Welcome to the Spring 2024 LPL Newsletter! As is traditional, we highlight the many recognitions and awards our faculty, staff, and students have received this past semester.

LPL faculty are coming off an impressive run of large NASA program successes these past few months. In March we learned that our planetary seismology team was selected to provide the seismometers for the Artemis III Lunar Environment Monitoring Station that will be deployed by the astronauts. The seismometers were developed as part of a multi-year effort led by co-investigator Dr. Daniella DellaGiustina; the LPL development will be led by co-investigator Dr. Angela Marusiak with missions operations help from co-investigator Dr. Veronica Bray. Professor Erik Asphaug is also a co-investigator on a separate instrument that will study the lunar regolith. All of the LPL faculty studying the Moon exemplify, as I like to say, that the first L in LPL stands for “lunar.” 

A few weeks ago, we learned that the Snow4Flow NASA Earth Ventures mission led by Professor Jack Holt was selected for $30M in funding. The goal of the airborne program is to improve our ability to forecast mass balance and sea-level rise contributions from glaciers across the Northern Hemisphere.

You may have heard of the UArizona budget woes and are wondering how LPL might be impacted. All units in the College of Science are being asked to curtail spending in the 2025 fiscal year; LPL will participate to help improve the overall budget of the College. While we will curtail some types of spending, we do not foresee major impacts on operations at this time. This does mean that we will need to rely more than ever on charitable giving, particularly for our Wilkening-Sill Fieldtrip Fund to support the graduate student field trips. I view the trips as an indispensable component of our students’ journey to becoming planetary scientists and we universally appreciate the donor support that helps make them possible. 

Our graduate student recruitment for the class entering fall 2024 went exceptionally well and we have a very impressive group of nine students on their way to Tucson. They aim to study everything from icy satellites to habitable extrasolar planets. We look forward to their joining our ranks.