At the California Academy of Sciences, kids took turns searching for aliens (toys) in our simulated universe of colored foam. If they didn’t find anything on the first try we asked them:

“Do you think that means there are no aliens in the there?”

“No!” -Said the kids.

“Why is that?”

“Because we didn’t search the whole pool. We have to keep looking!”

Then we talked about how at SETI we haven’t found any signs of intelligent life outside of Earth yet, but we’ve only searched a very small part of the Universe, so we also think we should keep looking!

This game developed when I volunteered to help Jill Tarter with an outreach event at the California Academy of Sciences. I told her my idea about creating a game for kids that helped them understand the difficulties of finding signs of intelligent life in the cosmos. She was very supportive and gave me the funds to create my crazy idea.

It was very successful. The kids found about ~80 alien toys (sometimes it took 10 scoops to find something) and there were people at our booth all day. Jill also had SETI Live running on a large monitor, so after people were done searching for alien toys, they could help search for the real thing.

Super fun day!

The first blog I started checking consistently was http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/. Did anyone see her post about some lava swirls on Mars that HiRISE captured?

Pretty… freakin… cool…

Anyhow, I work at the SETI Institute as a research assistant with Cynthia Phillips. We make elevation maps of the moons of Saturn. We study their surface, including craters and tectonic features, to try and understand their internal structure. Currently we’re focused on the moons Dione and Rhea.

I consider myself a “pre-doc”.  I finished my undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz (any other banana slugs out there?) in 2009, and have been working at SETI going on 2 years. I’ll soon be off to study Planetary Science at Brown University. I’m pretty pumped about it.

As someone about to enter grad school, I’m really excited to learn more about other parts of astronomy and planetary science. Most of what I know is about icy satellites and impact craters. I’ll use this blog to share some of the most interesting parts of my job, and I look forward to learning a thing or two from my fellow bloggers.

In post to come I’ll talk a little bit about FameLab, an astrobiology competition I competed in, as well as a Saturday spent at the California Academy of Science with Jill Tater.

Pics to come. Adios!