Things are winding down here in League City, and I'm going to bust out before I find myself trapped in the 90 degree weather on the Houston freeways. I've enjoyed the conference immensely. It's important scientifically and still somehow a hidden gem, not yet overrun with us media types.

But co-organizer Steve Mackwell, director of LPI, says LPSC has become so big that it might have to move to a different city next year. Now don't get me wrong -- I'll be happy to head to San Fran, LA, Denver or wherever next year. But the humid coziness of League City -- you're forced to commingle because there's nothing else to do -- will nevertheless be missed.

Posted by Eric Hand at 07:50 PM | Permalink

A pair of meteorites discovered in Antarctica last year has geologists here atwitter, mostly because they just don't know where the thing came from. “It's a weirdo,” says Yang Liu, of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. “There's nothing like it.”

Three different consortia got rights to analyse wee bits of the rocks and are comparing their results. It's very old -- about 4.5 billion years. Based on that age, and its oxygen isotope composition, both the Earth and Mars are ruled out as sources. It probably didn't come from the Moon, because it has too much sodium in it.

Liu says it could have come from an especially big asteroid, maybe even a former planet -- but it had to be big enough to have heat for melting rocks below a crust. An alternative theory -- one that has people most excited -- is that the rock came from Venus. If so, it would be the first Venusian meteorite -- and the first sample at all from that planet.

In the 1970s, the Soviet Venera probes touched down on Venus' surface and found basaltic material, like flows from a volcano. This particular meteorite has too much silica to be a basalt, but recent studies have shown that magma compositions on Venus could be more varied than previously thought.

Posted by Eric Hand at 05:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Swiss cheese texture on Mars' south pole is getting holier – so fast that the cheese will soon be gone.

Earlier this week, Shane Byrne, of the University of Arizona in Tucson, presented a model that explained the strange ice dynamics observed by HiRISE. At the south pole, there's a thin layer of water ice overlain by a layer of frozen carbon dioxide ice that varies in thickness between two to 10 metres. There are pits in the dry ice -- the so-called Swiss cheese textures -- that tunnel down to the water ice. And observations have shown that the pits are growing.

Once they start to grow, the reflectivity of the dry ice is reduced, more heat is trapped, and the process accelerates. Some have proposed that Mars' climate is changing. But Byrne asks the question: How can a residual carbon dioxide cap, with these pits, survive for us to observe? The process is so fast that we'd have to be awful lucky to observe the changes.

Byrne ran a model that doesn't need to invoke any climate change. He starts with a very thin layer of dry ice with a certain degree of roughness. At first, the layer is smooth enough that reflectivity is high, and each winter, more ice condenses. But as the ice layer grows, its roughness increases. After about 30 years, instabilities occur in places with the highest slopes. Pits begin to form. Even as the pits grow, the overall height of ice table grows for while in the intervening flat areas.

But eventually, a tipping point is reached, and all the carbon dioxide disappears. At that point, a smooth, flat film of dry ice could condense to start the process all over again. The whole process, Byrne argues, is the inevitable consequence of starting with an ice surface that isn't perfectly flat.

Posted by Eric Hand at 05:13 PM | Permalink

The poster was just one among hundreds, an analysis of craters bigger than 2.2 kilometres on the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus. But the author, Brian Karpes, was a bit more unusual.

On 14 February, Karpes, a geology graduate student at Northern Illinois University, was taking notes in a crowded lecture hall when a gunman burst in and began firing randomly with a shotgun and three handguns. The gunman, a former sociology student, killed five people before turning the gun on himself. Karpes was shot five times, including once in the head, and was taken by helicopter to the intensive care unit of a nearby hospital.

The LPSC poster was unattended, but dozens of colleagues had signed its border, wishing him well. There was a note in the middle of the poster: “Despite being shot FIVE times, Brian finished his LPSC poster Friday afternoon March 7, 2008. Because one bullet penetrated his skull and this wound has not yet fully healed, his doctors will not let him fly. He gets shot FIVE times and he still turns in his homework!!”

Posted by Eric Hand at 04:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I wondered why everyone kept clustering around Tony Irving, of the University of Washington at Seattle. Then I realized: if you're the guy holding a moon rock at a lunar science conference, you're pretty popular. Here's Tony with his 600-gram, 1-centimetre thick slice of the moon, taken from the 2nd largest lunar meteorite ever, an 11.5 kilo monster found in Morocco last summer. That's just shy of “Big Muley,” an 11.7 kilo sample that was the biggest returned by the Apollo astronauts.

