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.
Fall
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
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Timothy Swindle
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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.
These awards are intended for career advancement, usually associated with travel, for LPL students and staff. They are supported by gifts, typically of $500 or $1000, from donors. Videos from seven recipients appear below; the eighth student, Kyle Pearson, will be traveling to the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society being held January 2020.
Saverio Cambioni
Saverio spent 3 months at the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azure in Nice, France, where he investigated a new method, based on neural networks, for identifying the oldest collisional families of asteroids that formed in the earliest phases of our solar system and that have so far not been identified using classical methods.
Claire Cook
Claire traveled to Redwood City, California, to attend a two-day training session for COMSOL geophysical modeling software, a program she will use for her research. COMSOL is multipurpose but so complex that it requires in-person training; and, given that other students and faculty are interested in using the software for their own research groups, Claire's training experience will benefit others as well.
Cassandra Lejoly
In August, Cassandra attended the Mike A'Hearn Symposium at the University of Maryland, where presented results of dust radial profiles of 41P/TKG, 45P/HMP, and 46P/Wirtanen.
Kiana McFadden
Kiana traveled to Houston this October to attend the Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies (GCAGS) meeting, where she received an award for best student oral presentation of her paper titled, “Sedimentology, Petrography, and Mineralogy of the Tallahatta Formation near the City of Meridian, Mississippi.” The presentation was based on work she completed as an undergraduate at Jackson State University.
Benjamin Sharkey
Ben was able to attend the 2019 joint meeting of the European Planetary Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences meeting (Sept. 15-19) held in Geneva, Switzerland; he presented his work on asteroids orbiting near Jupiter.
Maria Steinrueck
Maria presented her work on the mixing of photochemical hazes by the large-scale circulation in the atmospheres of hot Jupiter exoplanets at Extreme Solar Systems IV in Reykjavik, Iceland. With over 600 participants, this was the largest exoplanet conference ever held. Maria reports that she was able to participate in in-depth conversations with other scientists about their exoplanet research, resulting in a collaboration on a Hubble Space Telescope proposal. Maria was also able to explore Iceland's volcanic and glacial geology.
Shane Stone
Shane attended the European Planetary Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences meeting and presented his work on the delivery of water to the upper atmosphere of Mars. He reports that the networking opportunities were particularly valuable, given that he is expecting to graduate in May 2020.
As reported in our spring newsletter, graduate student Rachel Fernandes won funding support from the Curson Education Plus Fund in Planetary Sciences and LPL for her summer research travel. Read on to learn about her trip to the 3rd Advanced School on Exoplanetary Science (ASES3), held in Vietri sul Mare (Salerno), Italy, from May 27-31.
The Curson Travel Award supported my travel to Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, Italy, to participate in the 3rd Advanced School for Exoplanetary Science (ASES3) from 27th – 31st of May 2019. This year, the workshop focused on the demographics of planetary systems and was attended by early career exoplanetary scientists from all over the globe. The workshop was structured around a series of lectures by five of the leading researchers in the field: Dr. Scott Gaudi (The Ohio State University), Dr. Andrew Howard (California Institute of Technology), Dr. Alessandro Morbidelli (Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur), Dr. Sean Raymond (Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux) and Dr. Antonino Lanza (Astrophysical Observatory of Catania). Each day, we had 4-6 hours of lectures on the topics of planet formation and dynamical evolution, star-planet interactions as well as observations and statistics from radial velocity and transit surveys (for close-in exoplanets), and microlensing, astrometry and direct imaging surveys (for wide-separation exoplanets).
I was fortunate enough to be one of the handful of school participants that were selected to give a short oral presentation on their research. My presentation, titled Hints for a Turnover at the Snowline in the Giant Planet Distribution, was focused on the first project I worked on at LPL with my advisor, Dr. Ilaria Pascucci, and Dr. Gijs Mulders. During this talk, I discussed our newly published result that shows a pile up in the distribution of giant planets at the snowline and its implications for (exo)planetary formation and migration. It was really nice to see our result gain the same amount of positive attention in the European exoplanetary community as it had in the American community.
The workshop also arranged a few outdoor social events for the participants. We visited the Archaeological Park of Paestum, which is home to three magnificent Doric temples that are thought to be dedicated to the city’s namesake Poseidon, Hera and Ceres. We also went on a boat tour of the Amalfi coast and explored the cobblestone streets and lush gardens of the city of Ravello. On the last day, we hiked the Paths of the Gods, a clifftop trail above the Amalfi coast which began in Agerola and ended in Nocelle, the upper part of Positano. The breathtaking views of the Amalfi Coast and the island of Capri made the two-hour long hike worthwhile.
Attending this workshop was highly beneficial to me as an early career scientist for the reason that unlike large conferences, the ASES3 workshop offered an ideal opportunity for networking and forming collaborations with an international group of students and experts in exoplanetary science which was important in formulating long- and short-term research ideas.
