We would like to thank all those who have donated to LPL in 2019 and 2020. Thanks to everyone for supporting research, education, and outreach at LPL.

Professor Jay Melosh joined the LPL faculty in 1982. Before moving to Purdue University in 2009, he served as advisor for twelve LPL Ph.D. students and three M.S. students, and led many memorable LPL field trips. One of the world's foremost experts in impact cratering, Jay was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003. He was named a University of Arizona Regents' Professor (2001), won the Barringer Medal of the Meteoritical Society (1999), the Gilbert Award of the Geological Society of America (2001), and the Hess Medal of the American Geophysical Union (2008). 

A tribute to Jay Melosh by colleagues Caffee, Swindle, and Turtle is available from The Meteoritical Society (Oct. 27, 2020).

Computing Systems Manager John Pursch retired from LPL on November 30. John was hired as a Principal Support Systems Analyst in 2001, just after moving to Tucson from California, where he had worked as a programmer for various technology startups during the technology boom of the 1980s and 1990s. At LPL, John began supporting infrastructure systems and working his behind the scenes "magic" in supervising daily operations for LPL mail, web, and file servers, backups, and user support. John’s programming skills can be found in scripts in almost every LPL infrastructure system, keeping everything in check and running smoothly.

John holds a degree in mathematics from Caltech. Before moving to Tucson in 2001, he traveled extensively all around the world. One of John's interests and talents is memorization. In 2010, John held the U.S. record for reciting the most digits of pi, with 2104 digits memorized. LPL computing staff came to rely on John's memory for details of LPL system implementations and associated problems (and solutions). John's other interests include the Rubik's Cube (his solution time is nearly less than 20 seconds), poetry (several of his works have been published online), and meditation. 

John's expertise, talent, and dedication over his long career has helped to build a computing infrastructure that will continue to support research and discovery at LPL.

Maria Schuchardt retired from LPL on October 12 after nearly 30 years of service. She began her LPL career in April 1991, primarily as department photographer. In 1998, Maria became the Data Manager for the Space Imagery Center, where she organized tours of the facility, facilitated access to the collection for researchers as well as the public, and provided educational resources and kits to visitors and educators. Maria expanded her role and responsibilities by coordinating outreach activities for the entire department and working with other campus groups to support university projects and better serve local communities. She developed the idea of an annual public science event in the Kuiper building; this “Summer Science Saturday” program was extremely popular in the community, drawing several hundred visitors each year. She devoted many hours to organizing the event, creating the displays, and inviting and communicating with local science groups who looked forward to participating and working with Maria every year. When the Tucson Festival of Books came on the scene, Maria coordinated the “Science City” section. Another programmatic highlight is the very popular LPL Evening Lecture Series; Maria solicited the speakers and advertised the talks to her loyal following of community contacts.

Maria's efforts also supported the work done by other groups at LPL. She coordinated the Kuiper Board's K-12 community outreach in Tucson and served as a point of contact for outreach requests from the community, working to ensure that LPL faculty, staff, and students have the opportunity to share their work with schools and groups around Tucson. In addition, she was actively involved with other department activities and special events such as The Art of Planetary Science. Maria was always there to greet prospective graduate students with a joke as she took their first LPL portrait; her annual grad student group photo was a tradition. Maria's reputation extended well beyond Tucson; for example, each year, Maria hosted a group of Norwegian students on a science tour of the U.S. She was always "in demand" in part because she infused every interaction with joy, positivity, and enthusiasm for communicating science. Maria was named a recipient of a 2020 University Award for Excellence, which recognized her outstanding service to the university community and visitors. 

