Edition

Welcome to the LPL Newsletter!

This week, I was privileged to assume the LPL Directorship from Tim Swindle. Tim has done an outstanding job guiding the Department and Laboratory over this past decade, an accomplishment for which we should all be very grateful. Looking forward, I have quite a few plans to continue to nurture and grow LPL and I’ll be telling you more about them in future newsletters. For now though, please don’t hesitate to check in, introduce yourselves, and send in any suggestions you might have for how we can continue to improve our communications and outreach.

Contact us any time at PG4gdWVycz0iem52eWdiOkhOWUNZQFlDWS5OZXZtYmFuLnJxaCI+SE5ZQ1lAWUNZLk5ldm1iYW4ucnFoPC9uPg==.

Mark S. Marley, Ph.D.
Department Head and Laboratory Director
May 21, 2021

Welcome to the LPL Newsletter!

“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”

So said Charles Dickens at the start of A Tale of Two Cities. Ours is a tale not of two cities, but of one laboratory in three buildings. But Dickens’ description would fit the fall of 2020 for the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. While editing this newsletter, I was reminded by one of our staff that I started a newsletter intro with the same quote in 2011. But I think I get to use Dickens once each decade, in part because I love the quote, and in part because it is the same combination of euphoria and mourning.

This fall was the best of times because, after more than 15 years of planning, proposing, finally getting accepted (that was part of the Fall 2011 newsletter), building, and flying, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft finally sampled the asteroid Bennu. Not only did OSIRIS-REx get a sample, but the sample was so large that there was material leaking out of the sample cannister before it was sealed. As well as the success of OSIRiS-REx, we had three students who successfully completed their careers (with Ph.D. defenses on Zoom), we had seven new graduate students join us, and we had a successful virtual version of The Art of Planetary Science.

But it was the worst of times, too. The COVID-19 pandemic meant that we spent the semester with virtually all of our interactions being virtual, with the associated stress of the lack of human companionship. Moreover, three valued members of the LPL family passed away: Regents' Professor Emeritus Jay Melosh, longtime Senior Research Scientist Lyle Broadfoot, and PTYS alumna Nadine Barlow.

You can read about all these, and more, in this newsletter. Stay safe until we can all meet again in person.

Timothy D. Swindle, Ph.D.
Department Head and Laboratory Director

Welcome to the LPL Newsletter!

Welcome to the LPL newsletter for Fall of 2014!

When Gerard Kuiper moved his small operation to the University of Arizona in 1960, and renamed it the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, he planned on establishing the pre-eminent research program in planetary sciences. I’m not sure that he realized how large the field would become, or how large LPL would become in the process of remaining at or near the top of that field. We were reminded of LPL’s fascinating beginnings by a series of events this past summer, including the release of a documentary about LPL’s early years (“Desert Moon”), the 50th anniversary of the Ranger 7 mission (on which Kuiper was PI) that took the first close-up images of the moon, and the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

But while a little nostalgia is nice once in a while, plenty of people are still breaking ground in a variety of ways. Within the last month, HiRISE (led by LPL’s Alfred McEwen) has taken the highest-resolution images of an Oort Cloud comet as Comet Siding Spring whizzed past Mars; nearly 1000 people came to the Kuiper Building to view The Art of Planetary Science (a show organized by LPL graduate students); and two proposals with LPL researchers as PI, plus at least one more with an LPL Co-I, have been submitted for science instruments aboard a proposed NASA mission to Europa (you’ll hear details of the winners). In addition, I suspect that some high-quality research papers, which serve as backbone of our endeavors although they come with less fanfare, have been submitted as well.

Besides the multi-million dollar missions and the high-profile public programs, there are the individual honors and transitions that occupy our everyday lives. You can read about a lot of those here, too. We don’t have any new faculty to report, but the Theoretical Astrophysics Program (TAP), of which LPL is one of the three sponsoring departments, completed a successful faculty search. Dr. Sam Gralla, an astrophysicist who specializes in general relativity, was hired by TAP; his home department will be in Physics.

