Join us as we explore an exciting new topic for our podcast — planetary science! From Martian landscapes to icy plumes on distant moons, Dr. Tanya Harrison explains how cameras help us explore other worlds and what those images reveal about the potential for life beyond Earth. Listen now: You can also listen to our podcast on these platforms: Amazon Music Apple Podcasts Spotify Read along with the podcast transcript: Introduction Hello, everyone. Welcome to Beneath Your Feet, a geoscience podcast. I’m Veronica Klassen, science communicator, geology enthusiast and your host. Here at the APGO Education Foundation, our mission is to spark curiosity and passion for the geology of Ontario. Whether you’re a geology nerd, science enthusiast, or nature lover, this podcast is for you. Join us as we geek out over fascinating geology, uncover the hidden stories and secrets of our extraordinary planet and explore the captivating world beneath your feet. Veronica Klassen Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Beneath Your Feet, the geoscience podcast where we talk to geologists of all different kinds in order to hear their career stories, advice for students and just fun, exciting things that are going on in geology today. We are branching out to a topic that we haven’t explored yet on the podcast, and that is planetary science. So today we’re going to be talking to Dr. Tanya Harrison, who is a professional Martian. She is currently a fellow of the Outer Space Institute and the director of Earth and Space Science at the Canadian Space Company, Mission Control, based out of Ottawa. She is a planetary scientist, future focused science strategist, author and one of the world’s go-to voices on Mars and space exploration. So thank you so much for being with me here today, Tanya. Dr. Tanya Harrison Oh, thanks, so much for having me. Veronica Let’s just start with a little intro. Tell us about yourself. Who are you and what do you do? Tanya Oh, gosh, I don’t know how to follow up the bio. Veronica Yeah, true. Tanya In terms of what do I do right now, so my background is in planetary science, like you said. I feel like a lot of folks have never heard of that term, if you are not a planetary scientist. So basically a geologist, but studying other planets. And in that process, especially if you’re studying rocky bodies like Mars or the Moon or Mercury, you have to understand geologic processes on the Earth first, because we see all the same stuff when we look at these places. Veronica Right. Tanya Well, for the most part. We can get into that later. There’s some cool stuff on other planets that we don’t see here. So yeah, you can take your geology background and then apply that to studying things like impact craters on the moon or volcanoes on Mars, or weird cracks in the surface on Venus. And I think that’s pretty cool. Veronica That’s so awesome! Wow. Okay, so what does a day in the life look like for you? Tanya So right now I work for a commercial space company called Mission Control as their director of Earth and Space Science. And so some of it is doing science, but more focused on what do we need to do to design instruments and missions to achieve specific science goals. So, if you’re trying to answer certain questions, say, and you need images to answer those questions, you want pictures, you know you want a camera, but what resolution should that camera be? What wavelengths of light should it be imaging at? And probably most importantly for space, how do you get it into the constraints of mass, power, and cost that you have for your mission, which are usually very, very tough to do. So you come in with these huge dreams about all these things you would want to do as a scientist. You want all the answers, right? But then at the end of the day, you come back with like, you know, one tenth of what you were dreaming you could do because of all the constraints that space and budgets put on you. Veronica Yes, oh, my gosh, that’s totally fair. So, yeah, essentially you’re just like, what can we do, what questions can we answer? What can we do with the time and money and space that we have, which I imagine is quite the challenge. Tanya Definitely. And then you work with engineers to actually build this. I am not an engineer at all. Veronica Right, okay. Tanya And the engineers aren’t planetary scientists, so they won’t know without somebody telling them, ‘Hey, we need something that can do this,’ then they can go and build it. And then usually that’s another meeting of the minds in the middle, like, what do the scientists dream of? And then what do the engineers tell you is possible. So it’s so it ties really well, I guess, to the idea of science communication in general, because you’re communicating with people of a ton of different backgrounds to try to get a mission to actually happen. Veronica Right. What is your specific niche or area of interest within planetary science? I know you’re working on technology like cameras and things like that. Would you say that’s kind of your niche where you find yourself? Tanya Yes, like cameras and camera operations, but more on the geology side in particular, my background was in landslides. And really, any way that something can fall down a hill. Because there’s a lot of different ways something can fall down a hill, whether that’s a landslide or a glacier flowing down a slope, because there are what we think are dust covered glaciers on Mars, as well as the remnants of where glaciers used to be and they’ve left some stuff behind that is very indicative of the glaciers having been there in the past.
