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What's up?
It's Sali Ward. Welcome back another episode of ologies. Hi guys, I'm happy continued summer to all of our friends in the Northern Hemisphere, Happy sweater weather to the Southern friends. Boy, howdy do we have a special two parter for you this week and next Mars. Are you ready? Okay? So that that orange orb in the night sky. It's fodder for science fiction and it's a place where billionaires ask themselves can we go there? When we ruin the planet we're on. It's kind of like a very dry rebound
after we crash and burn our marriage with Earth. So maybe you love Mars. Maybe you don't know why people love Mars. Maybe you're like me, And until a few years ago, I was like, wait, is Mars a really hot? Like fiery one? Because it's red and stuff? I had no idea. So this week you're not on getting answers to the questions you feel too stupid to ask, but also some in depth knowledge of what's coming up next from one of the most chill but deeply enthusiastic ologists
I've ever gotten to sit down with. Whoo Okay, but first I'll be quick. So this show would not be made without the patrons. At patreon dot com slash ologies. You can join that club for as little as a dollar a month twenty five cents a week. Unless you see what topics are coming up next, you can submit questions that I ask theologists directly. Also, I say your name sometimes I pronounce it right. So this is an
entirely independently made podcast. You guys make it happen. Another way to support the podcast if you'd like, is to go to ologiesmerch dot com. There's tots and hats and shirts and pins and just in are you ready for this? Ologies swimsuits and backpacks. You can put science on your butts. It's very exciting. It's so exciting that I was like, I should have a sale. I should just have a sale.
So if you enter the code Campologies cam Ologies at check out, you'll get ten percent off your whole order all through July. So if you decide you need an Ologies bathing suit with bugs on your butt or boobs or whatever, go to ologiesmerch dot com go get them. Also, your reviews and ratings keep it up in the charts
for other people to discover. And I'm often writing this without a bra I'm recording in my closet, and your reviews make my week, and then I read them, such as Nikki the Nerd, who titled her review I know you're reading this Alli.
She's not wrong.
She said this podcast is Filippin' awesome. Every week. I now have new random factoids to spit out of people in awkward situations. So thank you Ali for being a geek and giving your fellow nerds a place to geek out together. I want to know how awkward your situations get. I told one hundred people over a PA system about getting my hands stuck in an escalator, and this story did not go as well as I thought. Anyway, it happens, Okay, Areology,
Let's get into it. So first off, Mars has a lot of iron in the soil, which makes it red, which makes it look like the Solar system's big, bloody eyeball. So hence we named it after the god of war, Mars. So it's Aris in Greek mythology. And if you want to know more about Roman's ripping off Greeks, listen to the mythology episode. So the Greeks were apparently kind of ambivalent toward Aries. They were like, he's jacked and he could kick ass in battle, but also he's kind of
a dick. So the word areology means study of Mars. So this ologist was introduced to me via email by my NASA friend Casey. Hi, Casey, Hi, Christine Casey's email between us simply said do you need introductions?
No, you do not.
Then I received a message back from her saying that she listens to the podcast. She's been a patron since approximately ten minutes after listening to her first episode, and that once she played ologies with her friend where she pretended to be me and interviewed him, and she said, and I quote, I even talked about how dirty my hair was and put in asides. And let's just say I wanted to print up her email and frame it in something ornate and gold. So this interview was on,
it was happening. So she grew up in the heart of la She has the most laid back textbook so cal accent I have ever heard, maybe the chilliest areologist on any of the known planets. So I got off
a plane from a work trip. I had it straight from the airport to a little conference room with squeaky chairs at Caltech in Pasadena to talk about like what Mars's deal is and the best sci fi about it, some super recent discoveries about moons and life, insane dust storms, the rovers they're building, and some of the best science dreams I've literally ever heard in my life, So please prepare for a journey into space and your rocky subconscious
with aerologist Jennifer Booze. All right, so you know the drill, but this is a microphone.
You talk into it. Okay, this is gonna be fun. It's great. You just so just talk regularly about the microphone.
Yeah, exactly. You look at this.
You're already a prop.
You're already so good. At this point, I looked over and I saw that Jennifer was prepared with six printed sheets of questions from the Patreon page, asked by listeners, annotated by hand with her answers. She took the liberty of printing and answering them to prep for this. Oh my god, you printed them out and answered them.
Oh my god, I don't want to be caught off guard.
This is great. This is the most prepared to anyone's ever been. So we'll get to all those questions in part two of this series next week, but just know she's a wonderful genius. Also, her website is so worth perusing. It's her name minus the vowels, so jnnfr dot besy, and it features this pixely drawing of herself with purple hair and a turtle body floating in the cosmos, and it has photos of her work, links to significant space labs, and a ton of easter eggs that you just have
to click around to get into. And as soon as I saw it, I was like, I'm interviewing this very bizarrely amazing human being.
I love her.
Also, someone should clone her and populate a planet with a bunch more of her. Your website's so spectacular, by the way, I love.
Thank you so much. I thought about making it more professional. Nah that same, No, don't do that. Okay, So you study Mars. Yes, you're an areologist.
Yes?
Is that correct?
Yeah, well I think I'm a planetary geologist who studies Mars. But I study marsologist.
Okay, how long have you studied Mars. I'm going to get straight into it with basic bitch questions.
Okay, I started studying Mars when I got to Caltech, so it's been about six and a half years.
So Doctor Jennifer Booze got her bachelor's and master's degree in geological and planetary sciences at this little startup school. I don't know if you've heard of it. It's called MIT dude, and she just defended her geological PhD this April at Caltech. During her schooling, she just always dreamed of working with rocks from far away lands. And it's so easy to spend your twenties focused on dipping pizza into nacho sauce and trying to get your brother to
buy you drugs. But Jennifer was like, I gotta get my mids on some space rocks. When you got the call that you knew that you would get to work on this, like for real, Okay.
So like maybe that moment would be when I was an undergrad I applied to work in a lab that studied moon rock and that would be like my first time, like my first real exposure. And when I got that that research position, it was like a summer position. I was like, Oh my god, I'm gonna be touching moon rocks, like they're going to be in my possession, Like I get to look at them every day, and like they
came from the Moon. And I was reading Apollo transcripts like when they found the rocks, and I was like listening to the audio tapes and like, oh that's when they found my rock. Oh my god, and like and then one day I broke the rock, and I was like, they're gonna fire me for sure, but they didn't because they were.
Like, yeah, a rock's break.
Oh my.
