Fall

Maizey Benner

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

The purpose of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) is to ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States. GRFP recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students who have demonstrated the potential to be high achieving scientists and engineers, early in their careers. 

Sam Myers

Assessing the Limitations of NEATM-like Models with IRTF and NEOWISE Data

Advisor: Ellen Howell

Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology

Mackenzie Mills

Effects of subsurface Fluid Reservoirs on Martian Geomorphology in Utopia Planitia

Advisor: Alfred McEwen

Samantha Moruzzi

Faulting in Pluto's Ice Shell: An Investigation of Local Strain and Stress Concentrations from Refreezing of the Ice Shell Beneath Sputnik Basin

Advisor: Jeff Andrews-Hanna

Dr. David Grinspoon (1989) was selected as a member of the 16-member NASA independent study team on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). The 9-month long study began on Oct. 24 and will focus on unclassified data. The team will release its findings in 2023.

Dr. Grinspoon is a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute and is a member of science teams for several interplanetary spacecraft missions including the DAVINCI mission to Venus. He is the former inaugural Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology. His research focuses on comparative planetology especially regarding climate evolution and the implications of habitability on Earth-like planets. He was awarded the Sagan Medal by the American Astronomical Society and he is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also an adjunct professor of Astrophysical and Planetary Science at the University of Colorado (Boulder) and Georgetown University.

When NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft slammed into asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, it altered the moonlet's orbit by 33 minutes. Since the impact, DART scientists, including LPL alumni Nancy Chabot (DART Coordination Team Lead) and Andy Rivkin (Investigation Team Co-Lead), have been analyzing the impact ejecta and studying the observations to determine the object's composition and clues to its formation, in addition to how to defend Earth if an asteroid were headed for us.

DART's impact displaced over two million pounds of the moonlet into space and researchers are trying to learn just how much of the asteroid's displacement occurred as a result of the impact versus the recoil. Read more about DART and what comes next for the science team analyzing the impact and implications for planetary defense.

Alumnus John Moores (2008) was named Science Advisor to the President of Canada. He is the York Research Chair in Space Exploration at York University and is the Director of Technologies for Exo-Planetary Science with Canada's Collaborative Research and Training Experience Program. Dr. Moores previously held positions as Associate Dean of Research and Graduate studies for the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University.

Dr. Moores is a Participating Scientist on NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission and contributed to the 2005 Cassini Huygens probe to Titan and to the Phoenix mission to Mars.

By Mikayla Mace Kelley, University Communications - October 19, 2022

The University of Arizona's Daniella "Dani" DellaGiustina shot for the stars and has already landed among them. Today, the planetary scientist was named one of Popular Science's Brilliant 10 – an annual list of early-career scientists and engineers who are developing innovative approaches to problems across a range of disciplines.

DellaGiustina is an assistant professor of planetary sciences in the university's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and deputy principal investigator of NASA's LPL-led OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission. She is also principal investigator of the extended OSIRIS-REx mission, dubbed OSIRIS-APEX, which will visit the near-Earth asteroid Apophis.

DellaGiustina was chosen from hundreds of researchers across a variety of institutions.

Popular Science says its list aims to recognize the hard work, creativity and potential of those who are shaking up old modes of thinking, defining new disciplines and laying the groundwork for tomorrow's most groundbreaking research.

"For the Brilliant 10, we look for innovative thinkers and leaders whose work stands to reshape our understanding of our world. The insights Daniella's work will glean from asteroids will do just that," said Popular Science Editor-in-Chief Corinne Iozzio. "When Apophis makes its loop around Earth in 2029, the work she's prepping now will ensure we learn everything we can about our past, present and future as we possibly can."

"Dr. DellaGiustina is a brilliant planetary scientist whose work on the OSIRIS-REx and OSIRIS-APEX missions is expanding our knowledge of the makeup of asteroids and is laying the foundation for groundbreaking discoveries about the evolution of our solar system," said Carmala Garzione, dean of the College of Science. "Her journey through her education and career is inspirational and will support the next generation of female and Latina scientists. We are proud to have Dr. DellaGiustina representing our science community in Southern Arizona."

DellaGiustina is interested in water distribution throughout the solar system and how scientists can establish water's presence on different planetary bodies.

