One more day of hard work with good results. We got 1.25 meters in the fourth borehole. The first 40 cm were pure ice followed by permafrost of volcanic ash. Really interesting!!!. Laboratory work confirmed plenty of biomarkers including DNA, on the samples from the previous boreholes. Crossing fingers for same results in the last one. Also some bacteria started to grow.

We had to stop the fourth and last borehole due to other snow storm. We have a terrible storm but we have to recover material from the top of the hill because the Spanish ship Las Palmas will pick us up in two days for crossing Hoces Sea. Going back to Ushuaia. Be tuned…. Others results from Madrid lab will be post on the blog in a near future.
I would like to thank, from here, to the Spanish Army of XXV Spanish campaign to Antarctica with Mr. Casals as major and commander of the Gabriel de Castilla base for their help anymoment of our research. Our work had been impossible to develop without them.

Permafrost in Antarctica

The last two days were really productive. Good weather, not so strong wind and finally we got 1m 52 cm in the third borehole. We decided to drill this third borehole in a permafrost area.  After drilling at high and middle temperature we pretended to get cold temperature to look for psychrophiles. Cold loving bacteria leaving nearby to hot environment (hydrothermal volcanic source), tremendously interesting from an Astrobiology point of view. We had finally to stop drilling due to a very strong snow, but we have identified a very interesting place for a fourth borehole: Glacial ice on the top of a frosted (permafrost) volcanic ash.  Tremendously similar environment to the Martian permafrost basaltic areas. The cross sections will allow us to identify not only psycrophiles but also some mesophiles and thermopiles. These contact environments are possible new places to include in the Trans National Access 1 activity in a possible future Europlanet RI project extension. I will propose it for the future.

Will continue….

More about Antarctica

Still bad weather around. Finally we decided yesterday to go up to the hill just to continue with the second borehole. We got 60 cm depth at the second point the day before. The second point to be drilled was selected due to the proximity to the fault but not high temperature in the ground. At the very top of the column the temperature was 2 ºC. We started to drill and got 60 cm with 67 ºC. Finally, yesterday we got 1.10 m with 63 ºC at the bottom. 

Samples look like very interesting due to their composition, volcanic ashes with organic matter. Some bugs are growing after culturing them.

Some animals were very interested in us as represented in the picture. 

Antarctica

Today starts the trip to the cold of Antarctica. Members of Europlanet community are travelling to the Spanish Base in Deception Isle. 

Felipe Gomez, from Astrobiology Center in Madrid and coordinator of activities TNA 1 and JRA 2 of Europlanet RI project will be blogging directly from Antarctica. We are waiting right now for the ship that will transport us to the isle from Punta Arenas in Chile.

It will be a trip of four days. During two days we will be travelling along the Hoces Sea, one of the most stormy area in the world. We expect a "funny" travers to Antarcica. We will tell you in some days after all. After those four days we expect to have internet access to continue with our blogging activity in the Europlanet webWe will be posting the progress of the trip, pictures and the work we will be implementing along the following month in Antarctica.

Just we arrived to Gabriel de Castilla Spanish base. This base is managed by Spanish military personnel fro Defence Ministry. It is a pleasure for us to be here with these nice people supporting us for any necessity we could have in our work.

The team we are here is composed by Graciela de Diego, Mercedes Moreno, Olga Prieto and myself, Felipe Gomez.

We pretend to study the microbial diversity along the traverse between a thermal environment in the top of “Cerro Caliente” (hot mountain) and the permafrost in the down part of the valley.

Gabriel de Castilla Base is located at Deception Island in Antarctica, which is the tip of an active volcano with hydrothermal sources around. This is the part in we are interested on, in contact with the cold environment of the permafrost.

The first work day was yesterday with a very bad weather, snow and hard wind in the top of Cerro Caliente.

We arrived to the Spanish Base a couple of days ago after the traverse of Hoces Sea. We traversed this area in Las Palmas ship, a military vessel. Hoces or Drake Sea is one of the stormiest areas around the world, and normally, the traverse is very hard with strong movement of the vessel.

More news from Antarctica:

The methology to apply for sampling is drilling with an electrical engine for taking samples at 1 m. We will do three different drills at three different locations: at the top of the hill where a heat source is located, a nearby location where not so high temperature is located and, finally, just in the valley, where permafrost is located.

