligated to a dropped-name as a pre-doc, should read this, because A Brief History of Earth by Andy Knoll is far better in every way.

This book is the gold standard for all modern scientific non-fiction. The very measuring stick by which all others must be compared.