Fall

Congratulations to LPL alums Nancy Chabot (1999), DART Coordination Lead, and Andy Rivkin (1997), DART Co-Investigation Team Lead. On November 24, NASA launched its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) Mission on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. DART is heading to the near-Earth binary asteroid Didymos, where, in September 2022, it will smash into Didymos' moonlet, called Dimorphos. The goal is to test if the technique, which will alter Dimorphos' speed and, consequently, its orbit around Didymos, could be used to defend the Earth from potential impactors.

Learn more about DART from Nancy and Andy at the links below:

• Gravity Assist: How to Move an Asteroid, with Nancy Chabot
• In a First Test of Its Planetary Defense Efforts, NASA's Going to Shove an Asteroid
• NASA is ramming a spacecraft into an asteroid as part of a planetary defense test mission
• NASA’s DART Mission Could Help Cancel an Asteroid Apocalypse

We would like to thank all those who have donated to LPL in 2021. Thanks to everyone for supporting research, education, and outreach at LPL.

Indujaa Ganesh is the recipient of an Amelia Earhart Fellowship for 2021. The $10,000 fellowship is awarded each year by Zonta International to up to 35 women pursuing doctoral degrees in aerospace engineering and space sciences. The fellowship was established in 1938 in honor of Amelia Earhart, famed pilot and member of the Zonta Clubs of Boston and New York. Indujaa is a fifth-year student working with Associate Professor Lynn Carter. 

In the spring 2021 newsletter, we reported that Indujaa received the 2021 Curson Travel Award; you can read more about her research and recent summer field work by visiting the the Curson Travel Award site. 

On the first day of our trip, we travelled to Texas Canyon, where we visited the Triangle T Guest Ranch and exceptional granite outcrops with spherical weathering. Folks at the ranch kindly let our group explore the rock formations and guided us to see exceptional Native American petroglyphs. We then visited Willcox Playa and hiked to Fort Bowie to learn more about the region’s cultural history. The next day, we explored Chiricahua National Monument, including ancient volcanoes with spectacular hoodoo formations eroded into the 27-million-year-old Turkey Creek ignimbrite deposit. Our group of sixteen visited Massai Point, hiked the "Echo Canyon Trail," and climbed to the top of Sugarloaf to see the exceptional geologic history exposed within the walls of the valley.

For the final day or our trip, we crossed into Cave Creek Canyon, which is the largest and most biologically diverse canyon in the region. We then visited the Chiricahua Desert Museum and explored monogenetic volcanoes in San Bernardino Volcanic Field, which include exceptional mantle xenoliths. On the way home to Tucson, we enjoyed the final student presentations with ice cream in Tombstone. After two-years, it was great to explore the beautiful geology and cultural history of the Southwest again, and students are looking forward to exploring the Mojave Desert next semester with Professor Shane Byrne.

You can support the LPL field trip with a gift to the Wilkening-Sill endowment.

by Adam Battle

The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory Conference (LPLC) marks the start of the academic year for many planetary scientists in the Tucson area. This year, LPLC 2021 reflected the cautious trend toward normal operations and was hosted in a hybrid format. For one full day, participants—all fully masked—gathered at the Michael J. Drake Building to spread out in the massive auditorium and watch presentations given by faculty, staff, and graduate students. The presentations were also live-streamed to a Zoom webinar for people to watch and ask questions virtually. At lunch time, in-person participants enjoyed viewing the expansive meteorite collection housed in the Drake building and the outdoor patio space.

Despite the strange conditions this year, LPLC had the same level of attendance as previous years, with over 70 people participating. Among the invited speakers was Teddy Kareta, the winner of the “Best Grad Student Presentation” in 2020, who gave a great talk entitled No Ice, Please: 46P/Wirtanen in the Near-Infrared. The winner of this year’s “Best Grad Student Presentation” award was Galen Bergsten, who will be invited to give a talk at LPLC in 2022. In addition to the invited speakers, 23 people gave presentations about their current or upcoming research. For a conference largely designed to bring the planetary science community together, LPLC met all of its goals despite the ongoing difficulties of the global pandemic. The conference concluded with LPL director Mark Marley's keynote on Modeling Atmospheres from Giant Planets to Cool Stars.