CBL Google Hangout with Tanya Harrison

Tanya Harrison (tanyaofmars.com)

Tanya Harrison is a planetary scientist and professional photographer. She is a PHD student in Geology at the University of Western Ontario. She works mostly on collecting data for and from Mars.

On June 14th, 2016 our class had a chat through Google Hangout where she talked about herself and we, the class, asked questions about her job and about mars.

     Google Hangout cut short due to audio problems

      My partner was Hailey S and we decided to ask her question which was “How do we know all this stuff about space if we haven’t been everywhere?” Tanya answered telling us, “With all of the information that we can collect using probes, satellites and landers, they are able to use all of the data to figure it out.”

Carolina C asking a question to Tanya Harrison

I was interested in the photography side of things and another student, Carolina C did too (left), she asked “how did you choose the camera you chose and what steps did you have to go through?” Tanya explained that they decide what photos they need and they choose a camera capable of that task, of course it would be great to bring multiple kinds but bringing things into space is very expensive.

Tanya also told us that there are signs of flowing water on mars (streams of salt that can only be left behind from evaporated water), not something new, but many students were surprised as they had not known prior to that day. We also learned that one of the rovers that had supposedly had crashed actually landed but malfunctioned.

Another student asked the question “how do the Mars rovers move?” she replied “The Mars rovers are controlled by people on the ground. They only move at around 0.14km/h because the distance between Earth and mars is very great, the commands to the rovers takes around 40 minutes or more, so the rovers move very slow to ensure that they do not crash or get stuck anywhere. One rover has been there for around 13 years and hasn’t gotten any farther than approximately 40km. Tanya also stated the sizes of some of the Rovers and I was surprised when I heard that Curiosity was around the size of a minivan, she explained that Curiosity was that size because it has been fitted with many different kinds of equipment, whether it is for research or photography.

Mars Pathfinder’s image of “Twin Peaks” (http://mars.nasa.gov/MPF/index1.html)

I was already interested in space and knew little facts here and there, at first I didn’t think that I would learn anything from this video chat but I actually learned quite a bit and I enjoyed this chat it would be interesting to have this again.