But that day when I got that job, I was just thrilled beyond belief that, like I that they someone trusted me with a rock that came from the moon that like an astronaut collected.
Oh my god, Yeah, that must have just been such butterflies.
Yeah, that was like super super exciting and what.
A good lesson to learn that, like you can break a moon rock and life will go on.
Yeah. I remember that day I broke the rock and I just packed up my stuff and went to my dorm. I wrote an email to my advisor. I was like, I broke the rock. I'll be at my dorm and I like went and I was like really upset, and I told the people in my hall. I was like, you guys, like I definitely got fired just now, and like they all comforted me, but they were like, yeah, it sounds serious.
And then my advisor was like are you coming back?
And we've all broken rocks so cute. And then I was like, oh, did you like pack up your stuff like your desk area. Yeah, like I'd only been there like a couple of days, but I like packed up everything in the lab. I like made it all neat, and I just like put put it in my I just went back. I just went home, and I was just waiting just so he was at lunch. And it's like if he hadn't been at lunch, I would have just gone to his office and probably sat down and like cried and like I broke a rock.
But I did. I just send him in this email, like I broke a rock.
Oh, I just picture you walking across campus with like a box and like am that says I'm loney for the moon and like just being like, I guess this isn't my office.
Oh my god.
That's the cutest thing ever.
That's great that they like the in my In my experience, my advisors have been really understanding and like, you know, just patient with me too. I mean it's nice that even scientists who study like the coolest shit even on other planets, are all like, we're all earthlings. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, we're all just little humans. Yeah, that's so cute.
And speaking of little humans, when Jennifer was just a wee one, her folks took her on tours of NASA's JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and she just became deeply stoked looking at the models and the replicas of the rovers. These things bumble around Mars, scrubbing rocks and taking pictures, and eventually some models zap rocks with lasers. Right now NASA is planning the next one. There's a ton unnamed rover to add to the four already up there.
There's Sojourner, which kind of turned into a pumpkin metaphorically in nineteen ninety seven. And there's Spirit, which is stuck with a broken wheel, but up until a few years ago was bravely pinging back. And then there's Spirits twin rover opportunity, which has been cruising around since two thousand and four. And then there's a larger Curiosity. This is the one you've probably heard of a lot more recently. It's about the size of a Mini Cooper, so says
NASA itself. And Curiosity landed in August of twenty twelve, and it's been kind of bebopping around a crater named Gail for the last six years. So fun fact to help areologists figure out how loose the soil is and how far the rover has traveled. The Curiosity tires have a few dots and dashes in the tread that spell out a secret message in Morse code. What does it spell?
What it spell spells JPL ding dong. So I did some digging in the dusty soil of the internet and I discovered that Rover driver Mark Mamone, he's ginger haired, jolly looking, is responsible for that Morse code. And also his cell number was just like listed. So I did what any classy stranger would do at eight pm on a Wednesday, and I texted him just being like, hey, Mark, you totally don't know me, but my name is Ali Ward and I just found out you're the one who
proposed the JPL Morse code on the Curiosity tires. I'm just saying, hey, that was badass, super cool idea. But it's been five days and I have not received a response, so don't do that. So back to the Curiosity Rover landing in twenty twelve, which was an exciting time for space nuts. So Curiosity Rover, Yeah, we landed it one six years ago.
I think that's right.
Did you stay up late to watch it.
Yeah, I volunteered at a like a public event where they were showing the landing and stuff.
So what was I didn't see the landing. I think it was in the middle of the night, right.
It was late.
I feel like it's like eleven or something. I don't really remember, though.
What was that moment like when it touched down, Like, what were.
You doing.
That shopping from?
We were just all watching the screen, and I think there was lots of screaming and people crying and lots of general excitement.
Take it. There's raw video of the NASA JPL control room when the Curiosity rover touches down safely. Millions of dollars, so many millions of dollars, thousands and thousands of hours and trials and failures and redos and teamwork to get this thing on fucking Mars. People in the control room, like bearded men, grown women, just all weeping with joy. Did I watch it and cry? Maybe I did? None
of your business. Jennifer at the time was also pretty jazzed because that meant she didn't have to throw her unfinished PhD thesis into a burning garbage can.
My PhD research was going to be using that data. So it was just like super nervous also that it maybe wouldn't work and so and then I was gonna have to pick a new project. But I was like super excited also, So yeah, it was like high emissions and.
I like if it literally bit the dust, you'd be like, well, there goes my PhD. What was your PhD project? My PhD?
Uh basically came down to like five projects related to Mars.
Wait a second before we even talk about what she was doing on Mars. Let's just talk about Mars. Let's just back the hell up for one second. As a planetary geologist, can you run me through, like what the fuck is Mars? What's its deal? Why is it so dry? How cold is it? How big is it? Just tell me what we're working with here, Give me some specs. Like if you were if you were a dog, and you're like, I don't know what Mors is, like, how would you start?
Okay, So Mars. You know it's the next planet from ours sun, so it's going to be like older. It's also a lot smaller.
At its closest, Mars is around thirty four million miles. That's fifty five million kilometers. If you live in a country with a metric system and good healthcare away. So scale wise, Mars is about half the size of Earth and has roughly one third the gravity. One third. So I looked up a few simulators of Mars gravity, and in one there's this human in an orange onesie supported by slings, taking these graceful leaps around an indoor track, kind of like a giant marionette in a prison jumpsuit.
In another video, I saw what appeared to be a gaggle of French cosmonautical tourists taking a ride in a vomit Comet, which is a seatless commercial jet that makes these roller coaster dips in flights and simulates lower gravity. I don't know, from what I can tell, less gravity looks fun as hell with these middle aged Parisians resorting to whoops, they're hooting like tiny happy donkeys our kids in a ball pit. Ah, So Mars gravity. Take your weight,
divide it by three. That is your bounding happy space pony weight.
It's like, atmosphere is super thin right now, but in the past it had a thicker atmosphere and there was water on it for sure, Like we have evidence for like streams and lakes and all sorts of like things like that. And it was a lot warmer because it had an atmosphere, and it used to have a magnetic field like we had on Earth, but its dead doesn't have one anymore.
How did magnetic fields die.
The planet Mars? Because it's smaller, it kind of like cooled down a lot quicker. On Earth, it's like hot down in our core, and we have got iron spinning around, and it's also like a big planet and so, but Mars doesn't have like all those things, and so it's like, uh, it's core is like just not putting out like that kind of motion anymore. So we're not getting a magnetic field anymore.
