Energy. on this world and elsewhere. Instructor: Gordon D. Cates Office: Physics 106a, Phone: (434)

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1 Energy on this world and elsewhere Instructor: Gordon D. Cates Office: Physics 106a, Phone: (434) Course web site available at click on classes and find Physics or at Lecture #28 December 5, 2017

2 Announcements Final: Monday, December 11, here, 2pm All multiple choice Review sheet to be posted shortly Extra Credit guidance to be posted shortly, due December 13th. Two page paper. Homework due tomorrow, Wednesday. Times for review session? Second problems session tonight, 6:30 PM

3 Energy Elsewhere

4 Space exploration today

Launched: November 26, 2011 Landed: August 6, 2012 Landing site: Gale Crater, a ~150 km diameter

5 Nasa s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL): the Curiosity rover Mission: Determine if Mars was ever able to support microbial life. Launched: November 26, 2011 Landed: August 6, 2012 Landing site: Gale Crater, a ~150 km diameter crater at the center of which is Aeolis Mons, popularly known as Mount Sharp, that rises ~5 km from the crater floor, and is believed to be composed of sedimentary layers.

6 Getting Curiosity to Mars

7 Getting Curiosity to Mars

8 Real footage of the decent to the landing site

9 Real footage of the decent to the landing site

10 Illustration of operations in Gale Crater

11 Illustration of operations in Gale Crater

12 Curiosity s Scientific Instruments Mast Camera ChemCam (remote sensing) Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer Sample Analysis on Mars (SAM) Drilling capability Much more.. Photo at right is a self portrait taken on mars. Robot arm is not visible since it was used to take the photograph.

13 Actual photo with the rover photo-shopped in for scale

14 Actual photo

15 Actual photo I added this slide AFTER the lecture, but I want to remind myself it would be a good thing to include.

16 Actual photo I added this slide AFTER the lecture, but I want to remind myself it would be a good thing to include.

17 Analysis of drilling samples

18 Discussion of time-varying methane

19 The Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn

20 The Cassini Mission to Saturn Titan Enceladus

21 Water geysers from Saturn s moon Enceladus

22 The ice-covered ocean of Enceladus RESEARCH ARTICLE PLANETARY GEOLOGY Cassini finds molecular hydrogen in the Enceladus plume: Evidence for hydrothermal processes J. Hunter Waite, 1,2 * Christopher R. Glein, 1 * Rebecca S. Perryman, 1 Ben D. Teolis, 1 Brian A. Magee, 1,3 Greg Miller, 1 Jacob Grimes, 1 Mark E. Perry, 4 Kelly E. Miller, 1 Alexis Bouquet, 1,2 Jonathan I. Lunine, 5 Tim Brockwell, 1 Scott J. Bolton 1 Saturn s moonenceladushasanice-coveredocean;aplumeofmaterialeruptsfrom cracks in the ice. The plume contains chemical signatures of water-rock interaction between the ocean and a rocky core. We used the Ion Neutral Mass Spectrometer onboard the Cassini spacecraft to detect molecular hydrogen in the plume. By using the instrument s open-source mode, background processes of hydrogen production in the instrument were minimized and quantified, enabling the identification of a statistically significant signal of hydrogen native to Enceladus. We find that the most plausible source of this hydrogen is ongoing hydrothermal reactions of rock containing reduced minerals and organic materials. The relatively high hydrogen abundance in the plume signals thermodynamic disequilibrium that favors the formation of methane from CO 2 in Enceladus ocean.

23 Space exploration in the near future

24 Nasa s new Space Launch System (SLS) for deep space exploration

25 The Orion Spacecraft

26 Deep Space Gateway

27 Deep Space Transport

28 Issues when living in space

29 Issues when living in space

30 Issues when living in space

31 Space exploration in the distant future

32 Self-assembling robots

33 So... is there a moral to this (Physics 1110) story?

34 Society grew through the industrial revolution using cheap energy from coal, oil, and more recently, natural gas.

35 The fossil fuels are scarcer now, and we should expect prices to fluctuate, but ultimately climb quite high.

36 The time scales over which fossil fuels will become expensive is unclear, and depends on many factors. Regardless of price, we are paying a steep environmental price for the continued use of fossil fuels, and this is true independent of global warming

37 I truly believe that history will judge this time period by how we deal with the issue of shifting our energy infrastructure, and the way in which it impacts our planet.

38 More distantly, we should dwell on the fact that our star, the sun has huge amounts of energy to offer. And our solar system has huge quantities of resources.

Image: solarsystem.nasa.gov. Orbital trajectory of Cassini spacecraft ( ).

Image: solarsystem.nasa.gov. Orbital trajectory of Cassini spacecraft ( ). 1 Enceladus This image, acquired by the Cassini spacecraft, captures Saturn, its rings (edge on), and the moon Enceladus. It was discovered that this moon emits jets of ice from possible underground seas.