The Curson Travel Scholarship helped support travel for two LPL graduate students this summer.

Funding from the Curson award supported fourth-year student Ali Bramson's travel to Iceland to attend a joint team meeting for the HiRISE camera and the European Space Agency's Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS) instrument being built for the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. The team meeting, held in Lake Myvatn from September 1-7, had the goal of encouraging collaboration between American and European spacecraft teams and scientists. Ali presented her research results at the meeting. In addition, for the two weeks before the team meeting, Ali participated in the Terrestrial Analogs for Planetary Surfaces field campaign under the direction of Assistant Professor Christopher Hamilton. Students studied and mapped the Holuhraun lava flow using a variety of tools, including differential GPS, unmanned aerial vehicles, a LiDAR scanner and thermal instruments. Ali reports, "Because my research interests are in working with remote sensing data to learn about planetary surface processes, this was an amazing opportunity for me to be involved with a field campaign to study terrestrial analogs, as studying processes on Earth provides the best way to 'ground truth' remote sensing observations. Participating in this field campaign improved my remote sensing knowledge and helped me to continue to work on developing my intuition for geologic and physical processes of planetary surfaces."

Kelly Miller is a fifth-year graduate student advised by Professor Dante Lauretta. She studies a group of primitive meteorites called the Rumuruti chondrites, which are formed in an environment that was rich in gaseous oxygen and sulfur. These elements are both biologically significant, and are among the ten most abundant elements in the Solar System. They are also relatively volatile, which means that they transition from the gas phase to the solid phase at low temperatures. Kelly's research focuses on understanding how, when, and where the R chondrites experienced oxygen- and sulfur-rich environments. The Curson award helped fund her travel to the Gordon Research Conference on Origins of Solar Systems, held June 28 to July 3, in South Hadley, MA, where she presented her research. Kelly notes that the "conference aims to foster a strong sense of community through frequent discussion sessions, communal meals, and a limited number of attendees. Attending the conference provided an excellent opportunity for networking and the exchange of ideas."