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Posted by: Phil Stooke Jan 20 2010, 09:03 PM

Yes, the LPSC abstracts for 2010 are up:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/pdf/program.pdf

and there's lots of good stuff there.

Phil

Posted by: volcanopele Jan 21 2010, 12:02 AM

Very cool! Sifting through them now:

In the "I did that four years ago... perhaps I should have shown others" file:
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/pdf/2099.pdf
Patthoff D. A. Kattenhorn S. A.

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/pdf/1692.pdf
Stephan K. et al.
Good background on the VIMS specular reflection observation from a lake to the west of Kraken Mare

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/pdf/2244.pdf
Keszthelyi L. P. et al.
Well, looks like you could scratch off "Powerful Ioquakes" from the list of potential hazards to Ionian colonists...

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/pdf/1672.pdf
Wagner R. J. et al.
For those interested in early results from that flyby of Rhea

In the "Hey, I know those guys!" File:
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/pdf/1849.pdf
Stryk T. Stooke P. J.

In the "Phoebe did it! Phoebe did it! Himalia's just being a little copycat!" File:
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/pdf/2549.pdf
Cheng A. F. * et al.
(for those who don't get the reference above, you had to have seen that South Park episode...)

Posted by: nprev Jan 21 2010, 01:57 AM

Hmm. Another from the "Hey, I know those guys!" file:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/pdf/1544.pdf

Malaska M., Lorenz R., et al.

Posted by: volcanopele Jan 21 2010, 02:35 AM

The last sentence of this abstract had me doing a spit take: The impact of the lost satellite S/2000 J11 [11] onto Himalia would have produced far more than this rough lower limit volume of ejected material.

Whoa...

Posted by: aggieastronaut Jan 21 2010, 05:22 AM

By yours truly: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/pdf/1730.pdf

and another one with my name on it: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/pdf/1811.pdf

I've somehow been put in charge of coordinating an LPSC tweetup, so for those of you interested (we'll accept you, even if you don't have an account!) I'll post details once I figure something out.

Posted by: ngunn Jan 21 2010, 12:10 PM

I don't know how those attending the conference this time will appreciate the way the sessions are organised, but as a lay abstract hunter with a particular interest in Titan I found the absence of a dedicated Titan session this time quite annoying. Who came up with this for a session title? Is it supposed to be making some kind of point, humorous or otherwise?
"Several Species of Variously Sized Icy Chunks Gathered Together Around Giant Planets and Evolving Over Time"
!
Grumble over, there's lots of good reading as ever. Here's one I particularly like, from the "Satellites and their Planets" session:
Why Titan's Lakes Have Been Smooth So Far - and May Be About to Get Rough

EDIT Sorry, I don't seem to be able to post those as active links.

Posted by: djellison Jan 21 2010, 12:37 PM

Mastcam paper
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/pdf/1123.pdf

Nice to see a finished Mastcam. Tragic to see it delivered without Zoom despite Mastcam never having been over budget.

Posted by: climber Jan 21 2010, 03:37 PM

Doug, I know what you mean and you're the specialist, but M-100 yielding 7.4 cm/pixel scale at 1km distance doesn't look too bad to me. This would give about 20cm per pixel on top of Husband Hills from Spirit landing spot, or do I missundertand something? Does atmosphere allow getting much more details when we go over, say, 5 kms? Or does the Zoom would have allowed "different scales" from the same place?

Posted by: elakdawalla Jan 21 2010, 04:21 PM

You're clearly not a Pink Floyd fan! (lhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Several_Species_of_Small_Furry_Animals_Gathered_Together_in_a_Cave_and_Grooving_with_a_Pict)

Part of the "charm" of LPSC is the sometimes quirky session titles. Most times, the jokes are of the same quality as this one.

Outer planet moons have always been kind of a funny interloper into this meeting full of geologists. Now, the meeting seems to be getting back to its roots with lots and lots of lunar sessions.

As annoying as it can be that there is not a single session devoted to your favorite place, in part that's a mark of the diversity of the processes on Titan. A meeting like this should facilitate researchers who work on different processes in different places comparing notes -- the process-based sessions, while a bit harder to browse, do foster that kind of dialogue.

Posted by: djellison Jan 21 2010, 04:54 PM

I agree - that's superb. But it was due to be slightly better than that (10cm @ 2km I believe) - and at the wide end, be wider that the other 'eye'. But that's not the shame. The shame is that we wont have proper stereo from it. No 8fps HD Stereo driving movies or DD movies etc etc. With one zoomed in and one zoomed out, they stop being a stereo pair and creating stereo becomes a bit of a headache on the ground.

In terms of outreach, and in terms of usefulness for driving (L7 drive direction pancams, anyone) it has suffered massively.

Posted by: ngunn Jan 21 2010, 07:40 PM

Ha! Thanks Emily. Actually I am a fan, and familiar with that track, but I still missed the connection. (I suppose tenuous connections are what the outer Solar System is all about.)

I take the point about process-oriented sessions in general, though I think for Titan a good case could be made for a holistic one-world focus. I note that Venus gets its own session with a wide range of processes discussed. Anyhow, the upside is that although I'm still not sure I've found all the Titan abstracts I have run into lots of other interesting stuff I might otherwise have overlooked.

Also I don't blame the geologists for a bit of rock-snobbery. They are after all studying a rather special material that is probably much rarer than water.