I hope you enjoy reading about what’s going on in the LPL family, and please send us any news you have, so that we can include it in the next newsletter.

Timothy D. Swindle, Ph.D.
Department Head and Laboratory Director

Welcome to the LPL Newsletter!

Welcome to the latest edition of the semesterly LPL Newsletter. 

The last two months have been trying times for the entire world because of the coronavirus, and it has been no different at LPL. We have closed down all three of our buildings, except for essential research, but have managed to keep teaching, conducting business, and writing proposals and papers, but all remotely and online. We have all become very familiar with the Zoom meeting technology. But moving to remote operation has not been the most difficult thing that we’ve dealt with. Professor Adam Showman, whose expertise was in fields as diverse as the atmospheres of extrasolar planets and the interiors of the moons of Jupiter, passed away suddenly in March. However, we have had good news, too, with students graduating, members of the LPL family winning awards, and an LPL-led mission, the Io Volcano Observer, being selected as one of the finalists for the next round of NASA’s Discovery missions.

Please read through and see what has been happening at LPL, and please stay safe and healthy.

Timothy D. Swindle, Ph.D.
Department Head and Laboratory Director

Welcome to the LPL Newsletter!

Welcome to the latest edition of the semesterly LPL Newsletter, the last of the 2010s. A lot has happened over this decade, which also coincides with the length of time we’ve been putting out a regular newsletter (the first one came out in Fall 2010).

If you’ve been around LPL awhile, and you look at the directory of our faculty, you’ll realize that there are a lot of new names and faces. In fact, nearly 60% of the people listed there were not on that page in 2010. We’ve also graduated 48 students in that time, many of whom have already made their mark in planetary science and other endeavors. Our faculty, students, staff, and alumni have won numerous awards, ranging from membership in the National Academy of Sciences to awards for service. LPL scientists have generated some amazing scientific results, which we’ve been chronicling in these newsletters. Moreover, we have won the largest spacecraft mission contract LPL has ever managed, OSIRIS-REx, which is now just months away from its critical touch-and-go sampling maneuver.

There have been difficult moments as well. Most of the scientists at LPL have shared the too common experience of having worked very hard on a proposal that was not selected. In the past decade, three former directors of LPL passed away (Michael Drake, Charles Sonett, and Laurel Wilkening), as well as faculty member Tom Gehrels and several former members of the faculty and staff. On the whole, LPL is a very different place than it was ten years ago, but it is an organization that will continue to excel in the next decade.

Timothy D. Swindle, Ph.D.
Department Head and Laboratory Director

Welcome to the LPL Newsletter!

Welcome to the latest edition of the LPL Newsletter. Those of you with families work to the rhythm of the school calendar. LPL isn't quite as tied to a school-year calendar, but May still has that end-of-the-year feel. The end of the academic year is a time when a lot of awards are announced, and not just for students. In this issue, you’ll find discussions of awards to students, but also to faculty and to staff. These are all important, because while we sometimes take it for granted that LPL is full of clever, capable, dedicated people, we don’t tell them often enough how valuable their work is. Take a look at some of the impressive things people at LPL have been doing, as seen through the lens of the awards they’ve been getting.

And of course, there is the great science, highlighted here, but also available from our monthly newsletters and our web site (lpl.arizona.edu). Enjoy reading about what’s going on at LPL, and have a great summer.

Timothy D. Swindle, Ph.D.
Department Head and Laboratory Director

Welcome to the LPL Newsletter!

Are we there yet?

At last, we can stop asking that, when it comes to OSIRIS-REx. After nearly a decade of planning and proposing, several years of building instruments, and more than two years of flight, the spacecraft finally arrived at its target asteroid, Bennu, on December 3. In some ways, though, the work is just beginning, with the team mapping and characterizing the asteroid as quickly and as thoroughly as possible in preparation for collecting a sample.

In a way, we can also stop asking the question about Parker Solar Probe. After even more years of planning, but only a few months in flight, it made its first perihelion passage in November. But it’s not quite there yet, because over the next six years, it will get closer to the Sun each time it goes by.

