Mars Topography Display

The idea of terraforming Mars has been on my mind and probably many other peoples. It will probably become a realistic event but I don't expect it to a finished idea for another 100 or so years. Because of this, the idea of Terraforming can only be displayed in our minds and art. 

Luckily the nice people at NASA provide so many lovely photos of mars which is where my idea started. I choose this area of Mars because it has several nice craters and would make good topography.

I decided to turn the photo into a grey scale and increased its contrast in hope to bring out some of the details. Although now I know I could have used Fusion 360 to convert this to a 3d printable file at the time of this project I choose to use an online application called Selva3d. Their website allowed me to upload the photo and allow me to pick out certain dimensions and thicknesses. Luckily the website offered a free option and honestly it worked perfectly. 

3D Printing

I wanted to print 3 copies of the landscape each representing a different stage of Terraforming.

1.Current Mars

2.Mars after Green House effect creating lakes of water (100 years)

3.Plant life occurs and Lakes become permanent (150-200 years)

Just because of convenience I printed each landscape in Black PLA and gave a light sanding to remove any strings. 100% infill because I usually print every like that.

The Ender 3 Pro did an amazing job at printing. 

Painting 

All of the prints were painted a pumpkin orange. The all of the  topographies were given a dry brush of brown just to increase dimension so you could easily see the craters and low areas.

The second one got slightly green tone added to areas were I believed lakes and rivers were most likely. The orginal pumpkin orange was still majority and gave the idea that climatic changes were occurring but yet to be critical to the overall environment. The lakes and rivers were created using clear epoxy. I wasn't to worried about removing the bubbles or artifacts from the epoxy they added to the topography.

The third one got the same effect and again got painted pumpkin orange but most got covered with green. The green for the most part was to represent the growth of plant life and the establishment of ecology. I thought it was best to leave some of the orange because mars will probably always have it in some place on the planets surface. I also darkened all the lakes with a dark blue and green to give it a little color. Although on mars the oceans might not end up these colors.

All the landscapes were given semi gloss finish and displayed as it shows below

I hope you enjoyed my write up

Thanks for reading 

Insect lenses and Spectroscopic Analysis

Examining the Spectral Signature of Insect Lenses (Visible Spectrum)

I wanted to examine specific wavelengths that are able to pass through the lens of insect eye.The plan was to choose eight Missouri insects : Honeybee, Red Paper wasp, Cicadas, Common Sand dragon, Green Mantis,Green Stripped Grasshopper,Reddish Brown Stag Beetle. I humanely collected (mostly found dead) each sample and dissected each specimen for the eye structure and preserved each sample in a non-alcoholic resin. Each sample was roughly 0.3-0.5 mm in size when preserved in the resin. I mostly choose this size to both test my ability of specifically cutting the lenses to a size and this size completely covers the viewing area at the desired magnification. 

This post is mostly about the technical build and not about the study of the lenses although Ill post some of that data in the end for some insects tested.

Light source

The light source used was an array of white LEDs which had good spectral variance and could cover the wavelengths that I wanted to focus on.

Monitoring the wavelengths

So I decided to kinda cheat at this and use an off the shelf sensor for detecting and monitoring the intensities of the wavelengths other than using a broad spectrometer . Sparkfun produces a board called the AS726 Visible Spectrum breakout board. I purchased both the Visible and the NIR but for this I only used the Visible because thats mostly what the light source is focused on.

The Visible spectrum board has good wavelength variety, 450,500,550,570,600,650 nm. For my project this gives me enough information . Using a spectrometer would have opened up what wavelengths I could monitor but the breakout board takes away a lot of possible software issues and I like the idea of being in control of the code.

Microscope Attachment

The breakout board needed some form of case to properly attach to the microscope. So to try something new I decided to give Tinkercad a shot and I thought it came out great.

All of the prints were printed in Black PLA. In hope to stop any stray light

I designed a wire guide into the casing to length the life span of the project. The wiring leads to a male USB because the AS726 only needs four wires as it uses I2C communication. This leads to a female USB which is attached to a Arduino Mega as the image shows below. I can easily attach either of the breakout boards without having to rewire the Arduino. 

If you hook up both the NIR and the Visible light sensors like above ^ this gives you 12 wavelengths to monitor and play around with . Hypothetically you could possibly use this type of setup to examine micro custom lens and filters. I have plans on attempting to build lenses that block specific wavelengths and hopefully that will be another post in the future.

 

Insect Lens Data

So below is a few data samples I got from the setup

Resin Sample 

Blank Slide Sample 

Honeybee Sample

Grass Hopper

Green Mantis

   Thanks For Reading

I hope you enjoyed it !!

Links :

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14351

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14347

Dark field Microscopy

One of the well documented projects that I use very often when examining objects under the microscope are Dark field adapters.Dark field adapters simply stop light from directly interacting with the sample you are examining. The only light that will interfere with the sample is the light coming through the glass at a horizontal. This effect will bring details that would normally not be visible especially with samples that are not transparent.

                            I simply measured the area above the light source under my microscope and designed it to fit. I designed 3 different sizes  mostly to experiment to see what ones are more useful. Turns out it all depends on the size of the sample I have found that the light interferes differently so having multiple sizes worked out in my favor. The adapters were all 3d printed with Black PLA with one exception being the .5 mm blocker, my printer for some reason didnt like printing at the detail I wanted so I had shapeways print it for me and it came out great.

So to finish this off my wife and found a mite in one out terrariums so decided to check it out under the micoscope. Now a mite really isnt transparent so dark field really helped showing us the details needed in identifying the species.