"Over the last year, I've been enamored with the scientific questions to establish how water got to the early Earth billions of years ago," DellaGiustina said. "I'm also interested in understanding the interiors of asteroids, moons and planets, because it's so difficult to do. We only have indirect measurements and techniques at our disposal, so we must pair those measurements with good assumptions to fully interpret the data. I enjoy that challenge."

DellaGiustina develops and deploys remote-sensing instruments to learn more about the surface and interior structure of small airless worlds, including asteroids and the moons of the outer solar system, where liquid oceans could be lurking beneath ice sheets.

She tests her technology in places like Greenland, which has a landscape similar to the planetary bodies she studies. Over the summer, she spent several weeks testing instruments at a lake beneath a glacier in northwest Greenland, where half a mile of ice overlays about 30 feet of salty water, providing a similar landscape to what is expected on Jupiter's moon Europa.

Following the water has also taken her to asteroid Bennu, from which the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected a sample in 2020 that will be returned to Earth in 2023. Bennu contained evidence of water in its past, and so drew scientific attention. After the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft jettisons its sample return capsule over the Utah desert in September 2023, the spacecraft will fly on to study Apophis, thanks to a $200 million mission extension by NASA that DellaGiustina will lead. The goal of the OSIRIS-APEX extended mission is to understand what lies just beneath the surface of asteroid Apophis. Researchers also want to understand how Apophis will be physically affected by the gravitational pull of Earth when the asteroid make a close approach to the planet in 2029.

DellaGiustina, 36, has rocketed from student to principal investigator in a short period of time. She said that what motivates her is her love of discovery.

"I get obsessed with scientific questions and like treating them like giant puzzles," DellaGiustina said. "I also just love being the first person to see the first image of a planetary surface, or the first to discover what is at the base of an ice sheet. I'm hooked on that feeling."

DellaGiustina earned a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Arizona in 2008. She got her master's in computational physics from the University of Alaska in 2011 and then returned to UArizona, where she completed a doctorate in geosciences in 2021.

Her career began to develop at LPL when she was an undergraduate in the Arizona Space Grant program, studying meteorites with Professor Dante Lauretta, who would become principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx.

Her work led to a student experiment on the Phase A Discovery OSIRIS Mission, which was a precursor to OSIRIS-REx that ultimately was not selected by NASA for spaceflight but paved the way for the OSIRIS-REx mission. She developed an experiment to measure the ability of asteroids to provide radiation shielding for future manned missions to Mars.

In graduate school, DellaGiustina combined remote observations of Earth's ice sheets with modeling techniques to understand how ice flow will respond to a changing climate. She now uses her knowledge of Earth's permanently frozen regions to perform field studies in Earth landscapes similar to icy bodies in the solar system.

In 2012, DellaGiustina became a research scientist in the UArizona Department of Physics, and she transitioned back to planetary sciences in early 2014. She led the OSIRIS-REx image processing team from 2015 to 2021 before becoming deputy principal investigator of the mission in 2021. In addition to her other roles, she teaches a course about asteroids and comets to undergraduate and graduate students.

"Being recognized as one of the Brilliant 10 is really rewarding because I am a Latina who has not taken a traditional path through my career," DellaGiustina said.

She put the pursuit of her doctoral degree on the backburner while she worked for a while to figure out exactly what she wanted to study — eventually settling on seismology. She finished her doctorate while working full time as a scientist, graduating the same semester she wrote the proposal that would lead to her appointment as the OSIRIS-APEX principal investigator. At the same time, she was growing a spaceflight seismometer instrument program at UArizona, called the Seismometer to Investigate Ice and Ocean Structure. The program develops instruments needed to support missions to icy bodies in the outer solar system that could provide a sneak peek into the interiors of other worlds.

"It's been a little bit of a gamble to do things in the way I have," DellaGiustina said, "so it's nice to get external recognition that the work I'm doing is impactful."

Congratulations to Dr. Barbara Cohen (2000), Principal Investigator for NASA's Lunar Flashlight, which launched successfully on Dec. 11 and has begun its four-month trip to the Moon. Lunar Flashlight is a small satellite on a mission to seek out surface water ice in permanently shadowed craters of the Moon's south pole. Flashlight fans can track the SmallSat using NASA's fully interactive Eyes on the Solar System tool.

