My Personal Quest to Study Supernovae on Mars
I walked out of the airlock onto the blood-red Martian surface. My mind was crystal clear and laser focused. There was no room for panic or anxiety as I surveyed the landscape and remembered the job ahead. I had conditioned my body to instinctively complete the tasks at hand.
1. Triple check that the life support in my backpack is functioning and I can feel the stream of air tickling my face. My life depends on that trickle of air.
2. Triple check that the airlock pressure matches the Martian ambient atmospheric pressure of 6 millibars before exiting the Hab, our home, so I don’t blow it up into oblivion.
3. Communicate with HABCOM, my colleagues remaining in the Hab, to tell them that the airlock is secure. With everything checked, it was finally time to …
4. Walk on Mars.
In reality, I was at an altitude of 8,200 feet on Mauna Loa, one of the world’s largest volcanoes, on the Big Island of Hawaii, completing an analog astronaut mission. I am a Ph.D. candidate in astrophysics at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, where I research supernovae and computational cosmology. I study exploding stars, tracing them from birth to death, to learn more about their physics and how they might reveal untold secrets of the universe. Ultimately, my goal
