Fall

We are thrilled to announce the establishment of the Dr. Gordon Bjoraker Graduate Student Award. Dr. Bjoraker (or  “Gordy” to his many friends and colleagues) is an LPL alumnus (1985) who specialized in the study of the atmospheres of giant planets and brown dwarfs and made many scientific contributions through James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and ground-based observations during his 39-year career at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The Bjoraker Award is aimed at helping LPL graduate students who are recognized with external fellowships, grants, or awards that may not fully cover their graduate expenses. Award funds will be dispersed to help make sure that such excellent students are not placed at a disadvantage by winning an external recognition. We thank Gordy for his exceptional generosity and support of LPL students in the establishment of this new award.

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By Joe Schools and Jack Holt

Twenty-one LPL graduate students enjoyed three days in beautiful Owens Valley, California. This trip was a ten-and-a-half-hour drive both to and from the site. It was one of the longest drives that LPL students have done to get to a field trip location. Faculty and staff on the trip included Jack Holt, Lynn Carter, Stefano Nerozzi, and Joe Schools as part of the PTYS 590 Planetary Geology Field Studies course.

Activities included exploring the relatively young volcanic terrains associated with the Long Valley Caldera. We stood in the main caldera which formed in a supereruption event ~760,000 years ago. We also explored a lava tube in a ~50,000 year old volcanic field, and hiked around Panum Crater, a rhyolite dome which erupted only 600-700 years ago. Magma likely still exists at depth beneath where we were standing, as evidenced by the active hot springs which were shut down for being too hot.

The students also learned about the glacial processes which carved out the mountains of the area, discovered the history of the California Water Wars, and hunted for trilobites in the ancient White-Inyo mountains.

Everything went absolutely smoothly, and there were no vehicle-rock incidents. For anyone who did not get to experience the field trip, we brought a bit of Owens Valley home with us in the form of the mantle xenolith sample currently outside the Kuiper building. If you get a chance to stop by and see it, note the clusters of green olivine, that’s the mantle!

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Some of the PTYS 590 field trip students were also enrolled in PTYS 549, Radar Remote Sensing. Radar activities for that class were conducted in collaboration with a University of California Los Angeles group led by Professors Dave Paige and Mackenzie Day, who met us in the field along with some of their colleagues and graduate students. This joint effort focused on planetary analog features at three localities that overlapped with the PTYS 590 itinerary, including aeolian bedforms in volcanic cinder deposits at Fossil Falls, a rock glacier at a 9,000 foot elevation in the Eastern Sierras near Bishop, California, and ash fall deposits adjacent to Mono Lake. Students ran ground-penetrating radar on the surface to compare with drone-based radar sounding, complemented by drone-based LiDAR mapping and photogrammetry of the surface.

Support the LPL Graduate Field Trip by donating to the Wilkening-Sill endowment.

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The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory welcomed 5 new graduate students in Fall 2025.

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