(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, saddle up and get ready for a trip to the Wagon and History Museum.

(Stan) I take pride in keeping Tucson's history alive.

(Tom) Local research that's going to the moon and beyond.

(Dani) We want to understand the interior of other bodies across the solar system.

(Tom) How a University of Arizona professor's research is taking him to other worldly views in Alaska.

(Jack) I love being out there, just out flying over these remote places, seeing the big picture.

(Tom) And forget the big game, we've got some superb owls for you.

(Matt) This is one of the things I really love about Tucson.

Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

And today we're joining you from Sixth Avenue and Toole, where muralist Ignacio Garcia is putting the finishing touches on this massive new wall, commemorating the 100th anniversary of La Fiesta de Los Vaqueros Tucson Rodeo.

And that starts on February 15th and runs till the 23rd.

And if you stick around to the end of our show, we'll introduce the artist and you'll hear his inspiration for this masterpiece.

But for now, we'll take you down to the Tucson Wagon and History Museum, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary.

♪ WESTERN GUITAR SONG PLAYS ♪ (Tom) The museum is located on the site of the original airport that the City of Tucson developed.

In 1919, it became the first municipal airport in the country here on this site.

It moved to Davis-Monthan in the early 20s.

So the site's been the site of the museum and the rodeo and it used to be the old fairgrounds since.

♪ WESTERN SONG CONTINUES (Stan) I'd like to say that this is one of the hidden gems of Tucson.

Most of the people look at the Tucson Rodeo Grounds as just a rodeo grounds and our buildings as storage facilities.

And they really are storage facilities for wagons and a lot of other history of Tucson here.

♪ GUITAR MUSIC FADES (Tom) We have four buildings within the confines of the museum right here which holds different wagons and buggies and displays.

Basically of western culture, western life of Tucson, Southern Arizona and the world really.

There's stuff from all over the world here.

(Stan) We changed the name from the Tucson Rodeo Parade Museum to the Tucson Wagon and History Museum because there were people that were coming in looking for parades and stuff.

They're looking for floats.

They're looking for horses.

They're looking for all of that.

Even though we're under the umbrella of the Tucson Rodeo Parade Committee, we dropped that name and just called it the Tucson Wagon and History Museum because that's what people just started calling us.

♪ SLOW TEMPO WESTERN SONG PLAYS ♪ (Tom) This is one of the bigger barns.

When this building was constructed like 1964-65, so I used to call it the Big New Barn.

So we now call it the Roscoe Christopher Barn which we honored an individual on the committee.

This houses some of the bigger equipment, the industrial equipment, the stagecoaches, the freight wagons, the farm wagons and such in this barn.

[ MODEL TRAIN ENGINE WHIRRS ] (Stan) What makes our museum very unique is that, you know, we walk up and touch it.

The museum is not stuck behind glass.

It's not stuck behind stanchions, you know, roped off and that.

You can walk up and touch.

In some cases, if you ask to sit in a particular wagon or buggy, we'll allow you to do that.

It's a fun part of it.

♪ UPBEAT VIOLINS STRUMMING ♪ (Tom) We are in what we call the High End District.

That's the barn we have here.

It's called the Stan Grimes Barn.

We named it after another individual that helped out for many years.

And it has a lot of buggies in the carriages of a little higher state.

Things that you would see back east in the big cities that, you know, that the people of a little bit more wealth will be driving around in.

Of which we have the Maximilian.

You know, it's a carriage.

We call it the Maximilian because it would belong to Maximilian, who was the Emperor of Mexico.

One of the last emperors of Mexico from Europe.

And that carriage was in hiding for a number of years.

And the story goes that it eventually moved its way to southern Arizona into Tucson.

And had been in this museum for 70 some odd year, 80 almost 80 years.

♪ VIOLINS CONTINUE TO PLAY A number of our wagons and buggies carry been a lot of movies over the years.

And one of the most popular movies everybody knows about is the movie "Oklahoma."

♪ 'SURRY WITH THE FRINGE ON TOP' - OKLAHOMA ♪ 'The Surry with the Fringe On Top,' which up here, this is a two-seat Surry.

This and the one behind me also is in the movie.

And the whole musical, which "Oklahoma" was, is this is a central piece of it.

And people love seeing it when they come into the museum.

♪ ELECTRIC GUITAR PLUCKS (Stan) We've got people that worked at the El Conquistador Hotel.

We've got the exhibit of the original El Conquistador on Broadway.

Stopping in, we had one that was a worker.

She was a worker there.

And shared a lot of tears about when they tore it down.

El Conquistador Hotel opened in 1928.

And was in operation until the 1960s where it was demolished.

♪ ELECTRIC GUITAR PLAYS ♪ The Chinese market is one of the unique things that's really got a connection here.

Because I'm working with a gentleman whose father owned the grocery store right across the street from us.

