Editor’s Note: This week we’re at the joint 48th meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) and 11th European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) in Pasadena, California. Along with astrobites author Natasha Batalha, I will be writing updates on selected events at the meeting and posting at the end of each day. Follow along here or at astrobites.com! The usual posting schedule for AAS Nova will resume next week.

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Welcome to Day 4 of the joint 48th meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) and 11th European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) in Pasadena, California! Two astrobiters are attending this conference, and we will report highlights from each day here. If you’d like to see more timely updates during the day, we encourage you to search the #DPSEPSC hashtag!

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Plenary Talks (by Susanna Kohler)

Farinella Prize Lecture
Flavors of Chaos in the Asteroid Belt

This year’s Farinella Prize was awarded to Kleomenis Tsiganis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece), for “timely and deep examples of applications of celestial mechanics to the natural bodies of the solar system”. Tsiganis is one of the developers of the Nice model, a model that describes the migration of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune during the early phases of the solar system’s evolution to their currently observed positions.

Tsiganis’s prize lecture described how we can combine our knowledge of chaotic dynamics with observations to understand several interesting features of the asteroid belt, such as mean-motion resonances of asteroids, or the behavior of asteroid families (produced when a collision disrupts a parent body into fragments).

Harold C. Urey Prize Lecture
In for the Long Haul: Exploring Atmospheric Cycles on the Giant Planets

This year’s Harold C. Urey Prize for outstanding achievement in planetary research by a young scientist was awarded to Leigh Fletcher (University of Leicester), in recognition of his ground-breaking research in understanding physical and chemical processes in the atmospheres of the outer planets.

Why study the atmospheres of the giant planets? These atmospheres, Fletcher argued, are the heatbeats of the giant worlds. We are just now at a stage where we are able to measure and better understand the way that giant planet atmospheres change, shift, and oscillate on short and long timescales — and it’s an exciting time!

Fletcher’s lecture provided an overview of the different cycles we’ve been able to study in the atmospheres of giant planets. These include:

1. Seasonal evolution
2. Stratospheric oscillations
3. Belt/zone upheavals
4. Storm eruptions

An example: the clouding out of one of Jupiter’s most prominent belts. In 2010 we watched Jupiter’s South Equatorial Belt turn white as it was clouded out; a few months later the clouds dissipated and it returned to normal. High-resolution ground-based observations revealed a plume punching up from lower layers to deliver material high into Jupiter’s tropopause before the belt returned. This activity likely helped to clear up the clouds and revive the belt.

Another example: Saturnian storms. Roughly once every Saturnian year, a large storm erupts on the planet. In 2010-2011, Cassini took some spectacular images of an enormous storm that briefly formed the largest non-polar vortex in the solar system! Observations from Cassini were used to understand how energy was transported through the atmosphere in this storm.

Fletcher concluded by discussing what’s next for giant-planet atmosphere studies. He expressed his fervent hope that a dedicated mission to our outer ice-giant planets — which haven’t been visited since Voyager 2’s flyby in the late 1980s — would be completed within the next half century. He argued that studying the atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune is important because they represent a missing link between giant planet atmospheres and smaller terrestrial atmospheres. Plus these planets have plenty of satellites, so a mission to the ice giants would be able to find many targets to make everybody happy!

Until then, we can look forward to continued discoveries with ground-based telescopes, upcoming observations with JWST, and future programs, like a return to Jupiter with JUICE and NASA’s Europa mission.

The Ancient Habitability of Gale Crater, Mars, after Four Years of Exploration by Curiosity

In the final plenary of the meeting, Ashwin Vasavada (Project Scientist for Curiosity, JPL) and Sanjeev Gupta (Imperial College London) gave a tag-team overview of what we’ve learned about the past habitability of Mars from observations by the Curiosity rover.

Vasavada opened the talk by mentioning that Curiosity has recently drilled its 15th hole in the surface of Mars! When the rover drills samples from rocks, the resulting powder is analyzed by its CheMin instrument, allowing us to determine the exact mineral composition of the sample. This has revealed a lot of information about the terrain that Curiosity has been traveling through.

Vasavada took us on a tour of the first part of the rover’s journey within Gale crater as it has made its way to Mount Sharp. The crater is 150km wide, and the layers of rock around Mount Sharp likely contain a record spanning several hundred million years during a period of dramatic climate evolution in Mars’s early history. Almost immediately after landing, Curiosity was able to probe that history when it drove across an ancient streambed littered with rounded pebbles, providing unmistakable evidence that Mars once had flowing water on its surface.

Not long after that point, the rover arrived at Yellowknife Bay, where it took its first mineralogical samples and gathered data indicating that the region was likely an ancient lakebed. Curiosity’s observations suggest that ancient Mars was capable of supporting life: it appears to have had liquid water with a neutral pH and low salinity, key elements and nutrients necessary for life, and energy for metabolism.

 Gupta took over describing Curiosity’s ongoing journey to the base of Mount Sharp. The observations that Curiosity has made along the way have provided additional signs of past lakes and groundwater systems — not just at one point in Mars’s history, but in fact active hydrological cycles spanning millions to tens of millions of years! This suggests that habitable conditions may have existed on Mars for quite some time in the past.

Curiosity still has plenty of mission time and a long journey ahead of it, so it seems likely that we can count on many more revelations from this intrepid little rover.