Maria Schuchardt was named a recipient of a 2020 University Award for Excellence, which recognizes outstanding service to the university community and visitors. Maria has been a Program Coordinator with LPL since 1991. As part of her duties as Data Manager for the Space Imagery Center, Maria offers and organizes tours of the facility, facilitates access to the collection for researchers as well as the public, and provides educational resources and kits to visitors and educators. However, she goes above and beyond these responsibilities by coordinating outreach activities for the entire department and working with other campus groups to support university projects and better serve local communities. She developed the idea of an annual public science event in the Kuiper building; this “Summer Science Saturday” program has become extremely popular in the community and draws several hundred visitors each year on a Saturday in July. She devotes many long hours to organizing the event, creating the displays, and inviting and communicating with local science groups who look forward to participating and working with Maria every year. When the Tucson Festival of Books came on the scene, Maria began coordinating the “Science City” section, in part because she knew the groups that could be counted on to provide activities. Another programmatic highlight is the very popular LPL Evening Lecture Series; Maria solicits the speakers and advertises the talks to the distribution list she maintains, in addition to the community at large.

Maria's efforts also support the work done by other groups at LPL. When the department’s external advisory board decided to try to put together an outreach committee to bring together groups doing K-12 outreach in Tucson, she became the glue that bound them together, supporting their (evening) meetings, and participating in many events that they organized around town. Maria serves as a point of contact for outreach requests from the community, working to ensure that LPL faculty, staff, and students have the opportunity to share their work with schools and groups around Tucson. In addition, she is actively involved with other department activities and special events such as The Art of Planetary Science. Maria's reputation extends well beyond Tucson; for example, each year, Maria hosts a group of Norwegian students on a science tour of the U.S. She is always "in demand" in part because she infuses every interaction with joy, positivity, and enthusiasm for communicating science.

LPL and the University of Arizona are fortunate to have a science ambassador as dedicated as Maria; she truly embodies the spirit of the University Award for Excellence.

Charles "Chuck" See, a long-time member of the LPL family, passed away on January 8. Chuck was a native Tucsonan who earned a B.S. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering as well as an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Arizona. He spent ten years working as an aerospace engineer at firms like Sperry Space Systems (Phoenix), Allied Signal (Tucson), Westinghouse (Pittsburgh), Honeywell (Phoenix) & Westinghouse (Baltimore). In 1995, Chuck returned to the UA as a staff engineer working with Professor Martin Tomasko on the Cassini Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer (DISR) and the Huygens probe.

Chuck was a consummate aerospace engineer, possessing multiple skills that covered a variety of sub-disciplines: mechanical, thermal, electronic, systems, testing and flight operations. Never one to sit back and relax, he also developed his considerable analytical skills and became a talented scientific data analyst. Chuck was famously extroverted and a natural leader, usually tasked with being the U.S.-based DISR team’s instrument engineer during the Huygens probe’s Europe-based testing. Very popular with the other (largely European) instrument team members, he gracefully acted as the public face of an American DISR camera suite. He retired in 2006 but was retained part-time in order to curate and analyze the rich DISR data set.

Chuck had many outside interests:  he enjoyed remodeling homes; he had an avid interest and involvement in developing renewable energy; he was an active member of the community, most notably in his involvement at the campus Newman Center; and in 2008, he participated in a local reality journalism experiment, putting together a candidate platform for the U.S. presidential election. He also spent much of his time in semi-retirement caring for his mother and stepfather. 

A Celebration of Life was held at the St. Thomas More Catholic Newman Center on January 28.

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. Thirty donors have already pledged a total of more than $10,000.

by Mikayla Mace, University Communications

Professor Alfred McEwen's mission proposal to one of Jupiter's moons is among the four finalists for the next $500 million Discovery mission. The Discovery Program funds midsize principal-investigator-led spacecraft missions designed to unlock the mysteries of the solar system and our origins.

The four finalists will now embark on a one-year study before NASA expects to make its final selection in 2021.

If selected, the Io Volcano Observer, or IVO, mission will orbit Jupiter and make 10 close flybys of its moon Io – the most volcanically active world in the solar system – to determine if the moon has a magma ocean hidden beneath its vibrant, pockmarked surface.