Now it's Raspados.

And I'm working with him as far as trying to get it as historically accurate as possible.

And it really relates to, you know, this part of town.

One of the things he mentioned is that you want to get rid of the candy by the cash register.

That was common for the Chinese markets.

Down here it was saladitos.

♪ ELECTRIC GUITAR SONG CONTINUES ♪ (Tom) It fulfills my love for Tucson.

I'm a native.

I'm a fourth generation Tucsonan.

I love the history of Tucson.

It's a part of Tucson.

Everywhere we go and people will say, if I've been in different parts of the country and I have my Tucson rodeo parade or my Tucson rodeo, they'll go, oh man, that's really neat, Tucson.

They got a great parade.

They got a great rodeo.

That just warms your heart every time you see that and hear it.

(Stan) This is a special place to me in my heart just because the volunteers that work, you know, under me, I just give them a guidance.

I says, this is what needs to be done.

And they do it.

I take pride in keeping Tucson's history alive.

And I guess being a Tucson native, that's the reason, the main reason.

♪ SLOW WESTERN GUITAR PLAYS (Bob) I've been doing this for quite some time, 18 years.

I started out by giving tours and I wanted something a little more hands-on.

They said, okay, we got plenty to do.

[ SAND PAPER SCRAPING ] Very nice group of people, very knowledgeable.

I learn something every day.

(Stan) Most of Tucson doesn't know that we're here.

Last year's entry statistics, we find out that 92% of the visitors to this museum were from out of state, not even from Tucson.

♪ SLOW WESTERN GUITAR PLAYS ♪ (Dennis) I'm Dennis Eichenlaub, and I'm retired.

And we wanted to get away from Baltimore for the winter.

So, we came to Tucson.

We've been here once before and we had a great time.

(Danita) I really liked the idea of getting into the history of Tucson.

And this museum had a really nice combination of the old transportation, as well as the little storefronts on this side, and the tie-in to the parade, which unfortunately we won't see, but maybe another visit.

(Stan) We've got people that will walk in that live just two or three blocks away, actually.

They come walking in saying, you know, we've always seen these buildings here and we see the sign, but I thought I'd just come in and see what it's all about.

It's like any of us, we never paid that much attention to what's in our front yard or backyard.

♪ UPBEAT WESTERN SONG PLAYS ♪ SONG FADES (Tom) Ever wonder what lies beneath the surface of other worlds?

Well, scientists at the University of Arizona are turning seismic technology into space ready tools to be used to explore the unseen depths of moons, planets and asteroids.

♪ AMBIENT MUSIC PLAYING (Dani) One of the really incredible things that we have a heritage of doing here at the University of Arizona is building instruments for space flight.

We were able to draw on that wealth of experience when putting together a plan for how to take these seismic sensors, you know, built mostly for the oil and gas industry and mature them into something that could survive spaceflight, as well as some intense conditions on other planetary worlds We were really excited by the possibility of NASA sending a landed mission to Europa.

One of the payloads or the instruments that they wanted to include on this mission to Jupiter's Moon Europa was a seismic instrument.

This is something that can measure ground motion.

It can measure the response of any planetary body to shaking from quakes or maybe even impacts.

We wanted to see if it was possible to build that type of instrument here at the University of Arizona and we basically started from just a concept on paper and have spent the last eight years or so building up this program.

This is what we lovingly refer to as our beer can.

It's about the size of a large beer can and it is our seismometer system.

So this is our seismometer inside our main sensor, the the large one, there's three of these.

So the seismometer to investigate ice and ocean structure is this project that we stood up to develop a spaceflight seismometer that was well targeted to visit Jupiter's Moon Europa and could really be used at any icy ocean world in the outer solar system The seismometer to investigate ice and ocean structure encapsulates our work to try and really test how would you do this in real life if you're going to another world and you have one shot.

In the case of the moon we don't have a great sense of what is happening at its core.

The little bit that we have learned from seismology suggests that there is an inner core, it's solid kind of like Earth's, but it might still be chemically segregating.

So there might be a layer of partial melt in the interior and that's all based on seismic data from the Apollo days.

So if we can develop a better spaceflight instrument than what was sent out with the Apollo astronauts in the 60s and 70s, and send that to the moon, we'll be able to really advance our scientific understanding of its interior as well.

And it's accessible to us.

We plan to send astronauts there through the Artemis program over the coming years.

We want to put our seismometers in the hands of these astronauts and see, you know, what can we learn with this generation of instrumentation.

(Veronica) If we were setting up a seismometer on the Earth, you could do it in 30 minutes.

Whereas on the Moon, with the astronauts only being able to carry a certain amount each time they walk and having to rest every eight meters, it's gonna take them two hours.

So the Artemis astronauts are going to be drilling into the surface of the Moon to collect rock samples that they'll be bringing back to Earth for study.

