Transcript

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Fraser Cain [00:01:53 ] Astronomy cast. Episode 713 an update on volcanoes across the solar System. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, your weekly facts based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. My name is Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Doctor Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, Pamela. How you doing? 

Pamela Gay [00:02:17 ] I am doing well, and I just want to put an extra special thank you to all of our patrons out there, because as spring hits, we are going to be asking of far more of our editors than we do any other time of the year as the sniffles occur. And is it because of you, dear patrons? Right. No one has to listen to this as they lay in bed trying to learn about the universe, because no one wants that. So thank you, patrons, and thank you for tolerating my mispronunciation of your names week after week. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:53 ] And apologies in advance to everyone is going to have to edit this episode for all the sniffles. So I’ve got something I want to announce, which is that on Saturday, March 23rd will be the 25th anniversary of me Founding Universe Today. Wow. 25 years ago today. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:12 ] Amazing. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:13 ] That’s crazy. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it’s kind of amazing that I still do the same job. And I hope we’re getting better and better over time. And, that’s it. That’s all. I haven’t, I haven’t thought at all what I’m going to do. Like, maybe I’ll do a live stream on Saturday on my YouTube channel or something just to hang out with people and chat or whatever. I don’t know, but it is kind of bonkers. And I mean, when we think about how long we’ve been doing Astronomy Cast. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:44 ] Yeah, it’s. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:44 ] Amazing that you just keep showing up every day. And after a while, you’ve done something for a long time. So 25 years. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:52 ] Two years away from 20 years of astronomy cast. Yeah. And I think that means we need to start planning something. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:00 ] Right? Like I planned my own anniversary. Yeah. All right, so last week was one of the most exciting meetings we’ve seen from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, with hundreds of announcements and discoveries from various missions. One theme kept coming up, and the solar system is more volcanically active than we thought today. Looks for volcanism on other worlds. So I was watching. I hope not watching. I was browsing through all of the presentations that were given at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. It took me about three hours to go through day by day, paper by paper, and and then shortlisting the ones that are stories that we want to report on at Universe Today and. I was on one page. I want this. I want that. I want this, and then I go and I feel like I want that. And I’m like, okay, we’ve got a problem. I just counted them up. I’ve got. I’ve shortlisted 37 stories. Which are the ones that I think are most interesting. Things like the icy origin of the Martian moons, that there’s probably no geologic activity at the bottom of Europa. That one crater on Mars created billions of sub craters. It just goes on and on and on. And so hopefully over the next couple of weeks or months, we will be reporting on these as we have time and and budget to do this. What a week like is this. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:39 ] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:39 ] One of the most exciting weeks for LPC that you’ve ever seen. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:44 ] I. I think that short of when they had a mission that had just done something especially spectacular. Yes, there were a couple of years were like there would be a mission track that was more exciting, right? But when it came to like full on across the board, this mission really shown. And I also have to say it, it stood out for. It had ellipses. Classic humor. So, for instance, there are two sessions side by side. One is Venus surface. Is it hot in here or is it just me? And that one had across the hallway volcanism across the solar system. No, it’s not just you, Venus. I love this back and forth in titles and slides in haikus. Going with the abstracts. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:45 ] Well, that was the thing. You noticed that clearly there was a I don’t know whether it was an instruction from the people organizing it. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:51 ] It’s a tradition. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:53 ] Okay. So all of many of the abstracts were haikus or other forms of poetry. Which which was pretty fun. So they do that every year. I didn’t realize, yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:07:05 ] Yeah, that’s been going on for years. And it just gets a little bit more, spread across the community year after year. And this was perhaps the best hybrid meeting I have ever attended. I got press registration for the conference. It was held through V fairs, like just about every other conference on the planet has been since the pandemic hit. But what made this really good was they took the time to make sure that they acknowledged the virtual audience, included the virtual audience, and stayed on time so that you could actually jump between sessions. And it was just extremely well done. And then they left all the recordings up. Yeah. Which benefits both the people who went and the people who were virtual, because no matter which one you were, you can go back and watch the sessions that you weren’t able to see, because both the Venus volcanism and the volcanism everywhere else were held at the same time. And that’s rude. Yeah, that’s okay because of how they organized this. So I just want to say kudos to everyone at the Lunar and Planetary Institute. This was the best virtual conference I’ve attended so far. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:21 ] Wonderful. Yeah. Congratulations to everybody involved. You know, you’re doing it right when the from a reporting sense, the worst place to be is at the conference. Yeah. Because that that that if you just stay home, you’ve got your coffee, you got your slippers, and you’ve got live feeds from everything that’s going on, then that is the best place to do your reporting on the news that is coming out of the conference. It’s the worst place to interview people and make those personal connections, but still. All right, let’s get let’s get on with the actual task at hand, which is, when we are not, celebrating like we are talking about volcanoes across the solar system. So what’s the new stuff that we learned this week? 

Pamela Gay [00:09:07 ] I think the one that caused me to simply, like, stop what I was doing and focus momentarily just on LPC was IO has moving and major hotspots. We’re getting those results from Juno, which is also on the chopping block that was also announced. So yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:28 ] And Chandra, oh. 

Pamela Gay [00:09:30 ] I think that’s what Chandra and Maven are all, being shut down. Circa what was it, fiscal year 26, give or take a fiscal year, Hubble is getting a 5% reduction. They said the cost continues to remain over budget. It’s just what it’s going to do. Right. All right. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:55 ] So focus. We are we are focusing on volcanoes, feral, Pinos, io, moving hotspots. What’s going on? 

Pamela Gay [00:10:06 ] It’s this is a world that there aren’t necessarily conclusions yet. There is just data. And we have the same thing coming to us from Venus. So, there are hotspots. These are places where your lack of tectonics allows, the version of lava they have on io to pop out through the crust of io. And every time something new flies by that little world, we are able to map out. And because of Juno’s orbit this year, once a month, it is going past io. Or actually, this was true for 2023. Every month it’s going past io, and it was getting a little bit closer and a little bit closer until it made its closest approach in December perfectly timed for this conference. And they were able to see how the world evolved, how things heated up and cooled down over time. There’s going