Monday, July 18, 2022

"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. 

No comments:

Post a Comment

  "Best case scenario to be modeled." -Peter Jenniskens This is mostly a storybook slideshow. So it's pretty entertaining, but...