Fall

LPL alumna Dr. Elizabeth Turtle (1998), planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, is Principal Investigator for the Dragonfly mission to explore Titan. The mission leadership team includes another LPL alumnus (Dr. Jason Barnes, 2004) as well as a former LPL postdoctoral research associate (Dr. Ralph Lorenz). An additional six LPL student alumni are members of the Dragonfly science and engineering team.

We would like to thank all those who have donated to LPL in 2018 and 2019. Thanks to everyone for helping LPL accomplish things we would not be able to without you. 

Individual Donors

Victor Baker
Ed Beshore & Amy Phillips
Dan Cavanagh
David Choi
Ruben Garcia
Barbara Gray
Alan Hildebrand
Greg Hupe
Dave & Lori Iaconis
Dinah Jasensky
Michael Kaiserman
Xenia King
Norm Komar
Colin Leach
Martha Leake
Toni Littlejohn
Renu Malhotra
Alfred McEwen
Laura McGill
Bob & Gloria McMillan
Jamie Molaro
Kelly Kolb Nolan
Mark & Judy Paris
Jani Radebaugh
Timothy Reckart
Vishnu Reddy
Michelle Rouch
Cristie Street
Timothy Swindle
Eric Tilenius
Robert Ward

Corporate and Foundation Donors

Bentley's House of Coffee and Tea

Welcome to the latest edition of the semesterly LPL Newsletter, the last of the 2010s. A lot has happened over this decade, which also coincides with the length of time we’ve been putting out a regular newsletter (the first one came out in Fall 2010).

If you’ve been around LPL awhile, and you look at the directory of our faculty, you’ll realize that there are a lot of new names and faces. In fact, nearly 60% of the people listed there were not on that page in 2010. We’ve also graduated 48 students in that time, many of whom have already made their mark in planetary science and other endeavors. Our faculty, students, staff, and alumni have won numerous awards, ranging from membership in the National Academy of Sciences to awards for service. LPL scientists have generated some amazing scientific results, which we’ve been chronicling in these newsletters. Moreover, we have won the largest spacecraft mission contract LPL has ever managed, OSIRIS-REx, which is now just months away from its critical touch-and-go sampling maneuver.

There have been difficult moments as well. Most of the scientists at LPL have shared the too common experience of having worked very hard on a proposal that was not selected. In the past decade, three former directors of LPL passed away (Michael Drake, Charles Sonett, and Laurel Wilkening), as well as faculty member Tom Gehrels and several former members of the faculty and staff. On the whole, LPL is a very different place than it was ten years ago, but it is an organization that will continue to excel in the next decade.

Timothy D. Swindle, Ph.D.
Department Head and Laboratory Director

by Dolores Hill

This fall, LPL staff and students were busy reaching out not only to the local community but all of Arizona as well. Several events centered around moonfest, the University of Arizona’s extended celebration of the Apollo moon landings and future lunar exploration. We were able to “multiply our impact” at many public events with engagement by the Space Imagery Center, LPL Graduate Student Outreach, and OSIRIS-REx, thereby allowing us to reach more than 7000 people.

Spacefest brought together astronauts, artists, and space aficionados from all over the world including quite a few LPL alumni and longtime “friends of LPL” who stopped by the STEAM tables to say hello! We provided educational activities and exhibits for a range of ages and backgrounds from the STEM Showcase at Ocotillo Ridge Elementary School to Southern Arizona Technology Council industry leaders at the Tucson Convention Center. We presented the OSIRIS-REx mission’s “Final Four” Candidate sites in UArizona’s Research Innovation and Impact (RII) tent during UArizona homecoming and the Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter Office and Science Shop open house that coincided with the transit of Mercury.

LPL and baseball? Sure! On July 20, LPL joined Raytheon for Space Day at the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball game in Phoenix and also provided an assortment of OSIRIS-REx hands-on activities and demonstrations for Goddard Space Flight Center’s STEM Education Day at Fenway Park in Boston. LPL Director Tim Swindle kindly volunteered to staff the Diamondbacks outreach event—double duty on July 20 after hosting LPL’s Summer Science Saturday Apollo anniversary celebration in Tucson. In addition to external community events, we conducted OSIRIS-REx and meteorite tours for Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory volunteers and presentations for Kitt Peak docents, IEEE Tucson and Sierra Vista, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Prescott Astronomy Club, and the Huachuca Astronomy Club. Summer and fall were jam-packed with wonderful opportunities to showcase LPL and our contributions to planetary science, past, present, and future.

OSIRIS-REx engineer Josh Nelson answers questions from Space Shuttle astronaut Linda Godwin in the Spacefest STEAM area. (Godwin was a crewmate of LPL  alumnus astronaut Tom Jones on STS-59).

Graduate student Indujaa Ganesh, ready to share many worlds at Spacefest 2019.

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