Meteorite hunting has become big business in the dry deserts of northwest Africa and the Arabian peninsula. You can buy moon rocks on eBay, where little flakes sell for hundreds and thousands of dollars. Randy Korotev, who maintains a wonderful lunar meteorite Web site at Washington University in St. Louis, estimates that, per gram, you pay more for moon than you would for diamond or gold.

Assuming a bargain basement price of $1,000 per gram, Tony's slab would be worth half a million dollars, and the 11.5 kilo monster it came from would be worth more than $10 million. But Tony insists: “It's a scientific treasure, not a financial treasure.”

The rocks are important because they represent a wider distribution of the types of rocks that exist on the moon. The Apollo missions only retrieved rocks from a few specific areas. Whereas the 56 known lunar meteorites, which result from random impacts, sample a far greater area. This one, Tony says, comes from highlands on the lunar far side. He says it's an important rock because it contains bits of iron nickel metal that are exotic to the moon.

Continue reading "LPSC: Worth its weight in gold" »

Posted by Eric Hand at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The wonderfully named Wendell Mendell, manager for office of human exploration science at Johnson Space Center, talked at the end of the day about making sure that science capabilities were included in the lunar exploration architecture. His talk didn't include many slides, but he did have one with three statements. Two, he said, came from official NASA documents. And one came from Mad magazine. Wendell wouldn't reveal which was which, but I was still amused trying to guess.

A) The problem on landing on the lunar dark side is that terrain is usually dark.

B) Washout: high light angles do not allow reflected light to reach the eye.

C) Althouth the Moon is 1/49th the size of the Earth, it is farther away.

Posted by Eric Hand at 04:20 AM | Permalink

Here's a meme you sometimes hear repeated in space science communities: The return of humans to the moon -- formerly known as President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration -- has nothing to do with science. We've already been there. We already know everything. It's just a waste of money -- money that would be better spent elsewhere.

Now, to be fair, there are some reasons to be cynical about NASA's human exploration program; the rocket builders who push people into space sometimes view science as something to be tacked on. And many space scientists argue that robots will always bring more science bang for the buck.

But to say that there aren't space scientists who are excited to get another crack at understanding the moon -- either via manned or unmanned missions -- is just plain wrong.

Continue reading "LPSC: Loco for la Luna" »

Posted by Eric Hand at 04:04 AM | Permalink

Maria Zuber often starts her presentations with a Maya Angelou quote: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” If so, then the man in the Moon must be writhing in pain.

At an LPSC session on Tuesday, Zuber, of MIT, flashed a cross section showing what is known about the structure of the Moon's interior. The answer is: not much. “There are a lot of question marks,” she says. “We don't actually know that the Moon has a core.” She's fairly sure the GRAIL gravity mapping mission will change all that.

Continue reading "LPSC: She seeks the grail" »

Posted by Eric Hand at 12:14 AM | Permalink

This is the first time that NASA Administrator Mike Griffin has spoken at LPSC -- perhaps a sign of the growing importance of the conference. But there is also a valedictory air to Griffin's talk tonight. Many doubt that he will survive the coming election and continue as administrator in a new US administration. It is the first time I have seen Griffin -- always competent, ever irascible, seemingly indomitable -- look weary.

The main conference hall is packed. People line the walls. Griffin begins reading from a prepared script. His speeches are always well written. But tonight, his delivery is flat. At one point, he offers perfunctory praise to the Mercury Messenger mission, and says he is looking forward to the next flyby. “I don't know about you, but I can't wait,” he says in a monotone.

Continue reading "LPSC: Be like Mike" »

Posted by Eric Hand at 06:22 AM | Permalink

So I spoke too soon about the weather. After lunch, thunderclaps began to punctuate the talks, and it ended up raining all afternoon. But it cleared some of the humidity. And man, do I love the way Texas clouds roll in and out. Here's the view from the conference center. Across the marina, in the distance, the folks at Johnson Space Center must be celebrating the successful launch of the Jules Verne ATV.

Posted by Eric Hand at 03:51 AM | Permalink

Monday is Mercury day at LPSC. It's only been a month and a half since Messenger flew past Mercury, and the images and analyses keep on coming. I'm always surprised by the speed and volume of the work that occurs after these planetary missions. Messenger principal investigator Sean Solomon, of Carnegie, began the day's sessions, and said the team got 500 megabytes of data from its instruments, and 1,213 images.

