Exogeology ROCKS!

Yellow in the clouds
Pink and purple everywhere
Blue and bright orange sky

I stayed up late last night working on a project that’s due really soon, and I stayed up so late that I saw the sunrise before I went to bed. It was beautiful! The sky got slowly lighter, and in the East the sky just above the horizon was peach and red. The sky above that turned slowly bluer.

I couldn’t help thinking of what the sunrise on Mars would be like. The Martian sky is red because of all the dust (with iron) in the air, but it can refract light in a similar way to Earth’s atmosphere. So, if I were on Mars right then, the colors would be reversed. The sky would be turning a brighter shade of red, with the sky in the horizon looking a bit blue or green. It would be amazing! Someday Martian colonists will get to see those sunsets and sunrises. I’m not sure I could get used to that though. I love my Arizona sunrises and sunsets!

As I said before, part of being an exogeologist is getting to explore! From the bright Sun and its flares, to the outermost reaches of the Oort cloud, exogeologists get to see it all! The most exciting part is discovering new things about unexplored places.

Moons are some of the most diverse objects; some are like planets with volcanoes and atmospheres, and others are like asteroids with odd shapes and cratered surfaces. Titan has a thick and hazy atmosphere, which just makes me wonder, “What’s down there?”

Exogeologists like myself decided that Titan was a good place to explore. The Cassini-Huygens mission was and is set to explore and study Saturn and Titan. The Huygens lander detached from the Cassini spacecraft and landed on Titan. It found that there is water ice on Titan, the atmosphere is made of methane and nitrogen, and there even seems to be an underground ocean of liquid water! How cool! Literally, because Titan is so cold being so far from the Sun.

Speaking of being cold and far from the Sun, exogeology is also used for studying Kuiper Belt objects, or KBOs. The most famous KBO is Pluto, the famous dwarf planet. Just let me call it a dwarf planet for the purposes of this one blog, okay? Pluto and other dwarf planets are mostly made of rock and ice, like asteroids. We don’t have many good photographs of Kuiper Belt objects, so that’s one thing that I’d like to do in the future: take pictures of KBOs.

The most mysterious places to see are exoplanets, planets orbiting other stars! There are planets of all shapes and sizes out there, and exogeologists are finding more all the time! It rocks that there are other solar systems!

No matter where you look, you just might find something new and exciting! Exogeology ROCKS!