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Fall 2016 Where in the World are our Astrobiologists?Many exciting opportunities for travel and research for our AB community! Read on to find out who went where these past few months. 
John Kirkpatrick, a UWAB alum in Oceanography from 2011 went to Barrow, Alaska this spring. He contributed to a project measuring methane and microbial activity under sea ice. Just days before this photo, he was at a Mariners spring training game in Arizona where the temperature got to the 90s. Then, Barrow—with highs above 10 if they were lucky! 
The small foreground figure is Prof. David Catling walking down into Monturaqui Crater, the only known impact crater in Chile. The backdrop is the Atacama desert—the driest place in the world and a Mars analog—and the Andes. Prof. Catling was on a post-meeting fieldtrip after an invited lecture at an Astrobiology symposium at the European Southern Observatory HQ in Santiago. 
Aditya Chopra joined us from Australia as a post-doc working with John Baross. While visiting the University of Hawaii last winter, he took this aerial photo while he was on the lookout for migrating whales. How many icons of Seattle can you spot in his aerial view from Lake Union? 
UWAB Professor Victoria Meadows and Astronomy graduate students Giada Arney (2016), Russell Deitrick, and Andrew Lincowski traveled to Vienna, Austria, to attend The Astrophysics of Planetary Habitability Conference. Also attending was former UW undergrad Miles Tempe who has worked with the Virtual Planetary Laboratory during his time at UW. These photos show Andrew, Giada, and Miles at a dinner at the Vienna town hall and Russell at a cat café. 
Astronomy alumna Giada Arney traveled to Tokyo, Japan, in January 2016 to attend the 4th International Earth Life Science Institute Symposium. The topic of the Symposium was “Early Earth, Venus, and Mars: Three Experiments in Biological Origins.” This photo shows the Imperial Palace Gardens in Tokyo. 
Physics graduate student Nichole Barry (right) went to the outback of Australia to install the next phase of the Murchison Widefield Array, a radio interferometer used to study the early universe. 
Oceanography alumna Rika Anderson with her high school astrobiology science academy students, on a trip to Biosphere 2 near Tucson, AZ, where they sampled different biomes for microbial diversity. 
In May 2016, astronomy grad student Russell Deitrick and Professor Rory Barnes visited Goddard Space Flight Center to meet with collaborators on the NExSS ROCKE-3D team. They are studying the early Solar System through climate models and orbital models. This is a picture of Russell (and Rory in the background) with a model of the James Webb Space Telescope, currently under construction at Goddard. JWST is the first telescope that may be able characterize the atmospheres of rocky exoplanets. 
UWAB Workshop participants collecting soil samples in the Muir icefields in Mt Rainier, WA. More details (and photos) to come in the next newsletter! |
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