2014 Fall Department News

In previous LPL newsletters, we have acknowledged some of the major donors to LPL, but we wanted to publicly acknowledge all of our generous donors who have helped make many things possible, ranging from the LPL field trips to the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory Conference, to The Art of Planetary Science.This list is

Hamish Hay; MSci Geophysics, Imperial College London; interests in planetary interiors/dynamics; impact cratering, numerical modeling

Daniel Lo; B.S. in Planetary Sciences, B.S. in Physics, California Institute of Technology; interests in planetary surfaces, atmospheres, Mars.

Joshua Lothringer; B.A. in Astronomy (emphasis in Astrophysics), University of Colorado, Boulder; interests in extrasolar planets

Congratulations to Ingrid Daubar, Tiffany Kataria, and Juan Lora, LPL's most recent Ph.D. graduates!

On June 27, LPL hosted the first viewing of the film "Desert Moon," a documentary about some of the ways that southern Arizona was involved with the early days of the lunar exploration program in the 1960s.  Naturally, a lot of it is about people who were at LPL at

by Margaret Landis

This year’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory Conference (LPLC) was held August 21 and 22 in the Kuiper Space Sciences Building. Forty-seven talks and two posters were presented over the two days, culminating in a keynote talk by LPL's Dr. Travis Barman. The talk, titled "Imaging Exoplanets," described

LPL was featured in the Tucson Weekly cover story (To The Moon, July 21, 2014) commemorating the 50th anniversary of Ranger 7 (July 31, 1964), the first U.S. spacecraft to take close-up images of the Moon. The article centers on Gerard P. Kuiper and his role in the mission as

by Jamie Molaro

This year's Art of Planetary Science exhibition, held October 17-19, 2014, was an astounding success! More than 90 artists and scientists participated (up fifty percent from last year), and the exhibition displayed over 200 pieces of artwork. A variety of mediums were represented, including paintings, drawings, digital prints

LPL's 2014 summer outreach event was themed "Everything Lunar: Celebrating the Past, Exploring the Future." The festivities were held on July 20 to mark the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing; approximately 600 guests attended.

Activities and exhibits were varied and included:

tours of the University

From September 2 to September 30, the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission and The Planetary Society collected tweets and images as part of the Asteroid Time Capsule Campaign, which invited the public to tweet or post an image on Instagram (with hashtag #asteroidmission) to answer the question: Where

Hawai`i by Shane Byrne and Christopher Hamilton

Thanks to the generosity of donors, we were able to roam farther afield than usual this semester—much farther. The southwestern United States is gifted with exceptionally diverse geology, but there are some processes, such as active volcanism, that cannot be seen in our local