But OSIRIS-REx and Parker Solar Probe aren’t the only things happening at LPL. We’ve got graduate students, faculty and staff coming and going, and, as always, lots of fascinating science being done. So enjoy our semi-annual newsletter, which focuses more on the events within LPL, and we hope you enjoy getting our monthly electronic version, which features a couple of recent news items about LPL each month.

Timothy D. Swindle, Ph.D.
Department Head and Laboratory Director

LPL Homecoming: 50th Anniversary Banquet and Symposium

Welcome to the Spring 2010 Newsletter! LPL is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. To help mark this birthday, we're holding a variety of outreach events, such as a series of public evening lectures including Bill Hartmann, Mark Sykes, Faith Vilas, and Dale Cruikshank. The highlight of the anniversary year will be the LPL Homecoming Dinner and Symposium. All alumni and other friends of LPL are invited to celebrate together in Tucson on October 1 and 2, 2010, just prior to the DPS meeting in Pasadena on October 3-8.

We are proud to announce that Dale Cruikshank will be our banquet speaker on Friday evening (Oct. 1). We invite you to attend the Saturday (Oct. 2) symposium and give a 15-minute talk discussing your current research or other activities. There isn't time for all of the alums to speak, but there will be space for poster displays, so if you just want to bring a representative poster from DPS or another meeting, you can put that up.

Our purpose is not to have a themed workshop, but instead to let the family catch up on each other. Most LPL grads attend DPS, but a significant number attend other research meetings, or have moved on to other non-research pursuits. We want to bring as many people together as possible.

Information and registration is available on the LPL 50th Anniversary site.

We hope you can join the celebration!

Tim Swindle
Tim Swindle
Acting Department Head

Welcome to the Spring 2011 Newsletter

Welcome to another edition of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) newsletter.

We had our usual quota of successes in research and love (we've got items about two marriages), but we've also had a very sad event---Professor Donald Hunten, a long-time LPL faculty member and the person who (literally) wrote the book on planetary atmospheres, died in December.

The intent of this newsletter is to help you catch up with your LPL family. So if you haven't heard from many of your fellow LPL veterans lately, they probably haven't heard from you either, so please consider dropping us a line so that we can include something about you in the next newsletter.

Enjoy, and we hope to see you back at LPL again soon.

Michael Drake
Michael J. Drake
Head and Director
Tim Swindle
Timothy D. Swindle
Assistant Department Head

Welcome to the LPL Newsletter!

Welcome to the first installment of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory/Department of Planetary Sciences (LPL) electronic newsletter, 50 years in the making.

We will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of Gerard Kuiper's founding of LPL in 2010 with a variety of events (which will be posted on the website, in the next two newsletters, and in e-mails to many of you). In that time, our faculty, staff, students, and alumni have investigated the Sun, every planet, dozens of moons, thousands of other smaller objects in our solar system, and now planetary systems around other stars. LPL continues to be on the forefront of research, whether it is missions to Mars or theoretical investigations of extrasolar planets. But we have never had a newsletter, and a number of people have let us know that the time has come.

The newsletter will contain links to press releases about some of LPL's research accomplishments, but it is mostly devoted to the people who make this an organization that is not only a scientific powerhouse, but is also a congenial place to work, at least on most days. In this first issue, we have lists of some of the research awards and accomplishments of LPLers, but we also have notes about the annual Bratfest and its two descendants, a report on the last grad student field trip, a description of a curriculum innovation spurred in part by an LPL alum, and news from several alumni.

Consider this newsletter a work in progress---LPL includes, and has produced, many experimental scientists, after all, so it shouldn't be a surprise that we will be experimenting with this. We hope to publish two issues per year. Particularly for the first few issues, please let us know what you do and don't like, so that we can tailor it to better suit your needs. Meanwhile, we hope you enjoy finding out more about what has been happening to the LPL family.

Michael Drake
Michael J. Drake
Head and Director
Tim Swindle
Timothy D. Swindle
Assistant Department Head
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