One thing I’ve noticed at thisi year’s Division of Planetary Sciences meeting is how well members of the planetary science community support each other. Often when asking a question regarding a talk, the questioner starts out with “great talk.” It’s refreshing to see. There’s a lot of competition in the sciences (so much of a career rides on how many papers one publishes), but clearly there’s a lot of collaboration as well.
Editor's note: Liz is posting updates regularly from DPS09 to Twitter.com/AstronomyMag.
OK, back to the updates from the DPS meeting. Tuesday morning began with a few awards. First up was the first-ever Jonathan Eberhart Planetary Sciences Journalism Award, presented to Sky & Telescope Senior Contributing Editor J. Kelly Beatty. After he received his award, Clark Chapman of the Southwest Research Institute discussed Mercury and the three MESSENGER flybys. The September 29 flyby showed additional examples of volcanism, according to Chapman. The probe is scheduled to enter its science orbit around Mercury March 18, 2011, and promises more discoveries.
The next award — the Urey Prize — went to Sarah Stewart of Harvard University, for her research of impacts onto icy bodies. Then the DPS awarded the Kuiper Prize to Tobias Owen of the University of Hawaii at Monoa “for his outstanding contributions to the field of planetary science.”
Owen, “one of the fathers of the Cassini mission,” still works on the project. He gave a great lecture — it had spots of humor and covered a fairly broad topic (so that even I, with my little planetary science expertise, understood the majority of it). It sounds like he has impacted many areas in planetary science. It was a pleasure sitting in on his talk.
At lunch I tried driving to a grocery store only to discover that none of the streets in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, is labeled. Mission failed.
The second half of the day switched gears and was filled with science sessions, so I tried to jump around to a few different ones.
First I attended a session about irregular satellite debris belts. Anne Verbiscer of the University of Virginia announced her team’s discovery of an enormous dust ring around Saturn. Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland followed with additional details. This ring is the largest known planetary ring in the solar system. It’s some 40 times Saturn’s radius (Rsat) high. Its inner edge starts around 128 Rsat out from Saturn and extends to 207 Rsat. The ring seems to be inclined 27 degrees to Saturn’s equatorial plane.
The team observed this huge ring with the Spitzer Space Telescope. Saturn’s irregular satellite, Phoebe, is within the ring. The team described how impacts with Phoebe produced debris that remains in a thick disk around the satellite’s orbit, therefore creating this huge ring. Hamilton explained that if you were standing within the ring, the density is such that you’d be hit by a particle about once per minute — that’s a pretty low density. The October 7 issue of Nature includes the team’s study.
After sitting in on a few presentations in a session about Titan’s surface, I stopped by a science discussion about the atmospheres of jovian planets. In this presentation, Teresa Del Rio Gaztelurrutia of the Universidad del Pais in Vasco, Spain, described a long-lived cyclone in Saturn’s atmosphere. This cyclone has been around for at least 4 years (Cassini instruments have observed it from June 2004 through May 2008).
Wednesday looks like another jam-packed day. I’m definitely looking forward to wandering through the exhibit hall to view the posters.
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