I had no idea that was even a thing. I didn't know that was an option.
Yeah.
And the moon used to have a magnetic field too, it doesn't have one anymore.
The Mars moon no our moon, Earth's moon.
Yeah really Yeah, So I studied the moon before I studied in Mars.
Oh God, I got so many moon questions. Oh that's gonna be another episode. Does Mars have moons?
It has two moons, Phobos and Demos. Okay, there's like some debate about how the moon's form. How the Moon's form. But I think most people think they're like captured asteroids. So they're really small moons and not like ours. And uh, I think from the surface they look more like a planet's.
So if you're on Mars, yeah, do you see two moons in the sky at the same time.
I think you can. But I but they're so small. I think that they look more like planets. Okay, they just are like little Dimi dots.
Yeah, I don't think they're don't look like Arman for sure.
Okay, yeah, I thought maybe have you ever cracked an egg and you got a double yolk?
My luck?
An egg side note, how lucky is it to get a double yoker egg? I had to stop and check because I was like, how rare is that? Maybe it's happened to me twice in my life. Anyway, some traditions say it's really good luck, or that someone in the family is going to get knocked up with twins, But according to Norse legends, it's an ominous sign the death will visit. So what's actually happening? Like biologically, so, in about one in every thousand eggs, a hen just boops
out an extra yolk. She's like boop. Usually younger hens do it more frequently. I don't know, maybe their bodies are just like hell yeah, I'm a baby machine. Let's go. As for Mars's double moons, some hot goss just came
out this past week. Jennifer emailed me that Phobos, which she described as a twenty six kilometer wide lumpy turd ball or a cocoa puff, may not have been a aptured asteroid, but possibly it was formed out of a cloud of dust that was left over from a giant impact, kind of like our own beloved moon, and that possibly, possibly Phobos has formed many times over Mars history, and it just periodically crashes into the surface, forms a dust
cloud around Mars again, and then recreates itself into a moon, and then crashes again, forms itself anew again, but smaller, over and over and over, which is like the most poetic shit I have ever heard. And also that's more comeback than Brittany, and I respect that.
Now.
The decreasing orbit of Phobos, this tendency to kind of decrease in decreasing crash, convinced even Carl Sagan at one point that Phobos was just a hollow satellite put in
place by aliens. And I love the idea that maybe Carl Sagan just thought of it kind of like a backyard shed, like aliens would just store holiday decorations in tubs, or like coffee cans filled with nails and ikea alan wrenches, maybe a lawnmower that the Martians haven't used in a few billion years because landscaping got a little parched up there. Sounds like that, but moons and so it's dry. Yeah, so what do they think happened to make Mars such a dust bowl?
So it got dry.
Basically it used to have water, but because it's so much smaller, its atmosphere like got lost. Basically doesn't have
as much gravity like pulling it in. And it also like didn't have a magnetic field anymore, and like we say, our magnet field protects us, and so like the atmosphere just got like stripped away over time by like the solar wind and just like other atmosphere loss processes, and so it just like lost its atmosphere got drier and drier, and then now it has a thin atmosphere and everything's just dusty.
Does the water evaporate into the Solar system.
Yeah, just gets like lost and I guess it's like, yeah, basically I wonder where a ghosts. Yeah, I don't know, just like out can.
Ition, just oceans just kind of missing around.
Maybe I think it's like probably really scattered apart.
Okay, probably just a gas.
So we have a super dusty planet.
Yeah, why is it red? It has a lot of iron. It's like rusty.
Oh yeah, and same as like Utah.
Yeah yeah, kin in a lot of ways.
Why do you think people fucking love Mars so much?
Because it is awesome? I mean it's like I agree with you. It's like it could have had aliens on it. It's like it's like a little Earth that was like way cooler in the past and now it's like a little dead, but like it has so much potential and it's like so similar to Earth in a lot of ways that people are like, we could go there if you know, we screwed up our planet. It's so like geologically diverse. You know, it's got evidence for like maybe
an ocean. It's got lakes, it's got deltas and this crazy sand dunes and like there's just like so many cool things you can look at on Mars that it's just fascinating. I think that's why people love it. And there's just so much potential for like thinking about life and aliens and space travel and being on another planet and fantasies related to.
That, and Martians like literal martians. Yeah, hear me out. Maybe Mars functions for us Earthlings as like the idea of like an old cabin and Joshua tree, Like it's far away but not that far away, and it's old and you don't really know why. It's kind of like decrepit, but it has a charm to it and maybe you could escape there if shit went down.
Yeah, so it's kind of dusty too, and it's dusty.
It's kind of like our our old vintage homesteader cabin in the desert.
Oh yeah, I like that idea, right, mm hm.
So what parts of this chili desert are we really poking around now? The Curiosity Rover landed in a crater Gaele Crater, named for Walter Frederick Gael who was an Australian banker by name, but he was a real space do we by night? So Gaale Crater is this huge dent in Mars and it's filled with a mountain of perhaps wind whipped debris that's taller than Mount Rainier. It looks like if you piled a bunch of brown sugar into a shallow bowl, or like a little tiny tuft
of lint in a belly button. Now, why do we care about this crater because maybe it was a lake? Why did we put curiosity in the crater? That's where the lake was, okay, and that's where the cool stuff was. Got it? So if they were gonna be like any old beer cans or like signs that people had a party there, we would find it in the bottom of what used to be lake, or we'd be like there were maybe old fish in here.
Yeah okay, yeah, you know.
It's like it's like a basin, so stuff's gonna collect there. And we had seen from orbit that there were like layers that looked like they could have been uh, from a lake or something wet or people actually really debated what the layers were and so it's just curious.
People were curious.
From many different perspectives, and so that's why we went there. But picking like the landing site is like a multi year thing with like hundreds of people involved and stuff so do.
People debate ferociously? Are they like in a boardroom, like over late night takeout food being like no, we're gonna put it in this basin.
Yeah.
So the landing site process is really an interactive process and it's actually people in the general public can participate too, but they so like the twenty twenty rover, we're having landing site workshops right now. And basically the way it works is like people who study Mars or even anybody
can propose a landing site. They'd be like, I want to go to this place, but then they have to make their argument for it, and so they have these workshops that are like gearly by yearly, and people present what they found out about their spot and like why we should go there, and then.
Like literally we vote, like we raise our.
Hands people at the workshop and then and then it's like a popular opinion. But then there's a little bit of influence from like NASA, you know, headquarters.
So it's the wait, so it is decided by a hand raise, and then NASA's like, uh I approved.
