DPS 56: Day 3

Editor’s Note: This week we’ll be writing updates on selected events at the 56th Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) meeting happening in Boise, Idaho, and online. The usual posting schedule for AAS Nova will resume on October 14th.

Table of Contents:

• Plenary Lecture: Addressing Mental Health in Planetary Science: Big and Small Steps to Creating an Environment that Supports Well-Being (David Trang)
• Press Conference: Amy Simon, Richard Cartwright, Mariah Jones

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Plenary Lecture: Addressing Mental Health in Planetary Science: Big and Small Steps to Creating an Environment that Supports Well-Being (David Trang)

Planetary scientist and mental health counselor David Trang (Space Science Institute) discussed the results of recent surveys of mental health among planetary scientists and strategies to improve the health of the community. Mental health is a pressing issue for our community: 76% of planetary scientists surveyed reported having anxious or depressive symptoms that made it at least somewhat difficult to perform work duties, take care of things at home, or get along with others. Twenty-nine percent of respondents found these tasks difficult, while 9% of respondents said they found these tasks very difficult.

These issues affect everyone: even if you’re not personally experiencing symptoms, the collaborative nature of planetary science means that someone you work with likely is. Distracting thoughts associated with anxiety, stress, and depression occupy short-term memory, affecting research quality, the ability to develop new ideas, interpret data, and more. Aside from research quality, poor mental health worsens physical and social health as well.

To examine the mental health of our community, Trang surveyed roughly 300 planetary scientists in 2022 and 2023, using common anxiety, stress, and depression assessments. The survey indicated higher than average anxiety and depression among female, POC, LGBTQ+, and early career respondents. Notably, graduate students had the highest prevalence of anxiety and depression of any of the groups surveyed. While stress, anxiety, and depression decreased for nearly all demographic groups in 2023 compared to 2022, even after decreasing to 2023 levels, planetary scientists across the board remained more stressed, anxious, and depressed than the average respondent from the general public, pre-COVID. For almost all groups, levels remained higher among planetary scientists in 2023 than the general population during the peak of COVID.

Overall, the results show a statistically significant difference in the prevalence of anxiety, stress, and depression between members of marginalized groups and members of non-marginalized groups. While this difference may reflect larger cultural and societal issues, it also presents an opportunity for planetary science participation to become a protective factor against these larger issues.

In what way might the planetary science community be protective? As an example, Trang showed that there are statistically significant differences in the prevalence of anxiety and depression between scientists that participate in missions and those that do not. Why mission participation has a protective effect isn’t yet clear, but Trang hypothesized that mission participation creates a sense of belonging to a group, and it also pairs early career scientists with a larger number of potential mentors, increasing the chances of there being a positive mentor relationship. (During the Q&A, audience members proposed other potential factors, such as stability of funding and the impact of working toward a common goal.)

To bring these positive aspects of mission participation to all planetary scientists, Trang suggested creating more teams (not just missions, but research institutes and interest groups as well) and improving mentorship for early career scientists. To achieve the latter goal, institutions could implement mandatory mentorship training for graduate advisors or invest in a mentor advisor to provide career mentorship to a large number of graduate students, reducing the burden on graduate research advisors.

In addition to these larger policy changes, individuals can make small changes that have a big impact. One area of focus is expressing appreciation, as many of those surveyed said that not feeling appreciated was a major contributor to their anxiety or depression. Trang suggests that simply saying thank you with one sentence explaining why you’re grateful can go a long way. And as someone receiving an expression of appreciation, be sure to say how you felt about it (e.g., “You’re so welcome, I’m happy to hear that you found it helpful!”) — this makes it a positive experience for everyone involved.

Trang presented two other strategies that can help people feel appreciated: focusing on strengths and complimenting the process. As scientists — especially scientists in advisor roles — it’s easy to focus on what’s wrong and what needs improvement. For example, when editing a student’s manuscript, it’s natural to point out what needs to be fixed. But don’t forget to focus on what’s been done well (e.g., “You did a great job of reviewing past work in the introduction. Let’s bring that same strategy to the discussion section.”). Similarly, it’s easy to congratulate or compliment someone after a major achievement — say, being awarded a grant — so try to compliment the steps of the process as well. For example, take the time to acknowledge the hard work that went into writing an excellent proposal, even if it wasn’t selected.