Continue reading "LPSC: Here there be spiders" »

Posted by Eric Hand at 05:31 PM | Permalink

Why did I bring sweaters? Too habituated to wintry weather in Washington, DC, I suppose.
The weather here in Houston, Texas (well, League City, actually) is expected to be in the mid-70s all week (that's pretty warm for you Celsius types). I actually turned on the air conditioning in my hotel last night.

Continue reading "LPSC: Forecast balmy, planetary" »

Posted by Eric Hand at 04:25 PM | Permalink

Join Eric Hand at the LPSC this year in League City, Texas. He'll be sending back diary reports to this blog page from 10-14 March.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 12:02 PM | Permalink

I am getting out of here, the number of people around me coughing their way through the last day of the conference is increasing exponentially, and I refuse to succumb (*cough*... too late?)

... I just looked back over the entries from the conference and spotted a recurring theme - Mars...

Continue reading "LPSC 2007: Goodbye, see you on Mars" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 06:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Instruments from doomed Mars mission seek a second chance on the Moon.

There's life in the old dog yet: plans are afoot to use duplicates of the Beagle 2's instrumentation to assess conditions for a future Moon base.

Read the story here

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 06:44 PM | Permalink

Dark 'skylights' could be openings to martian shelters

Some underground martian caves may have been spotted, thanks to 'skylight' holes into the caverns that have been photographed from above.

Read the story here

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 06:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The second poster session threw up a few treats last night. And not just the beer and snacks (that didn't quite come out right - no one was literally vomiting beer and snacks. Yuck).

Anyway, I was thrilled to see a poster involving Colin Pillinger's long lost friend, Beagle 2. Check out the news story on the website later...

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 06:35 PM | Permalink

Could Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, have watery volcanos spewing forth as we speak? According to maths, yes, but according to other’s views of geology, no.

Continue reading "LPSC 2007: Frozen volcanoes in the Kuiper belt. Cool..." »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 06:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This morning, in the only session on Astrobiology, John Moores from the University of Arizona suggested that areas of Mars that were sheltered from UV rays could harbour bacteria or other Martian life forms much longer than if they were exposed to the largely unfiltered UV rays that the surface of Mars usually encounters.

Continue reading "LPSC 2007: Parasols for life on Mars" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 11:47 PM | Permalink

Here's a thought - Jupiter's volcanic moon Io is responsible for most of the rocky stuff on another of Jupiter's moons, Europa. So says Kevin Zahnle of NASA's Ames research center.

Continue reading "LPSC 2007: How did Europa get so pock-marked?" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 11:31 PM | Permalink

Last night’s session about lunar missions felt a bit like a grand PR exercise. We were treated to presentations from senior NASA figures about plans to send manned missions to the moon and set up a habitable station there - very exciting it all looked too. But this isn’t news, so I’m not sure why there is a need to keep telling everyone what a good idea it is. The meeting room was certainly not as full as it was for, say the Mars rovers session that morning, so perhaps my cynicism is bordering on being correct.

Continue reading "LPSC 2007: Fly me to the Moon - again..." »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 04:12 PM | Permalink

Ah, those Mars rovers. Still struggling on, and still finding new ways to excite their masters. This time Spirit's broken front right wheel has churnded up the soil as it is being dragged along the ground, instead of wheeling nicely, to reveal some interesting geology.

Continue reading "LPSC 2007: Spirit scientists still optimistic in spite of everything" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Lots of the scientists at this meeting are sporting natty mission-related t-shirts. It's like a school uniform, so far I've seen Phoenix shirts, HiRISE shirts, Mars Rover shirts, as well as any number of plain old NASA t-shirts. If anyone knows how i can get hold of, say, a HiRISE shirt (actually, I'm not fussy - any will do), please let me know. I feel a little underdressed...

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 08:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Stunning footage of the surface of Mars has been filmed — sort of

Read the story here

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 06:58 PM | Permalink

At the poster session last night, amidst the free beer and snacks, there was some confusion (at least to me) about where to try and land on Mars.

Continue reading "LPSC 2007: where will we land?" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 05:56 PM | Permalink

The thing I find fascinating about space science is the enthusiam for uncertainty in the results.