Lunar Flashlight will use a near-rectilinear halo orbit – designed for energy efficiency – to take it as near as 9 miles to the lunar south pole. The SmallSat has a reflectometer equipped with four lasers that emit near-infrared light in wavelengths readily absorbed by surface water ice. If the lasers hit bare rock or regolith, the light will reflect back to the spacecraft. However, if the target absorbs the light, the presence of water ice would be indicated. The greater the absorption, the more ice there may be.

Data collected by Lunar Flashlight will be compared with observations made by other lunar missions to help reveal the distribution of surface water ice on the Moon for potential use by future astronauts.

Dr. Cohen is a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Read more about Lunar Flashlight.

by Claire Cook

The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory Conference (LPLC) marks the start of the academic year for the LPL community and other planetary scientists in the Tucson area. This year, LPLC was hosted in a hybrid format on August 19. Over 70 participants gathered at the Kuiper Building and on Zoom to watch 30 presentations given by faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate students from LPL and other departments. Among the five invited speakers was Galen Bergsten, winner of the “Best Grad Student Presentation” in 2021. Galen gave a great talk titled There’s No Place Like Home: Exoplanets and Accessibility in a Local Context, which addressed both exoplanet science and how to make the science more inclusive and accessible. The “Best Grad Student Presentation” award went to Sam Myers, with a talk on near-Earth asteroids titled Comparing NEATM-like Models to IRTF and NEOWISE Data to Constrain Model Results. Sam will be invited to present at LPLC in 2023.

In addition to the invited speakers, 25 others gave presentations about their current or upcoming research. LPLC concluded with a keynote from OSIRIS-APEX Deputy Principal Investigator Dr. Michael Nolan on The OSIRIS-APEX Mission. A catered reception followed the conference, helping to keep the discussions going and bringing together the local planetary science community. The LPLC Organizing Committee, composed solely of LPL graduate students, is proud of this year's excellent turnout, engagement, and participation. We wish to thank the Tucson planetary science community for your continued support and are looking forward to another successful conference next fall!

Recent rankings by U.S. News & World Report and the National Science Foundation (NSF) once again recognize UArizona as one of the world's top research institutions.

UArizona ranked 108 out of 2,000 higher education institutions across 95 countries in the 2023 by U.S. News & World Report Best Global Universities ranking, released on Oct. 24. The university was No. 44 among universities in the U.S. and No. 23 among public universities. UArizona again earned its best placement in the space science category, placing No. 10 overall, No. 6 (up from No. 7 last year) in the U.S. and No. 2 among public universities. The university earned top marks for its research reputation in space sciences, along with the number of citations and publications by UArizona researchers.

U.S. News & World Report's Best Global Universities ranks colleges and universities in 47 separate subjects. UArizona earned a spot on 34 of the subject ranking lists. The university's overall research reputation ranked No. 49 in the U.S. and No. 94 globally. To produce the global rankings, U.S. News & World Report uses a methodology that focuses on a university's global and regional reputation and academic research performance using indicators such as citations and publications. U.S. News uses a separate methodology for the subject-specific rankings that is based on academic research performance in each subject. U.S. News uses various measures, including publications and citations, as well as indicators for global and regional reputation in each specific subject area.

On Dec. 13, the NSF Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) survey again ranked UArizona among the nation's top public research universities, with $770 million in total research activity in fiscal year 2021. The HERD survey annually ranks more than 900 colleges and universities and is considered the primary source of information on research and development expenditures at U.S. colleges and universities. UArizona also retained its No. 1 ranking in astronomy and astrophysics (including planetary science) expenditures at more than $113 million – more than $40 million ahead of the No. 2-ranked university.

UArizona saw an increase of more than $9 million over its fiscal year 2020 total. Research and development expenditures rank No. 20 among public institutions and No. 36 overall, placing UArizona in the top 4% of all U.S. universities ranked in this list, both public and private. UArizona ranked No. 5 in NASA-funded activity and No. 6 in the physical sciences.

UArizona has held the No. 1 ranking in astronomy/astrophysics and planetary science expenditures each year since 1987.

Read more: 

• NSF: UArizona again ranks among top 20 public research universities, No. 1 in astronomy and astrophysics
• UArizona Space Sciences shine in US News Best Global Universities ranking