You say, there's like one hundred people suggesting sites, like the hand raising process will narrow it down to like eight Okay, and then once it gets to like those few landing sites, then NASA starts being like, hey, now we have to consider like how feasible is it to
go there? Like are there other engineering constraints? So people might be super psyched about a place for one reason, but like if it's not going to answer the question that it's a goal of the mission, then they're gonna be like, no, we need to stay on track.
And what did you think of the opportunity rover? Do you have a favorite between curiosity and opportunity? I mean, I know that opportunities opportunity did bite the dust and it's just chilling somewhere right Spirit Spirit?
Yeah, what did I say?
Opportunity?
Yeah, I'm sorry, It's okay. What I tell you, I'm gonna learn. I went into this being like I'm gonna learn a lot about this the way like one way that I remember that well in many ways.
But like free Spirit, like free Spirit stuck.
So what happened? Run me through? What happened with Spirit? What's going on with curiosity? I know there's been some dust storms. People are super worried about the dust storms and curiosity right now. Yeah, and what they're finding.
Out and then there was the twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, and so Spirit got stuck, like its wheel stopped spinning and it was like dragging it for a while. I wasn't involved in this mission, so I only know like a high level public kind of thing. But yeah, so it was like dragging its wheel Arouan and eventually it couldn't get out of it.
It's you know, yeah, no.
But Opportunity is still operational. So yeah, but the dust storm is stuper relevant right now because there's a dust storm on Mars right and so this is not the first time that there's been a dust storm with the rovers and what in the past. Actually, when there was a global dust storm, they were worried that we may never see spear an Opportunity again because they use solar panels for their stuff for power. But actually the dust storm like cleaned them off a bit, no, and the
dust cleared. Yeah, they were they had because as they're moving around. Dust is a major problem for our work because it's just like it's really fine and it lands everywhere and it's like just like a dirty apartment kind of and it's but if you're looking at the surface, it's like hard to to see stuff underneath the dust sometimes and so actually, yeah, clean clean them off the solar panels, and.
They're doing okay right now.
Yeah, so Opportunity is like not operational right now because it doesn't it can't get enough sun. But it's still alive, like it's still sending things like hey, I'm here, but I can't do anything.
And is it because of like seasonal things happening there, because.
Because the dust is in the sky is like blocking the sun from going there.
How big is this dust storm? And where? Why does Mars have these insane dust storms?
There's just a it's a really dusty planet. You know, it doesn't have like an ocean to catch the dust that's floating around, and then there is an atmosphere and so the dust is like really fine, it can get picked up and like just entrained in the atmosphere for a long time.
Yeah, and uh.
So okay, So but Curiosity is also witnessing this dust storm. Like when we look at pictures of the sky that it sends us, we can see that the sky is much darker. But Curiosity uses like nuclear power, it does, Yeah, it's not using solar panels, so it's like it can still function with a dust storm.
I did not know that. Yeah, how much fuel?
Does it happen a lot?
How long will it live?
Uh?
For more years? Okay, I don't I don't know the exact number of years. But like, so the battery, it has a battery that it like can recharge on stuff. I don't know the details of how it's powered, but it's some sort of decay and uh, yeah.
It'll live for a while.
We'll be able to use it like the really power hungry things less in the future. But right now, it's like, yeah, just.
Chug it along.
Yeah. I didn't know that. I thought they were all solar No.
Yeah, And the next one it'll be similar to curiosity.
Okay, and that's the twenty twenty. Yeah, what's the twenty twenty? Get a peep? What's it looking at? Where's it going to land? So we don't know yet where it's gonna land. It's like down to three sites, okay, and you could vote with your arm, you know. I think that.
At this stage, I'm not sure how much the like my individual opinion matters as as opposed to like, the people in charge of the rover, Like, I think they have a lot of say, now.
But there are still workshop.
There's still landing site workshops, so people are still working on the landing sites and presenting and then like the public and scientists can still go and ask questions and stuff like that.
So side note, I wanted to see if any workshops remain and yes, in October of twenty eighteen, NASA will be conducting the fourth and final three day workshop to determine the landing site for the twenty twenty rover. Now, according to a page up at marsnext dot JPL dot NASA dot gov. I'll put a link in the show notes.
They'll be gabbing about the potential of three remaining candidate sites, all possible sites where life could have existed and or there's a lot of evidence for rocks and fluids having interacted. So this workshop, I picture it taking place in some secret marble hall, but it's just happening at a hilton. And what's being called Los Angeles North, But hello, it's just Glendale. That's like calling New Jersey New York East.
But who am I to judge? Oops? Then I went on Yelp to see how this hilton was and reviews are mixed. Some people think the pool is too cold and the walls are too thin, and one person gave it three stars because quote the restrooms needed to be restocked due to my stall not having toilet seat covers and the lady in my stall asking for toilet paper.
Loll.
Perhaps they should have sent a rover to this hilton to see if it was the best place to host the conference. Either way, it's going to be exciting, and now you have all the info you need to choose the rover.
Spot on Mars.
And so one of the big ideas behind like past Mars life is that that it was like microbes maybe living in like cracks and rocks and stuff. And so there's also in that area there's like also like volcanism and stuff, a wide variety of rocks there and a wide variety of ages, which is crucial because Mars was like probably habitable a lot old in the lot in it's like early history.
How long ago do you think Mars was probably habitable? Right? Are we talking like five billion years ago or like thirty thousand billion years?
No long time ago, billions of years, okay, just billion years or something like. I mean maybe there's like there is still some fluid activity more recently, but it's like such small amounts that like these would be like really lonely bugs. There's a big group of people that want to send a rovert back to the same spot where Spirit is, which is kind of a cute thought in
some way, it is cute. A lot of people are like, no, we want to go somewhere new, but that that spot there's like hydrothermal activity, so which is like on Earth where a lot of people think life might have started. So that's why that's like a big That's why there's big arguments to go back there.
To make primordial Martian soup. Yeah, kind of do you think that there's any hope of sending the twenty twenty rover and it like bumps butts with a spirit and spirits like I'm bac it like gets its group back.
Oh you know, that'd be kind of cute if they sent it a little toolbox to fix its round. I don't know. I think that it may not go like to that exact precise spot, but it could. I mean it's possible, but yeah, it's like a highly debated thing if it should even be considered, because they're like, that's a big planet.
We should go somewhere near right.