Continue reading "LPSC 2007: uncertainties" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 10:55 PM | Permalink

The CRISM mission has been gathering data at Mars for only a few months, and already scientists are working hard to interpret what is being sent back.

Continue reading "LPSC 2007: CRISM" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 07:37 PM | Permalink

Welcome to this year's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. I'm looking forward to seeing lots of pretty pictures and seeing new data from various missions currently doing their stuff above us and around us. It's my first time in Texas, and apparently there be alligators here, although maybe someone was just trying to scare me by saying that...

Continue reading "LPSC 2007: Water..." »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 07:27 PM | Permalink

Get all the latest news from our Solar System and beyond, from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston. Katharine Sanderson will be filing diary reports here from 12-16 March.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 12:21 PM | Permalink

The first results from the Japanese Hayabusa mission have been presented here at the Lunar and Planetary Science conference, and have generally got a warm response. Hayabusa visited the small asteroid Itokawa late last year, and managed to survey the lumpy rock in great detail, despite coping with some major technical problems.

[read more here]

Continue reading "LPSC: Behold the cosmic coprolith" »

Posted by Mark Peplow at 07:13 PM | Permalink

Impacts on our planet could have sprayed life into space.

Earthly bacteria could have reached distant planets and moons after being flung into space by massive meteorite impacts, scientists suggest.

Read the story here.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 05:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Jupiter's giant moon Europa has long been a prime target for exploration, because it looks like one of the most potentially habitable place in the Solar System - its icy crust probably conceals an ocean of liquid water. So planetary scientists desperately want to find out how thick the ice is, and what sort of minerals and carbon compounds are littered around the surface.

Since the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) project bit the dust (I can't even find a NASA weblink about it), scientists have been working on an alternative proposal to visit Europa.

Torrence Johnson, chief scientist for the Solar System Directorate at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, starts his outline for a Europa orbiter concept with a question: should we go there at all? His first slide shows a screengrab of grainy, pixellated text, saying, “All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there.”

These fateful words from 2010: Odyssey 2 shouldn’t put us off, though. Apparently Lou Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, once telephoned Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka to check with him. “Arthur says it’s OK,” Johnson reassures the audience ... [click below for more details]

Continue reading "LPSC: Attempt no landing there" »

Posted by Mark Peplow at 04:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

At the ‘Back to the Moon’ session yesterday evening, Chris McKay of NASA Ames tried to convince the 500-strong audience that it was in their best interests to get behind the effort to send humans Moon-wards, more than 30 years after the final Apollo mission. Harry ‘Jack’ Schmitt, the very last person to walk on the Moon and the only scientist to ever visit, was on hand for moral support.

McKay first gave us a breakneck run through the plans for the Crew Exploration Vehicle that will carry astronauts there in the next decade. “I was there for the last Apollo launch, and I hope I’ll be there for this one too,” he said. “There’s a sort of continuity about it … er, with a 30 year gap,” he mused, to much giggling from the audience.

But he soon got the crowd onside by reminding them that most of the science done on the Moon will be geology. Ultimately, he explained, he wanted to set up a base on the Moon as a staging post for a Mars colony, because it provided the perfect testing ground for many of the challenges of the red planet.

One key difference is that the planetary protection people, who want to ensure that no Earthly bacterium ever contaminates Mars, wouldn’t be too worried if we made a few mistakes on the Moon first. “Nobody cares about contaminating the Moon,” he explained. “It’s like New Jersey.”

Posted by Mark Peplow at 03:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Spirit and Opportunity learn to single out good images.

The rovers Spirit and Opportunity will soon be able to spot interesting features of the martian weather automatically. Their new software, due to be installed in June, will help the rovers to identify swirling dust devils and thin clouds in the sky.

Read the story in news@nature.com here.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 02:21 PM | Permalink

The latest news on the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity is always a highlight of any planetary science meeting. Even if the science starts to sound a little samey – these minerals formed in water, those minerals are volcanic – the pictures just blow me away.

Now the Pancam team have upgraded their website, and are adding images to their open-access catalogue as soon as they are downlinked from Mars. Go look at them now, I promise you your jaw will drop ...

Continue reading "LPSC: Images to make you weep with joy" »

Posted by Mark Peplow at 05:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

At the poster session I bumped into John Murray from the Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. John and his colleagues from the Mars Express team caused quite a stir last year when they announced they had found a frozen sea on Mars. Nature papers followed soon after, but since then arguments have raged between those who support the idea, and others who claim the features they saw are in fact lava flows ...

