Plus dinosaur shrimp, sounds of the sea, floods on Mars, and good wine.

Hey readers,

I'll be taking a break from writing Explore and Observe for a couple of months so don't expect to see another edition until the new year. We've been going strong for over two years now but I'm getting married in a couple of weeks and need to focus on that among other things! In the meantime, I'd really appreciate it if you could fill out this short survey so I can get feedback and plan for the future. Thanks a bunch!

-Evan 

Correction from last time: White Sands National Park, the location of the lead story about "ghost tracks" is actually in New Mexico, not Arizona. Thanks to Steve C. for correcting me!

#01 WITH DIAMONDS

+ The Lucy spacecraft successfully lifted off Saturday morning, kicking off a 12-year mission to explore the Trojan asteroids which orbit the sun in the vicinity of Jupiter and likely contain material that has been largely unchanged since the formation of the solar system. Remarkably, the name Lucy is not an acronym for anything and instead pays homage to the 3.5 million-year-old hominin (an evolutionary group that includes humans) skeleton that was nicknamed Lucy (which itself was named after the famous Beatles song). In the same way that Lucy the hominin gave us a window into the early evolution of humans, scientists hope that Lucy the spacecraft will provide a glimpse into the early evolution of the solar system. And yes, there are actually some diamonds on board as a functional component of a science instrument!

#02 TRIOPS

+ Following heavy rains in Arizona this year, hundreds of prehistoric-looking three-eyed shrimp emerged from a temporary lake in the desert landscape of Wupatki National Monument. The creatures, known as Triops, lay eggs that can remain dormant in the desert for decades, waiting for conditions to become favorable again. 

#03 AUDIOPHILE

+ Although the northern lights are mostly known for their appearance, turns out they can make noise too. Curiously, the auroras originate too far above the earth for sound to propagate down to the surface so scientists have never fully understood how they make noise. To answer the question acoustician Unto Laine made hundreds of recordings of the northern lights and was able to correlate the sounds with the existence of an atmospheric condition called an inversion layer just a few hundred feet above the ground. It seems that the same geomagnetic activity that causes the aurora can also trigger electric discharges in the inversion layer, resulting in dull static being heard on the ground.

+ The Monterey Bay Aquarium and Research Institute has continuously collected audio from the bottom of Monterey Bay since 2015. The enormous amount of high-definition data is now freely available to download on the internet, providing a boon to ocean researchers who may not have the budget for expensive long-duration experiments.

#04 MARS

+ Images returned from the Perseverance rover provide additional evidence that Gusev Crater, the landing site of the rover, was once indeed the bottom of an expansive lake. Large boulders embedded in young rock outcrops near the landing site likely originated outside the crater and were transported downstream by flash floods millions of years ago.

#05 TO SPACE

+ China launched three astronauts to their new Tiangong space station for a 6-month mission, the longest ever attempted by the upstart space program.

+ Virgin Galactic has been cleared to resume flight operations after the FAA completed an investigation into safety issues on Richard Branson's trip to space.

#06 WINE

+ Isreal archeologist announced the discovery of a 1,500-year-old wine-making facility capable of processing over 500,000 gallons of wine a year. The complex contained "five wine presses, warehouses, kilns for producing clay storage vessels and tens of thousands of fragments and jars."

#07 THAT'S WILD

+ Scotland has become a world leader in rewilding. A newly announced effort involving the Affric Highlands aims to return as much as 500,000 acres of land to a wild state.

+ Winemakers in Napa Valley are finding that barn owls and raptors are an effective alternative to rodenticide for controlling the population of pests.  

#08 A GOOD BOOK

+ It's perhaps ironic, but I find inspiration for future exploration by studying the past. A book I particularly enjoy flipping through is Robert Powers's Planetary Encounters: The Future of Unmanned Spaceflight, written all the way back in 1978. Obviously, the book is well out of date so don't expect the latest and greatest news. However, what it lacks in timeliness it offers in historical context. I find it inspiring to read about the missions that we now take for granted, planetary probes, orbiters around the outer planets, rovers on Mars, massive space telescopes, etc., from when they were still on the drawing board. It's encouraging to see that all ideas had to start from somewhere, and gives me hope that the ambitious missions we are working on now may still come to fruition. On an unrelated note, today NASA is known for high-quality graphics and animations, but I love the old pencil-sketch style of rendering space missions and this book is full of such retro imagery!

"Let us not apologize for loving the stars, for having read and dreamed, plotted and calculated, for having manufactured and flown these pieces of our dreams which have shown us such fantastic reality. Let us build more, go on now, planet to planet, moon to moon, asteroid to asteroid until we try for the great long distance between this sun of ours and some other one and see what the hell is out there."

#09 SURVEY REMINDER

+ If you've made it this far I want to hear from you! Don't forget to fill out this short survey (the same one I referenced above) to help inform the future of Explore and Observe! 

That's all for this week! You can respond to this email to tell me about anything you liked or didn't like, tell me about a project you're working on, or suggest a story. You might also forward this email to a friend so they can subscribe too!

- Evan Hilgemann