Yeah, I do feel like, you know, I've dated people that want to go to the same restaurant like every single night. Yeah, come on, dude, a new place open up down the block. Let's try it out. I feel like we can branch out.
Yeah, I'm excited to check out some new spots.
So day to day, Jennifer works on the computer. She looks at images she gets beamed from another fucking planet totally normal. Or she looks at how light hits the surface of certain materials and what they're composed of. And then of course, fulfilling bibe Jennifer's dreams. She works on Mars rovers.
And then another thing that I do often is I'm on the Curiosity rover team, and so we some of my days are spent doing operation for the rover, and so we figure out like where's the river today, Like what's cool around us? Like where are we gonna shoot our laser?
Oh my god, that stuff.
Yeah, And so there'll be like telecons and stuff, and so I'll be on the on a telecon like most of the day.
Ps. I had to email Jennifer to ask if a telecon is a fancy word for a phone call, and she said, yeah, but also you share computer screens. So my guess is it's kind of like a role playing game, but instead of your cousin in another state having her elves attack you, it's a space scientist being like, check out these sweet ass rocks.
Planning out the making all rovers, the little agenda for it.
Is that crazy to you that, like you came to JPL, looked at rowers when you're a kid, and now you're like, I'm on the team deciding where to point the labers on Mars? Like is that banana?
Yeah, it's pretty exciting.
Like I definitely think back to those when I'm being little and seeing the rovers at JPL.
That's pretty cool to me.
Then, another cool part about being a Mars geologist is that we often study analog sites, and so that will go to places on Earth that remind us of Mars and study them and think about like, oh, if we were on Mars, like how would this be different? Or like we'll ask a question like Iceland is like a place where people go to study Mars, or also like the dry valleys of Antarctica, people go there really study Mars.
Yeah, and so what is.
It about those places and specifically Iceland. Like I know a lot of people love Mars and are thinking about going to Iceland. Where in Iceland do you go if you want to pretend like you're on Mars.
I don't know specific.
I couldn't say like a specific place, but like there's like lots of evidence of like volcanic rifting and so a lot of just like hydrothermal interaction kind of stuff, so like where water and hot rock met and there are volcanoes on Mars.
Yeah.
Yeah, so Mars is like super volcanic, super basaltic, So basalt is like what's coming out on Iceland, which is why people go there. And then it's like cold too. Iceland's super cold and Mars is really cold. So that's like you got kind of a lot of the stuffs in common already a correl it there.
Yeah, would you go to Mars if given the opportunity?
I think it It depends on the circumstances of it, but like.
Yeah, business class, You're at least going business class.
Yeah, I mean, like it's like, is there like a colony on Mars that's like already established then like yeah, but like or if I'm going to be like a cool geologist on Mars, Like yeah, for sure, but like one of the first are you like, maybe if I was like a little older, right, you.
Just eked out what you could on Earth and you're like, all right, I'm ready to retire on.
Yeah, I think I would just like weigh it out and be like am I ready to die? And then I would say if I'm like okay, yeah, that'd be kind of cool. Then yeah, it's like moving to Arizona, I'm ready to have the last phase of my life. When you were trying to figure out what you wanted to do, like with your life, like your job, at what point did you know where to see yourself?
At what point where You're like, Okay, I'm going to do this, I'm going to study this, I'm going to work there.
Yeah.
Only very recently really, yeah, because I was like, so I was like super into science in general, but I had a really hard time like figuring out what exact science I wanted to study. I like love nature, camping and stuff like that, so like I also love like weird biology thing. So it's like into a lot of stuff like environmental science, and I didn't get exposure to geology until pretty late, like until basically my freshman year in college, and then I was like, oh, dang, you
can go camping and do science. So that's like how I got into geology. But then I was like I didn't even know planetary geology. Like I knew about the rovers and stuff, but like I didn't really realize how big a field it was. And then I just like slowly got like more and more into it, and I
was like this suck. And it's only like now that I just graduated, I'm like thinking, now I need to make a plan for what I want to do in the future and the strategic like projects to work on strategically for things that I know will prop up crop up, so like getting involved with the twenty twenty rovers, like I want to continue to be involved with that kind of research, and so like I've been doing some stuff related to the twenty twenty rover calibration and things like that,
just to like get my name out there.
You know, Yeah, you're like come to me for your calibration and rover needs.
Yeah, and then like participating in the landing site workshops. I want to be like it's like super exciting to me now to know like all this background, because when I got involved with Curiosity, I didn't know as much about Gail Crater as like I know about the potential landing sites for twenty twenty. So it's like exciting to be involved from an early stage.
Oh, because hear me out, Is it like watching The Bachelor from the beginning you really care about who's in the last couple shows?
Yeah? Probably.
I've never had that experience, but I imagine that's probably the case.
Or accept this, Russ.
It's just like an investment in the playoffs, you know what I mean? And then when it comes to the World Series, you're like, this matters even more to me because I've been watching since the beginning. Yeah, yeah, I get that. So now that you're in the stage with twenty twenty where they're deciding where to land it, decisions are being made, and so it's going to mean even more when you see that through to completion, to the end, or they actually the rovers there at the site that
you all to help decide on. Yeah, that's going to be enormous. It's strange. Yeah, it's really exciting.
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Do you dream about Mars?
Yeah?
I've had lots of dreams about Mars. You have what happens and then so like some of them are nightmares?
Really yeah, just heads up. I'm so so glad. I asked this question because the payoff was fucking enormous.
Well, I had one that was like kind of like a It was like we were on Mars and I requested an image be taken of like a crater wall by the rover and like so the image came down and it was like not that interesting, and then somebody was like do you know how much money we spent on that image? And then like they guilt trip me about it. In the nightmare that was like a Mars nightmark I had, Like just I mean, all my dreams
are really bizarre. Like I had other dreams were like I went to Mars and like landed in a crater and there was like a lake there, and then there was like an exc convict that was a stowaway on my rocket ship.
Like yeah, so.
You're like, what are you doing here?
Yeah, like no to your business, yeah exactly, Like really, I mean just like weird dreams like that. And then I had a dream one time that's like maybe my weirdest dream that I gave birth to a moon rock and like in my dream world, you could have a boy or a girl or a rock, like those are
your options. And then the science the doctors took my rock baby from me and like, if you had a boy or a girl, you know, they just like weigh it on like the little scale, But if you have a rock baby, they put it like in a mass spectrometer. So they put my my rock baby in their instrument and then they're like, misboos, we have to tell you something like are you ready for this? And I was like, what's wrong is my rock baby? And they're like it's
a moon rock. And then I looked at my boyfriend at the time and I was like, are you an alien? And his mom was like I never told you you're an alien. That was my weirdest dream I ever had.