"IVO will revolutionize our understanding of a truly spectacular, volcanically active world, with volcanic eruption scales seen on Earth only during mass extinctions," said Alfred McEwen, IVO principal investigator and Regents' Professor of planetary sciences.

"To become a finalist for the next phase of the NASA Discovery Program is a tremendous accomplishment," said University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins. "If we are selected in the final round, IVO will become the second University of Arizona-led Discovery mission following the Phoenix Mars Lander, and the third University of Arizona-led NASA planetary mission, following the current OSIRIS-REx mission. The University of Arizona has a long history of space research that began with mapping the moon and has included most NASA planetary missions. This is a phenomenal step for our continuing leadership in space exploration."

The mission would carry a suite of science experiments to map Io's surface, measure its heat flow, monitor volcanic activity, measure the composition of surface lavas and gases erupting from Io, and measure the magnetic and gravitational fields near Io that inform us about the internal structure and distribution of magma.

"Magma oceans were common among the terrestrial planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and the moon – soon after the planets formed," McEwen said, "and are an integral piece of planet formation and evolution. They are responsible for the formation of metal cores and degassing to produce the planet's oceans and atmosphere."

These magma oceans cooled and solidified billions of years ago, but great quantities of magma are currently produced in Io from tidal heating as it is stretched and squished by its gravitational dance with the giant Jupiter and sister moons, changing its shape every 42-hour orbit.

The tidal heating could be so great that it sustains an entire magma ocean. Or Io may lack a continuous liquid layer and instead resemble the terrestrial planets soon after their magma oceans solidified. Either way, Io can inform us about ancient volcanic and tectonic processes on Earth and other worlds, and about countless exoplanets that may resemble Io, according to McEwen.

"The NASA Discovery Program enables universities like ours to make exquisite use of our remarkable scientists to peer into the formations and workings of planetary bodies, comets and asteroids and truly discover new knowledge that illuminates our place in the universe," said Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation Elizabeth "Betsy" Cantwell. "The discoveries resulting from this program also advance our ability to innovate broadly around space technologies and new entrepreneurial opportunities, opening many more doors for advances that benefit life on Earth."

The IVO spacecraft and several science instruments would be built and managed by the Applied Physics Laboratory. UArizona would lead science operations and the potential development of a camera in collaboration with students. Other key partners are the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for gravity science and spacecraft navigation, the University of California, Los Angeles for magnetometers, the German Aerospace Center for an infrared instrument and the University of Bern in Switzerland for a mass spectrometer. 

Adam P. Showman passed away unexpectedly on March 16, 2020, at his home in Tucson, AZ. His untimely passing has been felt widely in the international planetary science community which has lost an outstanding theorist, dedicated teacher of many graduate students, and a sought-after collaborator to a world-wide network of exoplanet astronomers.

Adam Showman was born on October 9, 1968 in Palo Alto, CA. He studied physics at Stanford University, where he earned a B.S. in 1991. He earned a Ph.D. at Caltech in 1999, with a dissertation on the atmosphere of Jupiter as well as the geophysics of its largest moon Ganymede. After two short postdoc stints at the University of Louisville and NASA Ames, Dr. Showman joined the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona as an Assistant Professor in 2001; he was named full Professor in 2012. He was recently named a Galileo Circle Fellow of the University of Arizona (2018) and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (2019).

