Kudos to these LPL graduate students with new or continuing NESSF (NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship) Awards!

Welcome to the latest edition of the LPL semesterly newsletter. For those of you with long associations with LPL, you may be finding that more and more of the names, even of the faculty, aren’t that familiar. And you’re right. I went through our faculty rolls, and it turns out that more than half our tenure-track faculty have come since the start of 2011. Similarly, more than half of our Research Scientists have joined the faculty since then. That makes us a remarkably young department in some ways.

Welcome to the Fall 2017 version of the “LPL family” newsletter. If you think that you’ve been receiving news from LPL more often recently, it’s because you have been. We realized that one of the things we weren’t doing well at was conveying all of the great science that gets done here. So we started with a short monthly newsletter that is mostly limited to news items from the media about the science and the people here.

Welcome to the Spring 2017 newsletter. I was trying to think of what I should say, and concluded that the best summary of what’s been going on is that the more things stay the same, the more they change. LPL remains, at least in my opinion, one of the premier places in the world to work on planetary sciences, filled with faculty and other researchers who define the cutting edge of our field, graduate students who are changing from just-out-of-college neophytes into world experts, and staff who provide the glue that keeps pieces of the organization from flying off.

At first, the impossibly bright glow of the ignited rocket filled our vision, even 4+ miles distant. But then, as the rising craft reached several rocket heights above the surface, the deep, low rumble of the engine sounding across the water grew to a loud roar that penetrated right to our very cores. No clouds interrupted our view of the rising streak, and as the craft rolled over and continued upward, up toward space with its precious cargo, we were all of us breathtaken.

It has been a tumultuous few months since our last newsletter, filled with both success and sadness.

Recent PTYS graduate Michelle Thompson received the Stephen E. Dwornik Planetary Geoscience Student Paper Award at the 47th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (March 2016).

Ewen Whitaker, whose moon maps were instrumental in the success of the Apollo program, died in Tucson on October 11.

Planetary Sciences graduate coordinator Pam Streett passed away suddenly on September 30 after a brief illness.

We gratefully acknowledge gifts to LPL from donors and corporate partners.