Now we've designed our seismometer to fit into one of those drill cores.

So when we're training with the Artemis astronauts, we're going to be doing it in their suits so that we can get an idea of, well, can they bend down and put this in?

If all the stars align, we should have our seismometer package ready for Artemis in 2025 We wanna understand the interior of other bodies across the solar system.

We can definitely send spacecraft with cameras to map out the surface of these other planetary objects, but it's a bit more difficult to get a peek at their interior.

And seismology is the ideal tool to study the interiors of planets.

In the case of Europa, we were really interested in understanding what does it look like at the subsurface?

How deep is its ocean?

And could its ocean be deep or shallow enough to possibly sustain or prevent the formation of life on that body?

When we look at objects like asteroids, which we are also investigating the development of seismometers for, we're really interested to determine how the interior is structured in an asteroid and what that means if we ever have to develop some sort of mitigation technique for an incoming asteroid that might be a threat to our own planet.

So across the board, we wanna understand the interiors of these bodies.

The scientific motivation can vary depending on on the type of body, but seismology is the best tool in order to get at the interior.

♪ EXPLORATORY MUSIC PLAYS (Tom) From the ground to the sky, now we look at a new NASA mission led by U of A professor and pilot Jack Holt.

And this involves putting advanced radar on low-flying aircraft and then scouring the skies above glaciers to try to better understand the impact of climate change.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC (Jack Holt) It's clear from the data, the global data, that things are changing rapidly.

Over the past 10 years flying over specific glaciers in Alaska, I've seen the change myself.

We see big lakes starting to form in front of glaciers as the glaciers retreat, icebergs calving in, giant lakes with icebergs that didn't exist like five years ago That's the sign that things are changing extremely rapidly, and we need to study them now.

Snow4Flow is a NASA project under its Earth Ventures suborbital program.

And it's a very large airborne campaign to study glaciers in the Arctic.

We're going to be using multiple instruments on an airplane to measure snow depth and ice thickness and use that to better constrain their mass balance to project their behavior in the future.

Glaciers are often cited as a big source of uncertainty in the climate models that project what's going to happen in the future.

And so we're zooming in on the glaciers that are changing the most rapidly and that we understand the least.

We currently have no sensors in space that can do these types of measurements.

But you can do it from airplanes.

We've established the techniques over the last several decades doing airborne surveys in Antarctica and Greenland and in Alaska, where I've done a lot of my work.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC [ HANGAR DOOR OPENING ] So we're at Marana Regional Airport, just northwest of Tucson It's a great little community out here, pilots who work on their planes, build their own planes, share tools.

I keep my plane here in the winter.

And I often will be just doing routine maintenance on my plane, changing the oil, doing the brakes, going through an entire annual inspection, where we open it up completely.

We take out the seats.

And I love learning all about my plane.

[ AIRPLANE ENGINE ] So it's a little odd being in Arizona and studying glaciers.

But we can't just live in a microcosm here in Arizona and think we can solve all of our issues here alone.

We need to look elsewhere to the global picture, because climate is a global process.

Do you know why that's there?

(Reasercher) My guess is maybe-- (Jack Holt) So when I'm back here at University of Arizona, I'm working with my students a lot, analyzing data from the field campaigns.

(Researcher) And kind of in the airborne data and even in the 2023 surface data (Jack) We also work on the instrumentation.

We've developed radars to do the types of measurements we need.

I developed this radar over several years.

Then it goes into this antenna that's very 30 meters long that's towed behind the airplane.

So in flight, we take off, get to our flight altitude, and then we just spool it out a hole in the bottom of the plane with a little drogue in the back.

So this project has involved a lot of really great scientists.

And Ali Barangi is one of those people.

He brings expertise that we really need to tie our measurements into a bigger picture.

(Ali) Light data from, for example, GPM type of observation.

I do a lot of precipitation estimation from satellite data and using satellite to study entire water cycle in general, but more focused on the precipitation side of that.

And in recent years, I'm more interested in looking at higher latitudes, especially because of the tight connection to climate change and how rapidly they're evolving.

Prioritize where we need to fly first.

This particular mission, Snow4Flow, can provide us with unprecedented data set that we never had.

(Jack) And then we also have people using completely different types of measurements, including Chris Harig in the Department of Geosciences.

And he uses primarily gravity data to look at changes in ice volume through different seasons.

(Chris Harig) From my perspective, we're a little more fuzzy on this.

So there's a couple of satellite missions which measure Earth's gravity field.

And they give us a really great but also broad picture of mass changing on Earth's surface.

And the Snow4Flow is really a complementary kind of project to that, where it's focused on the small scales.

It's focused on individual glaciers.

OK, so we've got these seasonal snow layers.

We start adding a lot more detail into our modeling.

And that hopefully results in a much more accurate picture of how much ice is being lost and affecting sea level rise.

