Congratulations to Abhinav Nishant and Laura Seifert, recipients of the Hitachi Electron Microscopy Scholarship for 2021/2022. Hitachi High Technologies established this award as part of their partnership with the University of Arizona in support of the Kuiper Materials Imaging and Characterization Facility. Hitachi recognizes the need for advanced electron microscopy in addressing fundamental questions across the physical sciences and engineering. This competitive award is provided based on demonstrated ability for original scholarship and communication of research to the scientific community.

Abhinav Nishant is a Ph.D. student at the J.C. Wyant College of Optical Sciences. He is working with Dr. Robert Norwood in the study and development of optical polymers for integrated photonics applications. Being awarded the Hitachi Electron Microscopy Scholarship is a great source of encouragement for Abhinav, validating for him the importance of the research he has undertaken. Abhinav writes, “With the support of Hitachi and Kuiper Imaging Facility, I can further my study of low-cost optical materials, paving the way towards making high quality and inexpensive photonic devices, such as trace gas sensors.” In the coming months, Abhinav aims to publish his work to showcase the high-quality research being done at the University of Arizona.

Laura Seifert is a fourth year Ph.D. student at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Her research involves the chemical and structural characterization of circumstellar grains that formed in the ejecta of supernova explosions. These grains are preserved in primitive materials such as meteorites and Laura analyzes them using advanced electron microscopy techniques. The goals of Laura’s research are to understand the types of materials, structures, and compositions that are formed in supernova environments and use such information to understand their thermodynamic origins, transport, subsequent modification, and preservation in solar-system materials. Laura writes, “I’m honored to receive the Hitachi Electron Microscopy Scholarship, which will further support my research and dissertation.” Upon completion of the Ph.D., Laura aspires to a career working at a NASA center continuing her work with planetary materials and advanced electron microscopy.

This year's recipient of the LPL Staff Excellence Award is Keara Burke, Image Processing Engineer with the OSIRIS-REx mission. Keara began working with OSIRIS-REx as an undergraduate on a project that had her counting rocks. In 2019, after completing her degree in Systems Engineering, she went on to co-lead the OSIRIS-REx site-selection campaign's boulder counting effort, tallying more than 30,000 boulders over the course of the mission. This meant long hours of tedious analysis and some 60-hour work weeks due to staffing shortages.

In addition to nominal job duties, Keara regularly takes on special projects such as taking the lead on a now-published article that synthesized the OSIRIS-REx boulder-counting results. Over the past year, she has supported several large-scale proposal efforts and pitched in on high-value proposal development. Beginning in 2020, Keara has worked primarily as a systems engineer within LPL's spaceflight seismometer program, SIIOS PSTAR. In that role, Keara is responsible for generating, tracking, and verifying instrument requirements by reviewing design and test documentation for spaceflight seismic sensors.

Keara is an extraordinary engineer who has already made outstanding contributions to LPL and UArizona. The skills and experience she has cultivated will continue to play an important role in the future of research and exploration at LPL.

LPL Associate Professor Christopher Hamilton is a National Science Foundation (NSF)-Fulbright Arctic Scholar currently working from the University of Iceland to document the products and impacts of Icelandic flood lava eruptions. On February 21, 2021, an earthquake swarm began on the Reykjanes Peninsula, near the capital of Reykjavik, and on March 3, volcanic tremor was identified—signaling magma movement within the crust. Considering a volcanic eruption to be imminent, Christopher worked with Solange Duhamel, Associate Professor with UArizona's Molecular and Cellular Biology Department (with a faculty appointment in LPL), to obtain support to investigate the eruption.

With initial support from the university's Research, Innovation, and Impact Office and the NSF Rapid Response Research Program, Solange and Christopher have been developing times-series monitoring of the geomorphology and microbiology of the Reykjanes region, before and after the start of the eruption, which began on March 19 at 8:45 p.m. GMT. LPL graduate student Joana Voigt and Research Specialist Michael Christoffersen traveled to Iceland in April to conduct novel measurements of the active eruption using drones (i.e., Unoccupied Aircraft Systems) and other state-of-the-art instruments to contribute to Iceland's volcano monitoring effort and address fundamental questions related to planetary volcanism and astrobiology. The eruption will continue into the summer, providing additional opportunities for students to develop first-hand observations of this unique event as a planetary analog.

It's time for a change. After about a decade leading this wonderful organization, I've just retired, and Mark Marley has taken over as Director of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and Head of the Department of Planetary Sciences. It's been a great decade for me, and I'm satisfied with where LPL is in many ways (although there are always things that a person wishes they'd done better), but, again, it's time for a change, and I'm thrilled that it's Mark. He's an LPL alum (the first one to become Director), an accomplished scientist, and he's got lots of good ideas for ways to move LPL forward. In the last 10 years, LPL has been able to hire some great scientists and teachers, has produced some outstanding graduates, and this brilliant bunch has produced more than enough great ideas and projects to keep this newsletter full. In fact, LPL has been so productive that we've started a monthly newsletter full of press releases about our science.

I hope you enjoy the newsletter, I hope you stay in touch with LPL, and I want to thank all the faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends of LPL who have made this, as my predecessor Mike Drake once told me, "the best job on campus."

Timothy D. Swindle, Ph.D.

