Caden Howlett

I found these colonial (slides 1–2) and solitary (slide 3) rugose corals on a hike yesterday. They’re about 340 million years old. I read a cool article (slide 4) about how rugose corals were used to confirm that Earth’s rotation has slowed over time (i.e., a day on earth was shorter in the past).

Over geologic time scales, nanosecond changes unnoticeable in a human lifetime add up to months. In the 60s, this guy Dr. John Wells counted daily growth lines within annual bands (“annulations”) in Paleozoic corals. He found that there were about 400 daily bands per year during the Paleozoic. That is, 400 days per year.

This morning at 330am EST, the fully private Blue Ghost Mission successfully landed on the Moon. The lander carries a suite of NASA science and technology payloads including instruments aiming to test and demonstrate lunar subsurface drilling technology, regolith sample collection capabilities, radiation tolerant computing, and lunar dust mitigation methods.
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