Everything about this is the best.
That's amazing.
Where you so disappointed when you woke up to real life.
Yeah, yeah, it was a nightmare.
Also, no, I can't believe these things happened in the dream world.
And like, I'd never know this unless I put a microphone in your face.
I have a really vivid dreams. I used to keep a drenal.
I don't blame you. You gotta publish these things. Speaking of publishing in Mars, yeah, let's talk about the Martian cliff Notes best selling book that became a movie. Dude stranded on Mars has to survive says things like I'm.
Going to have the science.
Okay, So Andy Ware wrote a book self published.
I read it. He read it. He was not a Mars scientist, no, just a fan. Yeah.
It was fanfic about Mars, right, yeah, but it got people kind of pumped about Mars.
Yeah, how did you feel about it? As someone who works on Mars.
I was excited about it.
I enjoyed the book, And I like people getting excited about Mars. I love when people, you know, asking me questions and I can answer them and uh, And I enjoyed the book and for the most part, like I wasn't like appalled by buy it like so so.
Yeah, I was good there are other books.
Like similar kind of in the same line that are super accurate.
About really what's some of the best sci fi about Mars.
I think like the Kim Stanley Robinson series, like Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars, like okay, the first book Red Mars. He he just does like a ton of research on like what's actually happening on Mars. And he paints these landscapes that are actually incredibly accurate, and the way he just scribes them is just like incredible and beautiful. And he did a great job and of like painting Mars scenes.
Good good on him, man. So this is a trilogy about Mars and making it habitable and long story short, I went down a rabbit hole about author Kim Stanley Robinson, who is not a girl Kim, but boy Kim. And he's married to a chemist and sometimes he goes by his wife's last name, which is cute. Also, he lives
in Davis, California. He prefers to write out of doors. Anyway, back to Andy Wears The Martian, which I did read on a plane and confession, I will say I did read The Martian and I cried, you're really a couple of times, I was like, they're coming and gets you, buddy. I felt very emotional. I didn't think the movie it was did quite as good a job. But what are you gonna do? Also? I had to stop to look
this up. But scientists say that the reason we're more likely to cry on an airplane than on the ground maybe due to hypoxia or lack of oxygen due to air pressure, because being on a plane is equivalent to being at an altitude of around eight thousand feet. Is that crazy even with the pressurized cabin. Or it may be the emotional liability of unfamiliar surroundings, and humans tend to cry when we're a little scared to promote emotional
bonding with others to increase our safety. So the next time you find yourself like sobbing at a tender moment of a junk Claude van Dam movie like, blame hypoxia. Okay, let's get back to Mars rovers. Okay, tell me a little bit about how the rovers are gathering. They gather rock samples? Correct, Yeah, now, well they're not like gathering them. How they tell me how they do their business?
Okay, So they like take pictures and they zap them with lasers, and they the pictures are not just like regular pictures though. They have like many wavelengths of light sometimes, and so you can tell more from than you could just have a regular picture. And then they drill them sometimes and they put them in like on the Curiosity River.
There's like an instrument that's like an oven. So they put their rock powder that they drilled in the oven and they heat it up and then they measure stuff that comes off of it and they learn about different compounds that are in the river. And then there's another thing where they like vibrate the rock and they can like tell what the crystals, like different mineral crystals are. Yeah, and then do they just dump it? Do they just blow it off when they're like done with you?
Uh?
Yeah, But for the most part, yeah, they drill it and then they like analyze that.
It's called the dump pile.
Okay, I didn't know that.
Yeah, they like dump out the stuff they drilled and then they look at the dump pile. Oh, and we have like an arm on the rover and so like we'll put the arm up close and like look at it. And then yeah, it's just like a lot of imaging and then a couple of different like scientific instruments. So that's like for the geology, but then there's also like stuff for atmospheric detections like that sense the winds and like gases and stuff like that.
And so is there like a feed coming through that just is like ddddd, like this is.
What we're gathering.
We get okay.
So the way it works, it's kind of cool. We relay with satellites that orbit Mars. So we send stuff to the satellites and the satellites send it down to the rover, and the rover sends it back to the satellite and back to us.
So to recap they send information up to the satellites, the satellites send it down to the rover, the rover sends it back to the satellite and back to us. The satellite's like our mutual friend who has cell service when we don't, and we keep being like, oh my god, ask the rover to take a soil sample, and the rovers like, holy shit, satellite tell them the soil is so red. I can't even And so we get our data in like batches. So in a way, yes, but
it's not like constantly coming down. We'll get like data deliveries at like specified times. Yeah, and are you are you ever waiting for one, like knowing like we should get a data delivery in like twelve minutes.
So that's how planning works sometime, where like we might not get data until like a certain place on our planning cycle, and so we'll be waiting for something to come down to like figure out how interesting something was, if we want to like keep looking at or if we want to move on.
Yeah, what do you think the weirdest thing is about Mars's surface?
Maybe like the sand dunes? They're really weird? Really, Yeah?
Do they look like sand dunes like when you when people ride camels it's from Egypt. Do they like look at my pica.
There's like a large variety of sand dunes on Mars, and like some of them are are like dusty and some of them are less dusty. And then like sometimes we can see the sand dunes moving, which is kind of cool, like with the winds on Mars. But then like something like a dust devil will pick up and then we can like see active motion.
What are some of the weird pictures that come back? Because I think I went down like a I think I went down a google hole ONTs of like shit that may or may not have been placed there by aliens. Yeah, what are some weird picture?
Okay, so like the most famous thing, I have two examples.
Oh my god, I'm so excited.
Okay. So, like first was like Perceval Lowell.
You know, he looked at Mars through his telescope and Lowell Observatory and flag staff.
Perceval Lowell PS was a Boston aristocrat aka a hell a rich guy in the late eighteen hundreds, and he was so passionate about astronomy that he founded observatories with all of his moneies. He also had a formidable mustache, and he had some theories that were well intentioned but turned out to be crackpot.
And he thought he saw canals, like they're like rivers and stuff he thought he saw and so he made all these like drawings of like what he thought was like a mar civilization. He was sure there was like people on Mars and so but like when we got better pictures, it was like, no, there's no canals that are built there, you know. So that's like that was
like people were so psyched on that. Yeah, and he was super psyched on it, but then we got like higher resolution stuff and we're like, uh no, it turns out it's not the case. And then well, like when we are first images. You might have heard of the Face on Mars. Yes, yeah, so it looks looks really creepy, like I'm not gonna lie. It looks like a like a giant guy and he's angry and he's looking at you.
