28 February 2010
Lunar and Planetary Science Conference 2010
Posted by Ryan Anderson
Hi there readers! It’s that time of year again: every March, planetary scientists gather at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference to share all their latest results, and every year I frantically try to keep track of all the cool things I see and report some of them on the blog.
This year I’ll be doing the same: as usual I’ll try to keep up with daily posts, but if I do fall behind, I will keep taking notes and post them as I get the chance.
I already know that I will be missing the first half of tomorrow because instead of landing it Houston right now, I am stuck in Detroit thanks to Delta Airlines. I should get to the conference in time to catch the afternoon sessions though, and I’ll be at the conference for the rest of the week. Stay tuned, as always it looks like it is going to be a great conference.
If you’re interested, the abstracts for the conference are available online for free! Each abstract is a two-page summary of the poster or talk that will be given at the conference, so even if you can’t attend the meeting, the abstracts are a great way to see what the latest results are. If you see an abstract that catches your interest or that you have questions about, let me know, and I’ll see if I can make it to that talk or poster and report on it here.
How about this one? I am interested in the ground rock powders versus the rock rock. 4:00 p.m. Clegg S. M. * Barefield J. E. Wiens R. C. Sharma S. K. Misra A. K. Tucker J. Dyar M. D. Lambert J. Smrekar S. Treiman A.
Venus Geochemical Analysis by Remote Laser-induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) [#1631]
This paper focuses on development of the LIBS technique to extract chemical composition and facilitate mineral/rock identification from LIBS spectra acquired under Venus-like conditions. Samples for these experiments were chosen to be geochemically-likely on Venus.
41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (2010) sess154.pdf
That presentation was on Monday so I didn’t get to see it, but I saw Sam Clegg (my main collaborator at Los Alamos) give a very similar presentation at AGU in December. It was mostly proof-of-concept that LIBS actually works under Venus conditions. It does, and they have submitted a proposal for a Venus lander that would carry a laser.