Spring

Dathon Golish is the recipient of the LPL Staff Excellence Award for 2025 in he category of Science/Engineering Staff.

Since joining LPL in 2013, Dathon Golish has been an indispensable member of multiple high-profile planetary science mission projects.

Dathon is the Mission Instrument and Observation Scientist for OSIRIS-APEX. His leadership with observation planning and calibration and development of detailed observation plans has been essential to the success of OSIRIS-APEX concept of operations development. Dathon is also the Systems and Integration & Test Lead for the SeisLEMS payload development on Artemis III’s Lunar Environment Monitoring Station (LEMS). He has stepped up to fill key gaps in system design, performance and environmental testing, and validation and his expertise has been instrumental in keeping the program on track, ensuring that this complex spaceflight instrument meets mission requirements while strengthening LPL's capacity to build cutting-edge planetary seismic instrumentation.

Dathon embodies the spirit of mentorship and professional development, guiding numerous undergraduate students in spaceflight hardware development, contributing to both LPL’s research excellence and the growth of the next generation of planetary scientists and engineers. His role as Deputy PI of CatSat, a student-led CubeSat mission, is just one example of how he has fostered hands-on learning opportunities.

This staff award recognizes Dathon for his leadership in spaceflight instrumentation, his technical expertise, deep institutional knowledge, and ability to work seamlessly across engineering and science teams that make it possible for LPL to execute complex, multi-year spaceflight missions. Moreover, we thank Dathon for stepping into additional roles when projects are short-staffed, for mentoring early-career scientists, and for developing methods that enhance mission capabilities.

Denise Blum is the recipient of the LPL Staff Excellence Award for 2025 in the category of Administrative Staff.

In her role as Research Program Administration Officer, Denise Blum does an exceptional job in managing the complex budgets for U of A flagship spacecraft missions, OSIRIS-REx and OSIRIS-APEX. She brings to her role an unparalleled attention to detail, commitment to teamwork, and a proactive view to improving processes and workflows.

Denise is the subject matter expert for the required financial tracking and reporting required by NASA; she takes the initiative to identify opportunities for cost-savings while considering the needs and perspectives of mission partners and other key stakeholders and considerations. Mission operations run more smoothly because mission partners know they can rely on the precise detail and accuracy of her work.

Denise takes her role as a supervisor seriously and is committed to developing talent within the team. And she is also a team player in every sense, regularly volunteering to take on additional tasks and going “above and beyond,” often taking on responsibilities outside of her job description to ensure the success of the OSIRIS-REx and OSIRIS-APEX missions and the cohesion of the mission teams.

Denise's colleagues describe her work is indispensable to the OSIRIS-REx and OSIRIS-APEX teams. She is a true professional and a valued colleague who consistently demonstrates excellence in all that she does.

Ricardo Maciel
January 13, 2025

M.S. in Planetary Sciences

Characterization of a Tunable All-Reflective Spatial Heterodyne Spectrometer

Advisor: Professor Walter Harris

New position: Researcher/Scientist, Lunar and Planetary Laboratory

UNDERGRADUATE

By Shane Byrne. Photos courtesy of Robin VanAuken, Joe Schools, and Reed Spurling.

This semester, the LPL field trip traveled to the Salton Sea in southern California. The Salton Sea is just the latest incarnation of large lakes that have existed there since the end of the last ice age and we were able to see all parts of the lake lifecycle.

We have lakes so often in this area due to the low-lying terrain of the Salton Trough. The famous San Andreas Fault splits into many minor branches in this area; kinks in these minor branches can cause pull-apart basins where the topography is low and the crust is thin. We saw plenty of evidence of this faulting in beheaded alluvial fans and steep mountain fronts. The thin crust also leads to copious geothermal activity (there are plenty of power plants there taking advantage of that). We visited recent volcanic domes and active mud volcanoes that indicate the shallowness of hot subsurface material.

Because it’s a closed basin, the most-recent historic lake, Lake Cahuilla, dried up a few centuries ago. Tufa deposits that formed in the quiescent lakeshore environment on the hills surrounding the Salton Trough show the former shoreline and old lake sediment is blowing around in the form of sand dunes that we visited in the Algodones Dunefield among others. It’s still possible to dig up freshwater shells in the desert in this area.

There’s a much smaller (and shrinking) lake within the trough that is now called the Salton Sea. It was created in the early twentieth century when some careless canal construction accidently diverted the Colorado River (undammed at the time) into the Salton Trough. It took over a year to bring the fiasco under control and get the Colorado flowing back into the Gulf of California again. Eventually, the Southern Pacific Railroad stepped in to stem the flood by dedicating a significant fraction of all its rail traffic to dumping rocks into the breach. Although initially a wonderful resort location, the Salton Sea has become saline and extremely polluted from evaporation and agricultural runoff. Melancholy remnants of the Sea’s golden age are scattered around the shore, along with dead fish and an unwholesome smell. Many plans have been floated to keep the lake levels high and avoid exposing the toxic sediments on its bed, but a solution remains elusive.