If you haven't seen this, there are images taken in the Sidonia region of Mars that appear to be an alien face monument staring into the void of the cosmos. But it looks like someone left a Halloween mask in the bushes for a year and then you took a picture of it with a razor phone at night from three hundred feet away. Also, sadly, it's just called the Face on Mars, like no one even named it Luke
or Denise or anything, which is kind of a bummer. Also, the tendency to see faces in inanimate objects like light sockets and toasts, et cetera, is called paradolia. I follow an account on Instagram called faced Book like faceed Book, and it's a collection of things that look like they have faces. It's like rocks and clothes pins and wood grains, and it creeps me out so hard, but I can't unfollow it because it's like a good creepy anyway faced
book if you're interested. Okay, the face on Mars. When we got better cameras, we zoomed in on this shit and and.
But then when we like took a higher resolution image like many years later, it's like, oh, it's just a little mountain that's got some shadows on it, Like damn it. Yeah, So those like those are really weird. The polar caps of Mars. They're like carbon dioxide and water and dust and the like. When they melt or like evaporate, they make like crazy morphologies like weird pits and like stuff that.
It was just like the dim like you have a hard time, like your brain has a hard time figuring out what's up and down when you're looking at these pictures, and then they're just look so alien.
Oh how much water is on Mars? And when did we find it? I say we as though I had any way to do with it. Uh.
Currently on Mars, Uh, there's not a lot of water. There's like some water, like liquid water, just like in pores. Of rocks and like buried basically not really exposed on the surface, but there's like water ice in the caps.
And when did we find it? I think probably the best, Like when we started getting these early images that showed like channels, there was no like solid evidence that it was formed by water, but people are like, the looks like it was formed by water, and then you know, get more and more info on it.
Yeah, how fast does our knowledge of other planets accumulate? Like have we just gone crazy with information in the last like twenty thirty forty years.
Yeah, we've uh we right now, we're in a time when like we have got recently and are still getting lots of information about planets from different satellites that we've sent. But like we're about to enter a time when we
don't have a lot of stuff going out now. And you know, like we a lot of the emissions that went out, they took like many years to get to where they were going, and so now like either now or like recently, they've gone and done their stuff and so but we haven't sent out a steady stream and so we're about to enter like a little bit of a wol.
Oh yeah, oh that's interesting. Yeah, and how long just refresh for me? Does it take for us to get something to Mars?
So like the data transmission, I think it's like seven minutes one way.
And then what about an object?
Okay, so like it depends on like where Mars is and its orbit and stuff like that, but I think it's like three months.
Okay, that seems really fast.
Yeah, I think that's like for really fast thing. But you can you can take way longer. Also, sure you can send it ground or something. Yeah, not primate. Yeah, I want to mention that we also have Mars rocks though.
Tell me about Mars rocks that.
They came to Earth like meteorites that like were on the surface and then they got a check and then we can study them too.
How does that happen? How does a Mars meteorite just get flung off the planet and just go.
And just land here?
Yeah, so like a big rock flies through space and then it hits Mars and then it shoot makes a crater on Mars and it shoots off rocks. Some of the rocks land on Mars, but some of them get shot off like straight up in the air and like they reach Mars, you know, escape velocity and they're just flying through space and then they fly through space for like millions of years probably, and then they land on Earth as another impact, and then we collect them.
It goes from a meteor to once it hits it becomes a meteorite.
Is that right?
I think that's right.
Okay, so once it touches down, it's like boop, I just turned to a meteorite. Yeah, how do you know what they are?
Yeah?
So we now have like classes because we can like kind of lump them and so like these are some to these other ones, and then but then there are some that are like bizarre and so like that's like how we found out that we had like a group of meteorites that different from the rest, and people started to wonder if they could have been come from Mars because the minerals in them were similar to what we
thought we knew was on Mars. And then so this group was like finally confirmed to be from Mars when we sent a lander to Mars and we measured the atmosphere, and like isotopes in the atmosphere, like the different ratios were the same ratios that were like trapped in bubbles in these rocks and so we were like, yep, they're from Mars.
WHOA yeah, and then where do you put the meteorites? Like do they get stored under like lock and.
Key because you're so rare? Yeah? They well, it depends who found them.
Okay.
So, like NASA has like missions to Antarctica to collect meteorites and like to some deserts I think, And so those are property of NASA and you can like apply to study them, but you you can only ever borrow them. They are owned by NASA and they're stored at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Yeah, but like people can also find a meteorite on their own and then I think it's their meteorite, depending on where they found it.
How often do areologists planetary geologists have someone say yo, I found a meteorite and you're like, that's alympogranite. Like how often did that happen?
A lot? Yeah? Yeah.
People like bring me rocks all the time and ask me if they are meteorites.
How do you know that they're not.
Sometimes I can just like be like that's an earth rock because it looks like yeah, like I like that's olympigranite. So, like, meteorites often have like a fusion crest, which is when it's all glassy on the outside of the rock, and that's like from heating up when it entered the atmosphere.
So that's like one thing that we can tell. And then like there are certain things that we only see in meteorites, like this cool metal pattern called a vid Monstotton pattern, and it's like a crazy like kind of etching looking thing.
By the bye, these cross hatch patterns and meteorites are caused by apparently nickel iron crystals, and they're credited to an Australian painter named ready Count Alois von Beck Vildman Statton, which honestly would be such a great name for a cat. Anyway, he discovered the patterns, he was like, whoa look at these patterns, So we named them vidden Statton in his honor, and then we found out later that a British guy with a way more boring name, William Thompson, discovered them
like four years earlier, but no one cared. So some people call these pretty geometric meteorite patterns Thompson structures out of fairness, but I think we should just say Vidman Thompson or William stotton people into meteorites, let me know, because I'll have a press conference about it. Note I will be wearing a monocle just for flair. Do you have a favorite meteorite? Like you have a favorite?
You do?
What is it?
I love it? That was zero hesitation.
Yeah, So a meteorite that I studied for one of my pug projects to Martian media, Right, Okay, it's called ALH eight for double oh one, sure it is, which is named from the Allen Hills of Antarctica. That's how the ALH it was fine found in eighty four, That's where the eighty four comes from. And then double O one.
It was the first metia I found that year. And it was this meteorite that sparked this great debate about if there were life, was life on Mars because the people who first studied it thought that it had fossils in it, and.
