I told them that NASA placed a priority on including students in research, and that in addition to helping prepare the artificial hypolith experiment, my students were following our research on this blog. I also talked about our interactions with yesterday’s students from Abu Dhabi
We were on the air at 8 and again at 11 tonight, and we were also featured today in a page 3 article in the Gulf News.
Jon cut a big plug out of the salt crust that shows the different layers of bacterial cells; brown, green and pink. It looked like a big sandwich. We left Liwa and drove out onto the gravel plains, looking for hypoliths but we did not find any. There was too much sand, and none of the right kinds of rocks. For astrobiologists, the sabhkas are the stars of the show here.
I found this skull of a goat, I think.
The salt plug is really interesting...it's like each bacteria has its own niche in the salt bed...and the green bacteria is underneath the red? I would have expected the red to be on the bottom since they photosynthesize with different UV wavelengths.
ReplyDeleteLots of questions could be explored looking at that picture!