During his career, Dr. Showman directly advised eleven graduate students and mentored many more across the disciplines of planetary science, atmospheric sciences and geosciences. He was a renowned teacher who enjoyed explaining to his students the complicated details of planetary physics and hammering out ideas to solve research problems. He developed eight different courses in the planetary sciences, including two completely new graduate courses, with course notes that are treasured by his students. His early pioneering research on the atmospheric dynamics of exoplanets (Showman & Guillot, 2002, Astron. & Astrophys. 385:166-180) has been the paradigm of hot gas giant atmospheric circulation models ever since. This work showed that the difference between the day and night side on hot Jupiters would drive strong eastward equatorial winds, comparable to or greater than the speed of sound in the medium. Showman and his collaborators worked out in detail the theoretical predictions that were spectacularly verified in subsequent observations, profoundly shaping the field. Showman extended his innovative theoretical models beyond hot gas giant planets, to tidally-locked and fast-rotating planets of smaller sizes and cooler temperatures as well as to the larger and warmer brown dwarfs. He was deeply involved in the exoplanet science community, collaborating with many observers to interpret their observations of exoplanet atmospheres and working with theorists to advance modeling techniques. He served the planetary science community in many professional roles, including as Editor of the international planetary science journal, Icarus.

Dr. Showman also made notable contributions to our understanding of atmospheric circulation in the four giant planets in our own solar system and of the geophysics of the Galilean satellites. Showman and collaborators (Kaspi, Flierl & Showman, 2009, Icarus 202:525-542) used an anelastic general circulation model to explore the deep winds on Jupiter, where density varies by more than four orders of magnitude from the atmosphere to the interior. They find that the winds are aligned with the rotation axis but decay gradually with depth. Their predictions were verified by the Juno mission, which has measured the higher harmonics of Jupiter’s gravity field and has shown that the zonal winds extend 3000 km below the visible clouds, a major breakthrough in planetary science. On the icy Galilean satellites, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, Showman’s work encompassed interior thermal structures and their interplay with the orbital dynamics (the formation of a water ocean in Ganymede and implications for the magnetic field detected by the Galileo Orbiter, Showman et al., 1997, Icarus 129:367-383), the peculiar tectonics of Ganymede (graben formation, Showman et al., 2004, Icarus 172:625-640), the putative convection in Europa’s ice shell (Showman & Han, 2004, JGR-Planets 109:E01010), and the unstable lithosphere of Enceladus (Bland, Beyer & Showman, 2007, Icarus 192:92-105). Dr. Showman was equally in command of both gas giant atmospheric dynamics and geophysical fluid dynamics, an astonishing combination of expertise widely admired by his colleagues.

Students and colleagues alike knew Dr. Showman as a fount of knowledge and ideas which he shared generously and widely. He was a friend to many who fondly remember his spirit of adventure and abiding curiosity. In his teenage years, after a family trip to China, he developed a fascination for Chinese culture; he travelled frequently to China and became proficient in the Mandarin language. Dr. Showman is survived by his daughter, Arwen, his brother, Ken, and his parents, Pete and Dinah Showman.

Renu Malhotra⁽¹⁾ and Andrew P. Ingersoll⁽²⁾

^{(text prepared for Icarus)}

Fortney, J.J. Adam P. Showman. Nat Astron (2020)

In Memoriam: Adam Showman

Dr. Stefano Nerozzi joined LPL in January as a Postdoctoral Research Associate working with Professor Jack Holt. He is leading a NASA-funded project to study the geological evolution of outflow channel systems in Utopia Planitia, Mars. This project integrates several remote sensing techniques to unravel the history of water in this region, and especially how it shaped the surface and interacted with volcanic and impact processes. Stefano is also interested in the study of Mars' cryosphere, analyzing gamma ray spectrometer elemental concentration data at boulder halo sites and continuing his doctoral work on ancient icy sedimentary deposits in Planum Boreum using radar sounding and visible imagery.

Stefano grew up near Bologna, Italy. He earned his B.S. in Geological Sciences in 2011 and his M.Sc. in Geology and Land Management in 2014 at the University of Bologna. During the second half of his M.Sc. program, Stefano participated in an exchange program at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also received a Ph.D. in Geological Sciences in 2019 with Professor Jack Holt. His dissertation focused on unraveling the morphological and stratigraphic signature of global climate events within the Planum Boreum of Mars.

Aside from work, Stefano enjoys a large number of hobbies and interests, including DIY electronics, amateur radio, outdoor activities, role-play games, and building ecospheres.