So it's like a little bit still of a debate.
Is it serious?
Yeah?
That was one of my projects, was like trying to like figure out people study this rock since ninety six was when that paper came out, Like people still think that some people still think that there's fossils in it, Like like a bacteria fossils and so like I was trying to apply like new techniques to see if there could be like a more definitive test and so like even my stuff, it was like a little inconclusive.
My god, what kind of test do you do to figure if there's bacteria in there?
So I was like trying to figure out. I was using what's called like paleomagnetism, where we're studying the magnetic properties of the rock, and so I was trying to figure out if proposed like bacteria, which are they They thought were magnet atactic bacteria, so that they travel like along magnetic field lines and have little magnetites on them. So I was trying to figure out which one it was, and basically it was inconclusive. Oh yeah, I know. And we thought we were being so clever.
What I mean, at what point do you have to call it and say it's inconclusive?
So like it's really easy to say no, but it's not so easy to say yes.
So what happened with the recent announcement, Like everyone watch out, we have an announcement to make about Mars, and everyone's like I'm studying my alarm clock, I'm staying up late.
Yeah, what happened with that announcement. So there were there.
Like the what people call like the building blocks of life that were found with the Curiosity rover.
These like.
Just like molecules that are actually really hard to preserve. They were found by the rover pretty like fresh looking, and so they're I don't know, it's just like the building blocks of life that were found, and we didn't think that we would find them because they can get destroyed really easily.
So that means that they.
Were like resurfaced like pretty recently, which is really exciting, and that they were there at all was exciting that they could have formed.
And so this was a heads up we have the ingredients to make life.
We didn't find it yet, but we found the ingredients. Yeah, and that's a big deal. Yeah, especially a big deal that we found it at all, because like it's so easy for these things to be destroyed on the surface of Mars.
Mars like surface is.
Like subjects to a lot of radiation and then there's like lots of things on the surface that like oxidate oxidizing species or they're just kind of like not good for these molecules, and so we just like I don't think we expected that they would even still be there, and they were there.
How did you react when you found out the news?
And did you get a heads up like way before well that was like a curiosity rover like press release and so like I didn't know about that before.
What did you How did you feel when you found out with your team?
Uh, it's exciting, Like a lot of times when stuff like that, When when there's like an exciting like potential for astrobiology kind of thing coming out, what people do is like try to figure out how could it be wrong? Like to you know, kind of Okay, this is what it looks like, but could we explain it some other way? Like could we have screwed up or something? And so like a lot of times there's discussion about that like could it be actually a blip in the instrument or
could it be something else? And so like that's like a hard discussion to go through, but it's like kind of a little interesting too. And so but then when all those things get like crossed off the list and like what's left is that it's actual detection, then it's exciting.
I bet, because it's just like kind of incremental discoveries too, and you have another breakthrough, right.
Yeah, like the methane, like their people propose like so many different ways. So like methane is a thing that like it doesn't survive a long time in the atmosphere, and so if it's there at all, like it had to have come from like relatively recent times. And it's like it's often a product of life, you know, like like they say, like.
Cow farts and stuff like that.
So we were like bacteria and so yeah, there people were like, oh man, uh, how can we explain this methane any other way other than like life. I don't think anyone's saying that it's like life making this methane. But there was like lots of debate like could the methane have come from something that we did, like from the tire breaking or the wheel braking or something like that.
Yeah, but it might just be an underground cavern of farting cows.
Maybe you never know, Yeah, you don't know. I mean say, anything's possible.
Just a cow emerges from a space cave being like, oh I didn't see that.
The next rover the twenty twenty River has like a little microphone on it, does it really so it can loose into the surface of Mars and then maybe it'll hear.
Like now, is it called the twenty twenty rover because they're gonna launch it in twenty twenty. Yeah, okay, that's that's cool. And it's also like clear vision.
Yeah it's a catchy okay, but it's gonna it's gonna be named. Oh yeah, it's like a contest school children contest, Like they're gonna pick the name, like all I think all the rivers have been named like that.
Oh that's such a cool distinction. Yeah, it's like, hey, kids, you're gonna inherit this planet once we turn into garbage, so you get to name the rovers for your next planet pretty much.
Yeah.
I have one million questions for you. Okay, is it okay if I ask you one million? Yeah, okay, so many questions. I love that you know you were a patron.
You've looked at some of these Yeah, you've looked at all of them.
The ones that were posted as of a few hours ago.
Like this is what I want in someone who studies other planets. Is this level of like detail and preparation, Like this gives me faith in the space program.
Okay, that is it for part one. You now have a primer on areology Mars the absolute gem of an Earthling, Jennifer Booze. So next week we come back with all kinds of very weird and awesome questions. We talk about habitability, more sci fi stuff. It's all the weird stuff next week. So to learn more about Jennifer and her work, visit j nnfr dot bz. It's her name, no vows. We are at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram and I'll post some photos of me and Jennifer at Caltech recording this.
I'm also at Ali Ward with one L on Twitter and Instagram. And thank you so much to Stephen Ray Morris for editing this literally the day that it goes up. I've been shooting on a new show for the past few weeks and have not had a lot of time for sleeping or eating or anything, and so Stephen, you're a trooper for helping me get this up on time. Thank you to the patrons at patreon dot com slash Ologies for the amazing Mars questions you asked next week.
They are hilarious questions. You are going to want to hear them, trust me. Also, feel free to join if you like Little List twenty five cents an episode. Thank you Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis for running Ologiesmarch dot com for me, feel free to join the Facebook Ologies podcast group. Thank you Hannah Liippo and Aaron Talbert for running that You're Amazing theme song was written and performed by Nick Thorburn of the band Islands, and if you
stick around pass the credits. You know I tell a secret And this week, this week, I've freaked out because I've known Aaron Talbert since I was four, and I've been so crazy with early call times that I forgot her birthday on the twenty fifth, and I almost started crying. I texted her apologizing I'm so sorry. I was mortified, and she was like, bitch, my birthday is in January and I was like yeah, and she's like it's June.
So happy early birthday next year, Aaron, And thank you for reminding me that it's not currently January and that I should probably get some sleep. Okay, come back next week for really weird Mars questions. It will make you one thousand percent more informed for your next cocktail party or capable of making the decision of which planet to live on if shit goes down here.
Okayberbye hacadermatology, hobiology or doo zoology, lithology and technology, meteorology, paratology, ethology, zeriology, semnology.
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