On Monday, March 25th, I had the honor to give two briefings on the OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission to policy makers in Washington DC. OSIRIS-REx will visit asteroid 1999 RQ36, a carbon‐ and water‐rich object that is also one of the most potentially hazardous near‐Earth asteroids. This visit was scheduled in conjunction with the OSIRIS-REx Independent Assessment Review (IAR) on March 26th.
Kathryn M. Volk defended her dissertation titled "Dynamical Studies of the Kuiper Belt and the Centaurs" on April 1. Kat is a 2013 recipient of the Gerard P. Kuiper Memorial Award, presented each year to students of the Planetary Sciences who best exemplify, through the high quality of their research and the excellence of their scholastic achievements, the goals and standards established by Gerard P.
The OSIRIS-REx mission was highlighted in the Spring 2013 edition of Arizona, the UA alumni magazine, with a suite of six articles featuring Professor Dante Lauretta and some of the UA students (graduate and undergraduate) working on the mission project.
OSIRIS-REx Mission: Are We Stardust?
OSIRIS-REx Students
In celebration of Women's History Month 2013 (Women Inspiring Innovation Through Imagination: Celebrating Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), the OSIRIS-REx team developed some online resources for promoting celebrating women in STEM careers.
Sarah Mattson, Senior Staff Technician with the HiRISE project, received an Emily Krauz scholarship from the University of Arizona Staff Advisory Council for the fall 2012 semester. The scholarship award is intended to support UA classified staff in career advancement or continuing education and professional development.
The first LPL Women's lunch had an impressive turnout of 36 women, representing alumnae, faculty, staff, and grad students, and many people who are combinations thereof. We came from the Kuiper, Sonett, and Drake buildings as well as JHUAPL, BYU, and Caltech (thanks to the Titan Working Group Meeting for bringing the out-of-towners). As a result of the lunch, our email discussion list has grown from less than twenty members to over fifty. Anyone interested in joining the email list can subscribe here.
The UA Campus played host again this spring to the annual Tucson Festival of Books. This year's event, the fifth annual festival, was held March 9-10, 2013; the event was a huge success despite some wild spring weather at the start.
Whether by telescope or spacecraft, when we look at the surfaces of other planets we do so through remote sensing instruments. There is a wide variety of such instruments from Synthetic Aperture Radars to visible wavelength cameras and an even wider range of geologic features to examine from sand dunes to lava flows. On Earth, remote sensing is further complicated by vegetation and features constructed by humans. However, there is one great advantage to remote sensing data analysis on the Earth – you can actually visit the site to test your conclusions…
Despite our tendency to crisscross the whole southwestern U.S. on these trips, there is an incredibly interesting geologic story sitting on our doorstep here in the Tucson area. There has been growing interest among the fieldtrip group in understanding more about the processes that have fashioned the local landscape around Tucson and that was finally satisfied this semester.
On May 1, NASA announced that the OSIRIS-REx target asteroid 1999 RQ36 was renamed Bennu. The name Bennu was selected from over 8,000 entries submitted to the Name that Asteroid! contest. Bennu was an important avian deity in ancient Egypt and one of the symbols of the god Osiris. Egyptians usually depicted Bennu as a gray heron.