Continue reading "LPSC: Ice or lava?" »

Posted by Mark Peplow at 07:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Strap the little darlings to a rocket, light blue touch paper and retire? A bit harsh – perhaps a video game would be better. A group of scientists are developing software that will put kids in the driving seat of a Moon rover, or in charge of repairing the International Space Station (some marathon games on the cards there, I reckon) ...

Continue reading "LPSC: Getting Kids in Space" »

Posted by Mark Peplow at 05:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Stardust mission yields white hot results.

The first results from a mission to catch dust from a comet's tail have revealed a surprise: these balls of dirty snow are born of fire as well as ice. Scientists were stunned to find a huge range of minerals in the particles captured by NASA's Stardust probe as it swooped past the comet Wild 2 on 2 January 2004. Many of the compounds could only have formed close to a star - far from the chilly outskirts of the Solar System where the comet first coalesced.

Read the news@nature.com story (you'll need a password) here.
And see all blog entries from the conference here.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 02:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (3)

Emily Lakdawalla is blogging this meeting for the Planetary Society. Anyone else doing the same and wanting a link should give us a shout. A quick search shows that presenters and attendees mentioning the meeting on their blogs or livejournals include David Bigwood, Veronica Bray and Ryan Anderson. But there's no guarantee that they'll be posting while they're in Houston.

Posted by Oliver Morton at 10:34 AM | Permalink

Google Mars launched today to much fanfare. It provides a map of the entire surface of the red planet, using more than 17,000 photos taken by the thermal emission camera on the Mars Odyssey orbiter, which takes pictures in infra red and visible light, as well as the topographic maps made by MOLA, the Laser Altimeter on Mars Global Surveyor. Some key sites are imaged in much greater detail, such as the giant volcano Olympus Mons, the landing sites for the two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, and the grand canyon of Mars, Valles Marineris.

“It really gives you the big picture view of Mars,” says Robert Burnham, part of the team at Arizona State University, Tempe, that created the martian map. It’s more likely to be used by space fans rather than for research purposes, but it does provide a platform for higher resolution images to be added by craft such as Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which arrived at the planet on 10 March. Have a look at the cool fly-through videos at the THEMIS website – you can even download special versions onto your iPod.

[Posted on behalf of Mark Peplow]

Posted by Oliver Morton at 04:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

I ought to say that the conference is actually not in Houston, but League City, just near to NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Either way, I’ve never been to Texas before. Driving around the beltway yesterday in my rather natty rental car (a red Chrysler PT Cruiser – we don’t have them in the UK, as far as I know, and it looks like something out of a Dick Tracy movie, which makes me feel terribly transatlantic), I got my first real view of the city coming over the Houston Ship Channel Bridge. As the car rose further and further up the vast arc of concrete, the whole sprawling mess was laid out beneath me. Oil refineries covered the ground in both directions as far as the eye could see, thick pipes tangling around each other like tree roots. Thousands upon thousands of towers topped by burning gas lit the scene in hot orange. I have honestly never seen anything like it in my life. Someone recently said something about an “addiction to oil” that needed to be addressed – and as I drove on in my rather more guilty pleasure, I thought: for once, he’s absolutely right.

[Posted on behalf of Mark Peplow]

Posted by Oliver Morton at 03:52 AM | Permalink

The result of the day at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference here in Houston undoubtedly came from the Stardust mission to catch dust from the tail of comet Wild 2. You can read more about it on news@nature.com in a few hours when the story goes live, but I was impressed by the healthy turnout of around 600 scientists who came to watch this comet’s life history start to unfold.

But that was nothing. The end of the day saw more than a thousand of the 1,500 or so conference attendees pack into a room to hear Mary Cleave, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, defend the agency’s recent budget cuts in the sciences. And boy, did she have a tough crowd. As the Shuttle and International Space Station eat up more and more cash, scientists are seeing their projects cancelled – sorry, “deferred” – in ever greater numbers.

Continue reading "LPSC: The natives are restless" »

Posted by Oliver Morton at 03:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Mark Peplow will be reporting back with diary blog entries from the LPSC in Houston, Texas, this week. Keep an eye on this space for updates...

Posted by Nicola Jones at 03:07 PM | Permalink