Want to implement these changes in your life? Set SMART goals, Trang suggests. Give yourself a Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound goal, such as pointing out two strengths each time you review a paper this year. Through individual efforts and broad policy changes, we can make the planetary science community a healthier place.

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Press Conference: Amy Simon, Richard Cartwright, Mariah Jones (Briefing video)

First to speak was Amy Simon (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center), who presented results from a long-term study of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. The famous Great Red Spot is the largest storm in the solar system, spanning 10,000 miles (~16,000 km). Although it’s been a constant feature of Jupiter’s disk for centuries, it’s both steadily shrinking and changing in more subtle ways. Simon’s team used the Hubble Space Telescope to investigate the Great Red Spot’s 90-day oscillations, which are periodic changes in the rate at which the storm drifts westward. This rate oscillation is seen in historical and ground-based data. The Hubble observations showed that many aspects of the spot varied over the course of 90 days. The spot’s semimajor axis varied, though it’s north–south extent did not, and the height and width of the deep-red core changed.

All of these changes were roughly in phase with one another. Other changes, such as changes to the reflectance of the core of the spot and the collar region just outside the core, were out of phase with each other. Some parameters were also correlated, such as the spot’s size and speed; the spot is largest when it is moving most slowly. The core is also brightest when the spot is largest, although this change is small. An analysis of the wind velocity field showed that the surrounding velocity isn’t compensating for the other oscillations. This indicates that a simple two-dimensional model in which changes in vorticity balance the oscillations doesn’t apply to this system, and the three-dimensional atmospheric structure must be more complex.

Next, Richard Cartwright (Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory) brought things farther out in the solar system with new JWST observations of Ariel, the fourth-largest moon of Uranus. The JWST data revealed the presence of CO₂ and CO ice on the moon’s surface. This finding is intriguing because these materials likely escape to space over time, so they must be replenished somehow. CO₂ ice might form via irradiation of materials on the moon’s surface by energetic particles trapped in Uranus’s magnetosphere. The alternative, which is favored by the JWST data, is that CO₂ gas could escape from a reservoir below the surface and condense on the surface.

A potential reservoir could be a subsurface ocean rich in CO₂, CO, and possibly CO₃. If CO₃ were to be found on Ariel’s surface, that would be strong evidence for the presence of such an ocean, since it’s a difficult compound to make on the surface of an airless body. The JWST data show a tiny hint of a CO₃ feature as well as a feature that could be interpreted as being due to clathrates — chemical lattices that trap molecules. Both of these features, if confirmed, would provide firm evidence for the subsurface ocean hypothesis. Curiously, the data show no hint of hydrogen peroxide, which has been seen on the moons Europa, Ganymede, Enceladus, and Charon. This might hint that the radiation environment at Ariel is quieter than expected.

Future work will dive deeper into new JWST observations of Uranian moons Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon. Preliminary analysis of the JWST spectra shows the first evidence of CO ice on these worlds.

Finally, Mariah Jones (Vassar College/SETI Institute) took things out of the solar system altogether with a theoretical exploration of co-orbiting bodies in exoplanet systems. Co-orbitals are bodies that share an orbit. For example, the Jupiter trojan asteroids share Jupiter’s orbit. Trojans are a class of co-orbitals that sit 60 degrees in front of and 60 degrees behind a planet. Horseshoes are co-orbitals with a more complex configuration, librating around 180 degrees from their host planet. In our solar system, Mars, Jupiter, and Neptune host stable populations of co-orbiting bodies, but Saturn and Uranus do not. The reason for this may be that Saturn and Uranus are both in near-resonance with Jupiter and Neptune, respectively. Orbital resonance refers to a setup in which the orbital periods of two or more bodies are integer multiples of one another.

Jones and collaborators used dynamical modeling to investigate if the presence of resonance in a planetary system affects the long-term stability of co-orbital populations. They collected initial conditions for several multi-planet systems from the NASA Exoplanet Archive and injected 20 synthetic co-orbitals into each system. They found a variety of behaviors, including stable trojans and horseshoes, no stable solutions, or switching between stable trojan and horseshoe configurations. They found that stable configurations were more likely for systems without resonance. This trend might happen because in a resonant system, bodies that are co-orbital with one planet are also in resonance with another planet, destabilizing the configuration.

Slides from these three presentations are available in the press kit.

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