(Jack) Being able to not only map the previous seasons snow accumulation.

We've learned a great deal from studying certain glaciers in the past 10 years.

In Alaska, one in particular is called Malaspina Glacier.

♪ PEACEFUL MUSIC Over about a five year period, we noticed giant pits sinking into the ground, trees falling in.

And we realized there was a lot of ice under the ground in front of the glacier.

And there were connections starting to be made between the ocean and the glacier.

Once that happens, you get rapid melting.

And it's very difficult to stop.

When you see them year after year, and you see these big changes, yeah, it kind of hits you.

Like, wow, these are going away fast.

And it does convey a sense of urgency to do this kind of work.

♪ PEACEFUL MUSIC Sometimes when I've been in Alaska flying in the survey plane out over the glaciers, I just think, wow, I can't believe this is my job.

I love being out there, just out flying over these remote places, seeing the big picture.

And that's the only way to do it.

There's really no other way to get these measurements and gain the knowledge that we want to gain.

All of this information feeds into, hopefully, us improving as a society in terms of taking care of our environment, managing our resources, making a difference while we can.

That's my goal, is to help make it a better place, you know, for our kids and future generations.

(gentle music) (Tom) And now something for the real fans.

While another station might be showing the big game, we have something special too.

We are taking you to a superb owl party in the Palo Verde neighborhood.

(Matt) We moved to the neighborhood in the fall in October.

Pretty soon after we moved to the neighborhood, one of our neighbors told us about the owls in this tree.

We just bought our first house and we had all these misgivings and sort of feeling stressed in general.

But kind of like having these Great Horned Owls as neighbors kind of made us feel, I don't know, connected to the neighborhood in a certain way.

(Neighbor) And I'll tell you, they pay attention.

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah.

(Barry) We're like their TV show.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

There you are popping up.

They're so cute.

(Alli) I grew up on Lee Street, so I'm really familiar with this neighborhood.

We've always had these nice mature trees, but I've never seen owls quite like this, or at least with this kind of neighborhood following.

Now my new interest is bird watching, but I've never really been aware of all the birds of the desert and in Tucson until we started following this owl family.

I live underneath the tree with all the owls in it.

We have a lot of people that come out, if not every evening, almost every evening.

It also slows down the traffic because when a car comes down the street and they see a huge crowd, they slow down, they roll down their window, they ask what's going on.

People say, "Oh, this is even better than going to the zoo."

These owls came to us about three years ago.

Prior to that, a bunch of Cooper's Hawks had built this nest, and they were in there seven to ten years.

Three years ago, a pair of owls arrived, and they nest earlier in the Cooper's Hawk's, so they kind of took it over.

This is the third batch of kids, owlets.

There was an accident where the female owl got poisoned.

Sometime end of November, first part of December, because people use rodenticide, and then an owl will eat a dead mouse or a dead rat, and you get a dead owl.

So, then we had three weeks of the male owl just hooting every night for hours.

Then he kind of disappeared.

We didn't think we were going to have any owls this year.

Then rather late, he arrived with a female owl.

They are much later this year, but they did have three owlets.

(Matt) This is one of the things I really love about Tucson.

Is just like, there's this weird mixing of urban space and wild space, and people really appreciate that here, I think, more than other places we've lived.

If there's a Night Blooming Cereus at Tohono Chul, people come out in masses.

Or like, if water is flowing in the Santa Cruz, people come to check it out.

There's this appreciation of nature, which I think is cool.

(Tom) And joining me now is the gifted artist behind this awesome mural, Ignacio Garcia.

Ignacio, beautiful work.

I wanna know what it feels like to be invited to be a pivotal piece of the 100th anniversary of the rodeo.

I mean, first of all, I'm beyond honored.

I mean, just to have the 100 year anniversary for the Tucson rodeo, just that itself, I'm beyond humbled, honestly.

(Tom) What's the reaction been so far?

Way more than I expected, and very emotional too for the public, and I guess, especially for the two locals, they literally feel like they can see themselves in this.

And for that, I did not expect that core to their soul.

And so to me, it was just, I'm honored to know that I can share that with them, and to actually show that their words and their stories speak, and that was my goal.

There's a lot behind this, the faces on that mural.

Tell us about the concept, who these people are, and what this says.

Well, it's a mixture of everything.

So the past, the present, the future, and overall the diversity of cultures.

And the point is, I'm not trying to narrow it for one specific culture, it's the culture of mixed cultures, because mixed cultures has always been in the root of Tucson.

(Tom) To hear our entire interview with Ignacio Garcia, please go to our website, azpm.org/ArizonaIllustrated or follow Arizona Illustrated on Facebook, Instagram, or X.

Thank you for joining us on this episode, and we hope you get a chance to come downtown and check out this terrific new mural, it's great.

I'm Tom McNamara, we'll see you again next week.