Back from Baja

BajaMarch2008 - 35, originally uploaded by davidagalvan.

Reg and I went to Bahia de Los Angeles last week with our friends Tim and Julie. Tim knows the area really well, and led us to various islands for kayaking, fishing, and snorkeling. It was lots of fun! Check out some photos at my flickr site! For now, it's back to work!

Antarctica

I arrived in Antarctica on Friday, January 4th. My advisor, Mark Moldwin, and I have come here to repair and re-deploy a magnetometer that is based at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAISD). We successfully fixed the electronics box, and have been ready to go to WAISD to redeploy it since last Friday, Jan 11. Since then the weather at WAISD has been bad enough that every flight since then has been cancelled. Mark has commitments he must return to back in the U.S., and we are running out of time to get out to WAISD and get back to McMurdo, before then flying up to Christchurch, New Zealand, and on to Los Angeles.

At this point, we are just hoping to get a day or two worth of time at WAISD to re-connect the electronics box to the power, GPS, Iridium and sensor cables. If we don’t have time to raise all the elements of the magnetometer site, another trip down in a year may be required. We’re hoping it won’t come to that, not because I wouldn’t love to come down here again, but because of the extra cost of an additional trip just to dig out and raise the magnetometer site.

Here at McMurdo, the largest research station on the continent, life is similar to living at a typical university. There is a population of around 1000 people during these summer months, which drops down to about 200 during the southern winter. The sun, of course, never sets here. It just goes round and round in the sky, ranging from ~30 degrees above the horizon and due north at local noon, to about 10 degrees above the horizon and due south at midnight. I had my “Snowcraft Training” course, which involved learning to make a Kinsey (snow-cave), snow-block walls, setting up Scott Tents, using a high frequency (HF) radio to communicate with receivers up to 1000 miles away (we actually got to talk to people at the South Pole, just from our camp site!), and of course spending a night out on the ice shelf.

Mark and I have done several short hikes around “town”. It really is beautiful terrain when the weather is good. There isn’t all that much wildlife right around the station; I haven’t seen any penguins yet. Though an adelie penguin delayed our landing by being out on the ice runway when were supposed to be landing. We had to circle a couple of times while the airfield staff chased it away. I have seen probably 100 weddell seals from a distance, lying out on the ice shelf near melt pool and cracks in the ice. And there is the occasional skua scavenger bird (resembles a brown seagull) hoping to steal food from the people here in town.

It’s the height of summer down here, so the temperature hovers around 30 F, though it’s in the teens or single digits when you factor in windchill. The wind really does make all the difference here. The extreme cold weather gear (ECW) given us by the U.S. Antarctic Program is great though!

HDTV from the Moon!

The Japanese spacecraft KAGUYA ("SELENE", in English) has taken the first high definition video from lunar orbit! Now it's even easier to imagine what it would be like to be in orbit around the moon!

Check it out the awesome video here:
http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2007/11/20071107_kaguya_movie_e.html

And there's more information about the spacecraft here:

http://www.selene.jaxa.jp/en/index.htm

Giant Black Sea Bass

Video:


2 weeks ago, I went out diving in La Jolla Cove to see if we could catch a glimpse of the black sea bass that are said to be in the kelp forests this time of year. We had no luck, mainly because we descended on the wrong buoy. This past Sunday, I went back in the water with my sister to look for the seabass at a different buoy. . . and we found 'em!

I dive with two of these black sea bass every week at the Long Beach Aquarium, but this is the first time I've seen them in the wild. This species can grow to as large as 500 lbs, though the ones we saw in La Jolla were probably ~150 - 200 lbs. We saw 4 of them at one time, and they were very cool to watch. Check out the video above, and take a look at some of my pictures from the dives at my flickr site.

Dawn and the pursuit of purpose

The Dawn spacecraft launched this morning from Cape Canaveral. Dr. Russell, the Principal Investigator of the mission, is a professor in my department here at UCLA. Dawn is going to be the first spacecraft to orbit two separate planetary bodies (the asteroids, Vesta and Ceres) in the same mission. Its mission is to study these asteroids to determine their geophysical properties: whether their interiors are differentiated (like the Earth's), or undifferentiated (like a smaller asteroid or rock). It will send back data that will help us to understand the process of planetary formation.

One of the reasons I chose to go into space science as a career is stuff like this. The sense of true exploration; of finding ways to explore places no human has ever been before, and of using these observations to better understand the amazing and surprising universe we find ourselves in.

In my (possibly a bit melodramatic) estimation, organizations like NASA are important because they help to give humanity a purpose. At the end of the day we humans spend so much time, money, sweat, and blood fighting with each other over chunks of dirt, hurting each other because we don't believe in the same mythology, working hard to ensure that more members of the human race are able to live healthy lives, or simply finding new ways to keep ourselves entertained. But what for? All the military effort spent keeping us safe, all the medical science helping us to survive, all the time we spend on enjoying and accentuating our art and culture is essential and vital to our existence as a species; don't get me wrong. But should we be content with merely existing?

Increasing the percentage of the human population that can expect to live long, healthy, and happy lives is a noble pursuit. . . but it is ultimately all for the purpose of our continued existence. Assuming we humans continue to improve our ability to survive, to increase our population, to increase our quality of life. . . what do we intend to do with ourselves? Will we just sit on the porch and enjoy the existence our efforts have earned us, content to live out our lives happily, then disappear after our individual deaths?

It is efforts like exploration, or natural science simply for the sake of satisfying our curiosity, that can give humanity deeper purpose: to explore and understand our amazing universe. We are such an insignificant species, a result of an accident of physics and chemistry, on a tiny world in a vast, vast universe. There is so much in our world and beyond it for us to explore. Stretching our vision out into space is an effort in the pursuit of our purpose.