Department News

The 2016 Lunar and Planetary Laboratory Conference (LPLC) was held on August 19. The organizing committee (Joshua Lothringer, Maria Steinrueck, Nathan Hendler, and Margaret Landis) tried a new format this year: a one-day (rather than two-day) symposium. The purpose for a one-day symposium was to organize the conference with shorter talks in order to foster a “meet and greet” style for new graduate students and researchers joining LPL this fall. A total of 31 talks were contributed by LPL and Steward Observatory graduate students, faculty, post-doctoral researchers, and staff scientists.

Associate Professor Tom Zega gave the keynote address,  Å to A.U.: Coordinated Analytical Studies of Planetary Materials, covering his recent work with planetary materials (including pre-solar grains) and his current efforts to build a laboratory at LPL with focused ion beam and transmission electron microscope facilities. In addition to the keynote, there were seven invited talks, ranging in topics from the digitization of Surveyor era data by John Anderson to moving object detection by new faculty member Dr. Vishnu Reddy.

The graduate student talk competition was held again this year. Tad Komacek, last year’s winner, started the session with an invited talk. Judges Leon Palafox, Gijs Mulders, and Tommi Koskinen evaluated ten student talks. Margaret Landis was named winner of the Best Graduate Student Talk competition for her presentation titled, Ceres Water Vapor Production: What can Dawn tell us?

LPLC concluded with a reception in the Kuiper atrium for speakers and attendees.

	Associate Professor Tom Zega discusses the formation of pre-solar grains. Later in his talk, he discussed plans for building facilities at LPL to analyze pre-solar grains and other planetary materials. Photo credit: Margaret Landis.
	LPL fourth-year graduate student Margaret Landis begins her conference talk, which was judged Best Graduate Student Talk for LPLC 2016.
	2016 LPLC organizers Nathan Hendler, Maria Steinrueck, Joshua Lothringer, and Margaret Landis celebrate the end of a successful LPLC at the reception in the Kuiper atrium.

OSIRIS-REx prinicpal investigator Dante Lauretta is on a hot streak! On Friday, September 30, he threw the first pitch at the Arizona Diamondbacks game versus the San Diego Padres at Chase Field in Phoenix. The game capped a day of interactive exhibits aimed at about 4,000 students (K-12) who participated in the third annual Diamondbacks Science of Baseball STEM Showcase. 

The LPL family extends best wishes and congratulations to Ed Beshore, who retired from his career at LPL on October 4. His many contributions and accomplishments were celebrated at a farewell luncheon held in the Michael J. Drake Building on October 3. Ed has a long history with LPL and the University of Arizona. After being away for many years and building a successful engineering career, he joined the Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) team in 2002, becoming CSS Principal Investigator in 2007. He has served as Deputy Principal Investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission for the last 4 1/2 years. More information about Ed and his "rocket ride into the sunset" is available from UA News.

Congratulations to Leon and Silvia Palafox, who welcomed baby girl Emma into the world on September 18. Emma, who weighed in at 4.6 pounds, was also welcomed to the family by big sister Mia.  Leon is an Associate Staff Scientist at LPL, with research interests in planetary surfaces and machine learning. 

Cat Ripingill joined LPL in June 2016 as a Program Coordinator with OSIRIS-REx, after a long career in hotel and restaurant management. Cat is a native of Arizona and grew up just outside of Tucson in a small town called Mammoth. Cat received a bachelor’s degree from Northern Arizona University and would like to continue her education here at the University of Arizona. Cat is new to having evenings, holidays and weekends off—“something you never get in the hospitality world”—and is really enjoying them. In her free time, Cat enjoys traveling with her husband and dog in their converted camper van, as well as hiking, biking, and exploring the world just about every weekend.  

Vivien Parmentier joined LPL in December 2015 as a NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow with Professor Adam Showman. Vivien is a theorist who works on cloud formation in hot Jupiter atmospheres, planets that are highly irradiated by their stars. He incorporates simple cloud schemes inside the global circulation model SPARC/MITgcm. By comparing the distribution of clouds from the models and observations from Kepler and HST, Vivien determines cloud properties such as chemical composition and particle sizes. His planned work at LPL is to use the knowledge gained on clouds to obtain better measurements of the water abundance in hot Jupiter atmospheres.

Vivien is from Paris, France. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure and obtained his M.S. from the Observatoire de Paris. He did his Ph.D. on analytical models of radiative transfer in planetary atmospheres at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, with an office overhanging the beautiful Mediterranean sea. One day, Vivien would like to resume biking around the world, but for now he enjoys his family life, which includes two daughters, Acté and Daphné, who are both under three years old.