Archive by category | Lunar and Planetary Science

LPSC 2009: Little asteroids on Mars lead to ice

LPSC 2009: Little asteroids on Mars lead to ice

A graduate student on my shuttle bus to the conference center tipped me off to a couple of really cool abstracts, presented on Tuesday and tomorrow. I was all set to push for a story about them. But then a) the authors didn’t want to talk to me about it, because they’re hoping the work will make a splash in a journal-which-will-not-be-named, and b) I realized that my eagle-eyed editor had, like MRO, already spotted the work, and its novelty, when the authors were presenting it at AGU in December.  Read more

LPSC 2009: Ice volcanoes on Titan

LPSC 2009: Ice volcanoes on Titan

I have a new story up on the main Nature News site that tries to piece together the growing evidence for an ice volcano at Hotei Arcus, a region of Titan pictured here in an artist’s illustration. Bob Nelson and Randy Kirk were already onto Hotei at AGU in December, but they hadn’t yet processed everything from two close Cassini flybys on November 19 and December 5. The new data have allowed them a better grasp of the shape of the landscape, which looks volcanic, and Nelson is making the bold claim that, as the region gets brighter, a spectral  … Read more

LPSC 2009: Prospecting for moon ice

LPSC 2009: Prospecting for moon ice

The Chandrayaan-1 folks had a session yesterday, and people streamed into the room to see what Paul Spudis had to say about ice on the moon. Spudis is an LPI scientist leading the mini-SAR radar instrument on Chandrayaan, which is a prelude to a bigger radar instrument on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which will launch in May. Both instruments will search for radar reflections, consistent with ice, in the permanently shadowed craters of the moon’s poles; Spudis has been heavily involved in this search for years. A quick review of history (Spudis has a nice review, colored by his perspective,  … Read more

LPSC 2009: Squyres to lead planetary decadal

LPSC 2009: Squyres to lead planetary decadal

Steve Squyres, principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers, has been named the chair of the steering committee for the upcoming planetary science decadal survey, according to David Smith of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board. Squyres, of Cornell University, will address LPSC attendees at 12:15 pm on Wednesday.  Read more

LPSC 2009: Moonface two-face

LPSC 2009: Moonface two-face

The man in the moon always presents us with the same mugshot, because the Earth’s tides have locked the moon’s spin to ours. But in a talk yesterday, Mark Wieczorek pointed out that not only did it not always have to be this way, but also that there is some evidence that the moon actually did swap its Earth-facing side at least once in the ancient past.  Read more

LPSC 2009: Venus or bust

LPSC 2009: Venus or bust

With all the fierce debate over sending a NASA flagship mission to Europa or Titan, it’s easy to forget that there are other communities waiting in line. Mark Bullock, of Southwest Research Institute, gave a talk describing the results of a major science and technology definition exercise for a future flagship mission to Venus. Given $4 billion to design a mission to be launched by 2025, the team had to figure out the best way to answer the most important science questions (like, does Venus have active tectonics and volcanism?) with technology that’s not too far off. The team settled on a particular architecture: an orbiter, two balloons that would last about a month swimming through sulfuric acid clouds, and two landers that would survive a few hours at the lead-melting surface. Here’s an artist’s impression of the lander after those few hours. Venus is not a forgiving place.  Read more

LPSC 2009: Dhofar, so far

One more update to the Late Heavy Bombardment story, then I’ll shut up about it. I started that story with a discussion of Dhofar 961, a lunar meteorite that many think is the only found meteorite to have been chipped off of the South Pole Aitken Basin, the biggest and oldest basin on the moon, and the one that, once dated, should mark the beginning of the Late Heavy Bombardment. (Statistically, this is long overdue: There are more than 60 lunar meteorites, and South Pole Aitken covers almost 15% of the lunar surface. If meteorites fall from the moon to Earth randomly, then geologists should have around 10 from South Pole Aitken.)  … Read more

LPSC 2009: Basins abounding

LPSC 2009: Basins abounding

Last year, I wrote a feature story about the Late Heavy Bombardment, the time, roughly 3.9 billion ago, when the young bodies of the inner solar system were subjected to a beating by asteroids flung in from the outer solar system. The story was partly triggered by an abstract presented here last year: Herb Frey’s report that, using topographic data, he could identify some 92 likely impact basins bigger than 300 kilometres across — twice as many as contained in the canonical database. That meant that the moon — the ‘record plate’ for the bombardment, since the relic impact craters and basins are preserved better there than elsewhere — was hit harder than most thought.  Read more

LPSC 2009: The Woodlands

Hello folks, welcome to the 40th anniversary Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, still in Houston, Texas, but on the other side of town (which, in Houston terms, means a heckuva long way). The traditional home of LPSC, a conference center in League City, near the Lunar and Planetary Institute and Johnson Space Center, was getting too tight for the burgeoning ranks of planetary scientists. But organizers wanted to keep the traditional roots of the conference in Houston. So they moved to a conference center in The Woodlands, a master-planned, mixed-use development done in the 1970s by astrophysics-loving billionaire George Mitchell. It’s about 30 miles north of downtown Houston, and about 60 miles north of League City.  Read more

LPSC: The 1st rock from the 2nd rock from the Sun?

LPSC: The 1st rock from the 2nd rock from the Sun?

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.”  … Read more