2010 Fall Department News
With expertise ranging from the furthest reaches of the realm of planetary science to the nanometer-scale world of laboratory studies, three scientists have accepted offers to become assistant professors in the Department of Planetary Sciences, beginning in 2011.
Ilaria Pascucci, currently at Space Telescope Science Institute, studies the formation of
Three students began their graduate careers at LPL this fall:
Corwin Atwood-Stone Meghan Cassidy Melissay Dykhuis
Welcome to LPL!
Congratulations to Doug Archer, who successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation, "The Martian Near Surface Environment: Analysis on Antarctic Soils and Laboratory Experiments on Putative Martian Organics," in April 2010.
Congratulations, Doug!
On May 22, 2010, LPL hosted its first ever open day at the Catalina Observatories atop Mt. Lemmon. Approximately 100 guests spent the day learning about LPL's past, present, and future, including a history of telescope observations on Mt. Lemmon and Mt. Bigelow. Featured activities included tours of the Catalina
The Sun was the star of the show on June 12, 2010, as LPL and the National Solar Observatory hosted a public day dedicated to all things solar. There were many kid-friendly events, including Physics Factory and comet building.
Students for the Exploration of Space and the Tucson Amateur Astronomy
On September 25, 2010, LPL's SPACEWATCH® program marked the 20th anniversary of the first automatic discovery of a near-Earth asteroid using computer software.
David Rabinowitz, then a UA astronomer and now a research scientist at the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, designed the software, and SPACEWATCH®, the UA asteroid-tracking
From 1962 to 1973, LPL had its own journal, "Communications of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory," edited by Gerard P. Kuiper.
Thanks to the efforts of Maria Schuchardt, Elizabeth Moreno, and Ari Espinoza, we've been able to create PDF versions of the approximately 200 articles in this series and place them
The application, called Transient Events, uses real-time observational data from the University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey to monitor transient objects, or objects that change in brightness or position.
Users select events that interest them, then images are downloaded from the Skyalert database, housed at Caltech. Next, users receive a
LPL is home to a new CAMECA SX100-Ultra electron microprobe and newly remodeled microprobe laboratory. For more detailed information on using the Electron Microprobe Laboratory, visit the Microprobe page.
There are very few U.S. universities with the electron microprobe analysis capabilities currently available at the University of Arizona. These