Welcome to the Spring 2015 LPL Newsletter. As we finish off another academic year, there is, as always, lots to talk about.

The most exciting news is that Professor Renu Malhotra has been named a member of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors an American scientist can receive. For good measure, she also was named a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

The other big piece of faculty news is that two long-time LPL faculty members, Randy Jokipii and Rick Greenberg, are retiring over the summer. Rick has been at LPL for roughly a quarter of a century, but Randy has been here longer—he was one of the early hires when the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory added an academic component and the Department of Planetary Sciences was born.

In addition, our talented graduate students continue to accrue honors. Most notably, Jamie Molaro won the UA College of Science award for the most outstanding effort in public outreach, based on the very successful Art of Planetary Science event that she designed and organized. The College gives out one award each for Research, Teaching and Service each year—an LPL  grad has won one of those three each of the last four years, and the award-winners have been in all three categories, a testament to our students' performance.

We also have several items of personal interest involving the LPL family, ranging from births and graduations to just introductions to the people you might see in the hallway (if you work at LPL) or hear about from LPL friends (if you’re part of LPL’s extended family).

But perhaps the most impressive thing about LPL is still the work that is done here. This newsletter includes more than two dozen articles with an LPL twist from various news outlets, covering a broad range of topics. Reading those will give you some sense of the amazing range of interesting things going on at LPL, from flying kites in Hawai’i to study Mars to using “leftover” data from Catalina Sky Survey to study black holes. And because not every excellent paper generates a press release, you’ll have to use either your imagination or a database of the scientific literature to understand the full scope of the science that goes on at LPL.

Enjoy the newsletter, and as always, if you have news about you, your career, or your family, please let us know, so that we can pass it along to all the people who would be interested.

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 50^th anniversary of the Ranger 7 mission (on which Kuiper was PI) that took the first close-up images of the moon, and the 45^th 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 Spring 2014 newsletter from the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. It’s been a busy spring, with the normal extraordinary goings-on—Catalina Sky Survey found another asteroid just before it hit Earth, the OSIRIS-REx mission passed its Critical Design Review, and the HiRISE mission just keeps turning out spectacular images of the surface of Mars. But we also keep working to bring in new people and fresh ideas—Christopher Hamilton and Gilda Ballester joined the LPL faculty, we have a faculty search going in the multi-departmental Theoretical Astrophysics Program, and we’ve gone through an Academic Program Review to try to figure out how we can move on to even greater accomplishments (hopefully, you’ll hear the results of the latter two in the next newsletter).

We’ve got links to a lot of interesting news items relating to the science we do, and to the various awards that our talented graduate students keep winning (of note, Juan Lora won the department’s prestigious Kuiper Award and Ali Bramson won the College of Science’s Graduate Teaching Award). But we also have links to stories about things we do that aren’t exactly science. The graduate students (led by Jamie Molaro and James Keane) put on a spectacularly successful “Art of Planetary Science” art show, our building hosted the roll-out of “Orbiting Ray Bradbury’s Mars,” a book consisting of essays about science-fiction author Ray Bradbury (edited by LPL Kuiper Circle regular Gloria McMillan, spouse of Spacewatch® director Bob McMillan), and the OSIRIS-REx team has started posting a set of videos called “321Science” on YouTube (I knew they were good when I realized I’d told someone about an “entertaining video about the Yarkovsky Effect”). And somewhere in the middle, between pure public outreach and pure science, Catalina Sky Survey is working with Planetary Resources Inc. (a company with Chris Lewicki, whose ties to LPL go back 20 years, as president) to crowdsource asteroid detection.

The bottom line is that LPL is a fantastic organization, full of people with a myriad of talents (some even show up on YouTube for their exploits at baseball games). Enjoy finding out what’s been going on with the LPL family, and if you haven’t been mentioned recently, let us know what’s happening in your life and career.

Welcome to the latest edition of the LPL newsletter. More than usual, the last few months have been filled with transitions from a glorious past to a future we all hope will be at least as glorious.

For example, at a single celebration last May, we honored two key members of the OSIRIS-REx team who are retiring (including Peter Smith from LPL), celebrated a huge milestone for the mission (confirmation), and unveiled a portrait of the late Mike Drake, who led the proposals that resulted in the mission as well as directing LPL for 15 years.

We also have welcomed two new faculty members, Walt Harris and Travis Barman, as well as this year’s group of graduate students. These people are, obviously, the future of the laboratory.

But our future is intimately linked to our past. Former LPL director Laurel Wilkening has made a bequest that should fund the legendary LPL field trips for many future graduate students.

And we haven’t forgotten our past. The papers of LPL founder Gerard Kuiper, which are housed at Special Collections at the University of Arizona Library, have now been indexed, making them more available to interested historians. We are working with Special Collections on some other sets of papers from former LPL greats, and on finding ways to publicize and utilize the Kuiper collection.

Of course, we have the usual run of amazing science results. The fact that the stunning science that our faculty, staff, and students perform can be considered “usual” is a testament to the amazing people that have built, and continue to build, LPL.

Read and enjoy.