[X] My Assistant

[Phil Stooke]

LPSC is coming up in mid-March. I just submitted my abstract - and I'm a coauthor on another one which should go in shortly.

Is anyone else from UMSF going ?

Phil

[hendric]

I'd really love to, but I think I would need to finagle a relative into coming down to watch my son, since I doubt he would be quiet or still for the presentations. In another few years, hopefully.

On a related E/PO note, we did visit the AstroZone: Austin held before the AAS annual meeting here in Austin. My wife and I were a little underwhelmed at what we saw. Most of it was activities for children, which I don't have a problem with, but it would have been cool to see more of the "adult" E/PO we could have provided.

What was present: WIRE, Stereo, Chandra, Hubble, McDonald observatory, NRAO, giant MER 3-D panorama of Spirit near Home Plate, and a wheel mockup, SLOOH.com, a couple of others
What was missing: New Horizons, Cassini (!), Mars Science Lander, Mars Reconnaissance orbiter, Messenger, Phoenix, and plenty of others.

I imagine it's driven by what teams create, and how much time they can afford to give, so it's understandable.

More information: http://www.imascientist.org/astrozone

Schedule:
Future AstroZone dates:
St. Louis, MO: June 2008
Pasadena, CA: January 2009
Long Beach, CA: June 2009
Washington, DC: January 2010
Miami, FL: June 2010
Seattle, WA: January 2011
Boston, MA: June 2011
Austin, TX: January 2012
Anchorage, AK: June 2012


Maybe for their next AstroZone we can try to get some exhibit space for www.unmannedspaceflight.com, and show stuff. It was only a 4 hour deal for one afternoon, so lining up UMSF volunteers for that shouldn't be a big deal, should it? Any takers for St. Louis? Here's my dream exhibit for UMSF:

Trifold posterboard with UMSF greatest hits
Poster handout pictures of the best images from www.umsf.com
Laptop running MMB tied to a projector, with kids moving around the panorama and making movies on their own.
Bags with the UMSF logo (I noticed they didn't have anything to carry the loot around. Can get these for ~$1 a bag, minimum order 100 with 1 color)
Volunteers to talk about space exploration missions, where they are, what they've found out, etc. I kinda got the feeling the volunteers were just that, volunteers, not necessarily familiar with the missions. (Not to disparage the volunteers, they did give their time, after all)

[tglotch]

I'll be there Monday and Tuesday. I have an abstract in for a poster. Hopefully it's Tuesday rather than Thursday night.

[rlorenz]

LPSC is coming up in mid-March.
Is anyone else from UMSF going ?

Almost inevitably. Hopefully will have Cassini T41 results in hand from a
couple of weeks prior to the meeting...

[Phil Stooke]

The LPSC abstracts are online... and is there ever a lot of juicy stuff!

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2008/pdf/program.pdf

Phil

[elakdawalla]

Thanks for the heads up, Phil!

There is a possibility that I will be able to abandon the baby with her aunt for long enough to attend one day of the meeting, which will be the Monday, which contains MESSENGER results all day, overlapping(!) with Kaguya results in the afternoon. So for those legions of you who will be attending the other days and seeing the neat stuff from Enceladus and Titan and the Moon and Mars and NASA night and elsewhere, and who have been dying for a chance to enjoy worldwide fame via a guest spot on The Planetary Society Weblog, please send me an email!

--Emily

[CosmicRocker]

Events conspired to prevent me from attending LPSC this year, and I am experiencing withdrawal symptoms. Thankfully Emily has been able to post some early summaries on her blog. The folks at The Martian Chronicles have promised to post some LPSC highlights, but they haven't yet, as Monday rolls over to Tuesday in Houston time.

If anyone knows of other blogs or sites posting news from LPSC 2008, please post links here. If you are fortunate enough to be attending the conference, please send summaries to Emily, so she can publish them on her blog.

[Stu]

Live blogging from the conference here.

[CosmicRocker]

Thanks, Stu. I've been refreshing Emily's blog, Astronomy Cast, and The Martian Chronicles all day and night, watching for updates.
I am a little disappointed that so far no one has summarized any of the MER papers.

[Phil Stooke]

I'm at LPSC. And this just in - Kaguya has obtained beautiful images of the interior of Shackleton crater using light reflected off its uppermost rim.

Phil

[ngunn]

[quote name='Phil Stooke' date='Mar 12 2008, 01:43 PM' post='110728']
I'm at LPSC.
/quote]

Phil, has somebody been advertising this forum at the conference? I couldn't get in for a while and now I find we have 194 online users. This despite relatively few posts today. What's going on?? Doug???

[djellison]

No idea. Nothin unusual in terms of bandwidth, nothing unusual in terms of visitor numbers, nothing unusual on google analytics. Occasionally a search engine bot will trawl thru and as it works from multiple IP's - it can look like a lot of visitors ( currently 60ish )

[Ryan]

The folks at The Martian Chronicles have promised to post some LPSC highlights, but they haven't yet, as Monday rolls over to Tuesday in Houston time.

I'm one of the authors at The Martian Chronicles; all three of us had travel delays, so we missed monday, but we are at the conference now and blogging as much as possible!

[Phil Stooke]

"Phil, has somebody been advertising this forum at the conference?"

Well. I wore the T-shirt.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

Special Correspondent Stooke reporting from LPSC with a hot image tip:

HiRISE image PSP-004847-1745 was taken without the usual 14 to 8 bit compression, so it preserves the full dynamic range of the data. And it shows the floor of Jeanne, one of the pits on the north Arsia flank, illuminated by reflected light. Nice! It's reported in a poster by Cushing et al.

Phil