 

Heather Enos has retired from LPL. Heather served as Deputy Principal Investigator and Project Planning and Control Officer for the OSIRIS-REx mission. She began her career at LPL in 1997 with the Mars Odyssey Gamma Ray Spectrometer program. Heather has held key management roles in many other missions, including the Mars Phoenix Lander Mission, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity Rover).

Heather is the recipient of several NASA Group Achievement Awards. In 2010, she received the NASA Exceptional Public Service Medal. Heather was honored with the Robert H. Goddard Award for New Opportunities Captured for leadership in winning the OSIRIS-REx mission in 2014; and in 2018, Heather received the University of Arizona's Billy Joe Varney Award for Excellence.

Dr. Manpreet Singh joined LPL in March 2021 as a Postdoctoral Research Associate working with Research Scientist Dr. Federico Fraschetti. Manpreet studies interplanetary and astrophysical collisionless shock waves and particle acceleration.

Manpreet is from Batala (Punjab, India). He obtained his B.Sc. (Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics) in 2010 from Government College Gurdaspur (Punjab), and his M.Sc. (Applied Physics) in 2012 and Ph.D. with specialization in Space Plasma Physics in 2019 from the Department of Physics, Guru Nanak Dev University (Amritsar, Punjab). His Ph.D. research was focused on the theoretical study of dispersive Alfvén waves in multi-species and dusty plasmas in space environments. In 2013, Manpreet earned a Bachelor of Education degree with specialization in pedagogy of science and mathematics.

In his free time Manpreet likes to play cricket, watch science documentaries and science fiction movies, gardening, and travel to new places.

Thanks to the generous gifts from friends, family, and colleagues, the Showman Distinguished Visiting Lectureship, established in memory of LPL Professor Adam Showman, has been fully endowed. This fund will allow us to bring guest lecturers to the UArizona campus in Adam's memory, in perpetuity.

The first Adam P. Showman Distinguished Visiting Lecturer will be announced in the Fall of 2021. This distinguished scholar will engage with our students and share the latest scientific discoveries from among Adam’s great diversity of interests. We can think of no better way to honor both the joy Adam exhibited in his work and his broad perspective than by bringing an outstanding scholar that embodies the same passion for scientific discovery to campus.

Adam P. Showman passed away unexpectedly on March 16, 2020, at his home in Tucson, Arizona. The international planetary science community lost an outstanding theorist, dedicated teacher, and a sought-after collaborator to a world-wide network of exoplanet astronomers.

For years, the Kuiper Space Sciences Building has had an enigmatic object on the wall of the lobby, just inside of the front entrance. It isn't very colorful, so many haven't even noticed it, but it represents a creative mixture of art and science from the early days of LPL, and has a story that is much more colorful that the wall hanging itself. Thanks to Associate Professor of Practice Steve Kortenkamp and HiRISE Photogrammetry and Imaging Processing Scientist (and LPL Ph.D. candidate) Sarah Sutton, we now have a display to help put it in context.

In the 1960s, when LPL was mapping the Moon, Gerard Kuiper hired sculptor Ralph Turner to create 3D models of areas on the lunar surface. Turner would work with telescopic images taken under different lighting conditions and mold his clay until he had something whose shadows looked right as he moved his light to match the different illuminations he had available. It is one of these sculptures, the central peak of Alphonsus crater, that has been hanging on the wall for years.

Nearly sixty years later, we still value 3D representations of planetary surfaces, but we don't generate them the same way. Instead, modern 3D images are generated by digitally combining images taken by spacecraft from different angles as they pass over (or even on different passes).

The HiRISE team, led by Sarah, are masters at generating these for Mars and for other planetary objects as well, including the Moon. In particular, images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter were used to generate 3D models of the same area that Turner sculpted. The digital model was created by Nicholas Porter while he was an undergraduate student working in the HiRISE photogrammetry lab.

Instead of using clay, the preferred method for generating 3D models is now 3D printing. Steve has 3D printed models of planetary surfaces for use in instruction for visually impaired students.

By combining the talents of our staff and modern scientific techniques and manufacturing technologies, we produced a modern model of the same region, using both modern scientific techniques and modern manufacturing techniques, and have hung it on an adjacent wall, along with text to explain what the two images are all about. We have included pictures, but they're just two-dimensional, and don't give the sense of depth that either of the models on the wall give. 

Take a look at the models, old and new, the next time you are in the Kuiper Space Sciences Building.

Congratulations to Shane Stone and Daniel Lo, LPL's newest alumni!

Shane Stone's dissertation defense was held on April 23. The title of his dissertation is Martian Upper Atmospheric Thermal Structure, Composition, and Water and Their Significance for Atmospheric Escape and Evolution. Professor Roger Yelle was Shane's dissertation advisor.

Shane has accepted a position as a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Daniel Lo defended his dissertation, Carbon Photochemistry and Escape in the Present-day Mars Atmosphere, on May 6. Daniel was advised by Professor Roger Yelle.

Daniel has accepted a postdoctoral position at the University of Michigan.

We hope you will join us in remembering our friend and colleague Adam Showman with a gift of any size for the Adam P. Showman Distinguished Visiting Lectureship. With your generous support, we plan to establish an endowed fund that will allow LPL to bring guest lecturers to campus in Adam's memory in perpetuity. We can think of no better way to honor him than to bring exceptional planetary scientists with similarly broad interests to engage with and inspire our students, just as Adam did. Donors have already pledged a total of more than $13,000.