Today we started to drill in the top of Cerro Caliente. The place has a wonderful view to the entrance (Neptune docs) to the internal sea of the cone of the volcano. But, as usually, the weather was hard to deal with. But, finally, there is good news; after a hard drilling day we got samples at 80 cm deep. The temperature of the samples was 167 ºC. The temperature gradient just promises good scientific conclusions. To be continued…

Europlanet and the Future

We are gathered together at the beautiful Austrian Academy of Sciences to discuss the future of Europlanet.  We are nearing the end of the current project, which has been funded by the European Commission's Framework 7 programme for the 2009-2012 time period.  In this phase, Europlanet has covered a wide range of activities: it has brought together Europe's planetary scientists at the annual European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) and science workshops, enabled personnel exchanges, developed of modelling tools and catalogues, and even organised field trips to places on Earth that resemble Mars and Europa.

But what does the European planetary community want for the future and how can they go about achieving their goals?  It's an interesting topic leading to lively discussion.

In the shorter term, the announcement went out yesterday for EPSC 2012, which will be held in Madrid. The meeting will cover the scope of planetary science with typically 50 sessions of different types.  For details, see http://www.epsc2012.eu/

Europlanet's National Outreach Nodes meet up in Meudon

Europlanet Outreach Nodes (left to right): Magda (Romania),
Martina (Austria), Zdenek (Czech Republic/Slovakia),
Livia (Italy), Eleni (Greece/Europlanet Core Team),
Thierry (France/Europlanet Coordinator), Olivier (webmaster),
Emil (Germany), Jean-Pierre (Europlanet Outreach Advisor),
Anita (UK/Europlanet Core Team) & Hanna (Switzerland)

Thanks to all the Europlanet national nodes who attended the biannual node meeting at the Observatoire de Paris-Meudon on the 23-24th May.

The meeting was an opportunity to share experiences and update each other on activities, as well as to learn some new skills.

Olivier Marco, Europlanet’s outreach webmaster, gave a morning workshop on using new features on the website, plus an overview of Social Media tools available, including Twitter, Facebook.   This led to some very interesting discussion on differences between social media use in different countries and how much social media requires a personal face and how to manage the personal/professional divide in forums like Facebook.

During the meeting, two case studies of outreach projects were presented by Livia Giacomini, the Italian Node, and Emil Khasili, the German Node:

Livia presented a practical case study of how INAF have used social media to promote and develop a community for the Italian team entering the International Astronomy Olympics.  Before setting up the project Livia and her colleague, Stefano Sandrelli, spent some time finding out from the audiences they were targeting (teenagers and professional astronomers) which social media tools they used. This highlighted how much variation there is in social media use by different age-groups e.g. the Olimpiadi Italiane Di Astronomia Facebook page has been hugely successful for building a community of Italian teenagers. However, Livia’s survey showed that the same audience would not use Twitter at all. Download Livia’s presentation.

Emil presented a very honest and interesting review of a Saturn-themed schools event that he organised in Heilbronn, Germany, in April 2011.  The presentation generated a very useful discussion on how to build networks with educators and existing outreach providers, how to plan events that fit in with the constraints of a school’s curriculum and timetable and how to evaluate the success of an event.  Download Emil’s presentation

Success on Saturn

Tonight the observing gods are on our side - clear skies, low to zero humidity, and no problems with the telescope or its instruments. So Tom Stallard and I managed to get ~2 hours observing Saturn, whilst the Cassini spacecraft took a series of infrared images. Our infrared spectra of H-three-plus are designed to complement Cassini's Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS).

Our spectra on the Keck II telescope have nearly 100 times the ability to find the emission lines of individual molecules. But VIMS gets a much broader sweep of the whole spectrum of Saturn. Our spectra scan the planet from north-to-south, but only at one longitude - the noonday meridian, where the local time on Saturn is 12 noon. Cassini VIMS, however, gets a full picture of the northern hemisphere facing the spacecraft.

Tonight our Keck observations are also being backed up by Henrik Melin and James Donaghue working on the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility. They are getting images of the northern and southern aurora, at a wavelength sensitive to the H-three-plus emissions.

That means that, between the ground-based observations and the spacecraft, we should build up a really good picture of what's happening to Saturn's atmosphere on a semi-global scale. And that's important, because it enables us to understand all the pressures pushing and pulling the ringed planet.

Europe's planetary scientists have not been so good at carrying out this ground-based support for their space missions as their American colleagues. That's one of the reasons for Europlanet's NA1 "Ground-based support for space missions" activity.