Posted by: Phil Stooke Jan 21 2010, 07:54 PM

On my first run through I saw an abstract on Titan radar mapping - a set of 15 quadrangles covering the surface plus other global maps. Second time through it took ages to find it, because of the new format.

Phil

Posted by: ngunn Jan 21 2010, 08:01 PM

OK that is indeed one I missed. Which session is that in?

Posted by: volcanopele Jan 21 2010, 08:11 PM

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/pdf/2414.pdf
Kirk R. L. et al.

It is in the Data and Image systems poster session.

Posted by: ngunn Jan 21 2010, 09:00 PM

Thanks. Silly Me. I was looking in 'Pigs on the Wing'.

Posted by: sgendreau Jan 22 2010, 12:24 AM

Indirect evidence of the authors' ages (and ours, too )

Posted by: Phil Stooke Jan 22 2010, 01:49 PM

There's a very interesting abstract on the Spirit area here:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/pdf/2566.pdf

One thing I'm not sure I agree with - they suggest the Columbia Hills are part of a central peak of Gusev. I think they may be all that remains of the rim of a small interior crater similar to Thira. But there's lots of good stuff on other possible 'Home Plates', several landslides etc. I would have added another 'Home Plate' partly buried by the foot of the McCool Hill landslide.

Phil

Posted by: rlorenz Jan 24 2010, 10:28 PM

You would not be alone in being disappointed at that. I have my own conspiracy theories, of
course, but I guess the intent/pretext was to make the meeting more 'process-oriented'
(though if that were really the case, then why the heck do they have a 'Mars Fluvial'
session instead of a 'Fluvial' session.....?

Posted by: nprev Jan 24 2010, 11:05 PM

I still think that many people are flat-out intimidated by Titan. Everyone's trying to derive analogies to explain much of the complexity, and that's risky.

Posted by: volcanopele Jan 24 2010, 11:12 PM

I agree, I think the intention is to make the meeting process-oriented.

Bah, Ralph, conspiratorize away (hey that's a perfectly cromulent word). I suspect that they are trying to get people to stay for the entire week, rather than just the days the Titan, or Galilean satellite, or other sessions will be run. For Mars and the Moon, because there are SOOOO many (people clearly not prioritizing research right, otherwise there would be Umbriel sessions every day of the conference) , they don't have this problem.

Posted by: ngunn Jan 24 2010, 11:55 PM

It my not have its own session at this year's LPSC but it will eventually have its own university (maybe many). Trubba not, Ralph.

Posted by: peter59 Mar 13 2010, 06:33 PM

I just found materials from the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (128 PDF files). It is hard to even casually browse the material. It is a true mine of knowledge. This may be the source for many interesting discussions on this forum.
ftp://ftp.lpi.usra.edu/pub/outgoing/lpsc2010/

Posted by: pjam Mar 23 2010, 04:45 AM

T'was a fun meeting! I have half a bookful of notes from the talks and posters I *could* get to!

For me, some of the highlights were:

1) NEOWISE -Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer invesitgation of Near Earth Objects. Very entertaining talk by Amy Mainzer, who introduced us to the newly-launched spacecraft and the project goal to mine the WISE database (now building at 60 Gb a day!) for eventually ~90 000 main belt asteroids and ~200 new NEOs + new comets. Especially fun were her comments on the "pesky" stars being limited to the shorter wavelength bands, whereas the fun stuff tends to be redder; "Stars are the vermin of the sky!" got a big laugh & round of applause.
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/pdf/2534.pdf
Mission site: wise.astro.ucla.edu

2) Young <1 Ga lunar thrust faults (lobate scarps) seen with LROC ..Watters et al (talk given by Mark Robinson)
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/pdf/1863.pdf

3) Rapidly rotating monolith 5404 Uemura "death star" in the main belt. This was a poster by Vishnu Reddy and others which documents a possible coherent fast rotating body of >1 km dia that by its extreme IR spectral reddening looks like it might have a lot of metal. This object exceeds the observed "spin barrier" for asteroids over ~200m diameter, implying that it is a coherent and maybe has a density >4 g/cm3. Cool! ...sorry, that's my small bodies bias showing, I guess.
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/pdf/1227.pdf

4) A postulated "E-belt" of enstatite chondrite type parent bodies that are now mostly removed from the inner part of the main belt, leaving just a small remnant Hungaria population. This talk was by Bill Bottke, always a font of provocative ideas, enthusiastically delivered! Here the idea is that these bodies may be the source of the Late Heavy Bombardment and also be of the right `exotic' composition to match what is expected from lunar impact melts. He acknowledges that it is difficult to test this one ...but fun nonetheless and maybe fruitful.
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/pdf/1269.pdf

That's a good start anyway!
Cheers,
-pjam
Phil McCausland

Posted by: Stu Mar 23 2010, 06:18 AM

And the award for "Best line in a post for a loooong time" goes to...

(opens envelope)

'Rapidly rotating monolith 5404 Uemura "death star" ' by pjam!!

(applause)

Posted by: nprev Mar 23 2010, 07:09 AM

Hear, hear!!!

That paper also may have identified one of the richest metal deposits in the entire Solar System. Very interesting object for a variety of reasons; always wondered if really big chunks of NiFe actually existed in the Belt.

Posted by: Stu Mar 23 2010, 07:35 AM

...or may have confirmed that the Cylons have finally found us...