Editor’s Note: This week we’re at the joint 48th meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) and 11th European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) in Pasadena, California. Along with astrobites author Natasha Batalha, I will be writing updates on selected events at the meeting and posting at the end of each day. Follow along here or at astrobites.com! The usual posting schedule for AAS Nova will resume next week.

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Welcome to Day 3 of the joint 48th meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) and 11th European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) in Pasadena, California! Two astrobiters are attending this conference, and we will report highlights from each day here. If you’d like to see more timely updates during the day, we encourage you to search the #DPSEPSC hashtag!

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Third Press Conference: Updates on ExoMars and Planet Nine (by Susanna Kohler)

Did you follow ExoMars’s Schiaparelli module as it attempted to land on Mars’s surface this morning? Today’s first press conference opened with an overview of the latest news from the attempt, given by Olivier Witasse (ESA). Witasse summarized the first phase of the mission, in which ExoMars’s Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) enters in orbit around Mars and Schiaparelli attempts its landing. The primary goal of this phase is to test the technology for an entry, descent, and landing of a payload on Mars, but the mission has secondary science goals of studying the Martian atmosphere and conducting surface environment measurements.

Schiaparelli’s anticipated landing on Mars was a complex, 6-minute process. Witasse informed us that, while the team received confirmation during this time of key milestones like the parachute deployment, contact was cut off before the final landing. As images from the lander weren’t supposed to be sent until after the landing, we don’t have more information from the lander itself; we’re currently waiting for telemetry from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and info from TGO to find out what Schiaparelli’s status is. Witasse emphasized that the mission is “not nominal”, but it’s too soon to tell what happened.

Meanwhile, however, we can focus on the very successful insertion of TGO into orbit! The next speaker, Ann Carine Vandaele (Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy), discussed some of the science that will be done with TGO. In particular, TGO’s NOMAD instrument will measure the chemical composition of the atmosphere, Mars climatology and seasonal cycles, and help us to build models of the planet’s atmosphere. TGO’s timeline begins with 2 orbits for calibration, and then the next year will be spent aerobraking to get the spacecraft into its final circular orbit around Mars. The official science mission begins after that point!

Next, the focus of the press conference shifted to the hypothetical Planet Nine. Renu Malhotra talked about how we’ve further constrained the massive planet’s location based on the orbits of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). The longest-period TNOs all have periods that are integer multiples of each other. If we assume that’s because they’re in resonance with a distant, massive planet, we can get constraints on the orbit of that planet. Malhotra and collaborators find that a planet on an orbit with a ~665 AU semi-major axis could produce resonant TNO orbits consistent with what we see. You can read more about this here or check out the press release here.

Finally, Mike Brown spoke about one of the latest discoveries he and his team have made about the possible effects of Planet Nine on the solar system. Brown pointed out that the Sun’s axis is tilted by about 6° with respect to the axis of the solar system. If everything formed from the same protostellar nebula, why the misalignment? He showed that the presence of a distant, massive planet on an inclined orbit can actually create that misalignment over time, as a result of the planet’s large mass and long lever arm. The tug of the planet’s gravitational force effectively tilts the solar system over its lifetime! Brown’s models show that the predicted orbit and mass of Planet Nine are consistent with the 6° tilt that we see: chalk this up as one more piece of evidence supporting Planet Nine’s existence. The press release can be found here.

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Fourth Press Conference: Updates from the Juno Mission at Jupiter (by Susanna Kohler)

In the second press conference of the day, we received updates on the mission status and science outcomes of the Juno mission to Jupiter. Juno, launched in 2011, is the second of NASA’s New Frontiers programs (the first was New Horizons mission to Pluto). It arrived at Jupiter on July 4th of this year, and it’s currently in a 53.4-day highly elliptical orbit around the planet.

David Schurr, the deputy director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, opened the conference with some bad news: the Juno spacecraft went into safe mode at 10:47 PDT last night, just 13 hours from its closest approach to Jupiter in its orbit. This means that the team wasn’t able to do the science pass they had planned during this second “perijove” flyby of the mission.

Scott Bolton, Juno’s PI, provided more information about Juno’s current state. Bolton’s take on the recent events was calm: though the spacecraft evidently encountered something unexpected, it responded exactly how it was supposed to. Juno is currently healthy and in no danger, and it will continue on its current 53.4-day orbit while scientists analyze what triggered the safe-mode entry.

This glitch follows on the heels of another, unrelated delay: last week the decision was made to postpone a burn of Juno’s engines to reduce its period from 53.4 days to 14 days. This “period reduction maneuver” was put off when unexpected behavior was discovered with a pair of valves operating the propulsion system. The team is currently analyzing this as well, to determine whether it will be safe to fire the engines on Juno’s next pass. When asked what he considered to be the worst-case scenario for the mission, Bolton drew laughs with his response: “I have to be patient and get the science slowly.” He elaborated that Juno’s current orbit will produce exactly the same science results as the planned 14-day orbit, just a bit slower!

Bolton then walked us through a little of what we’ve learned from Juno so far. Details from this are discussed below, in Natasha’s summary of Bolton’s plenary talk later in the afternoon.

Next Candice Hansen, JunoCam imaging scientist from the Planetary Science Institute, told us about the public outreach camera mounted on Juno. This camera was designed to engage the public with the Juno mission, but it turns out it’ll also produce lots of interesting science! Already, we have some spectacular images of Jupiter’s south pole (the first time this has been imaged) which reveal the region’s cloud structure. In particular, the pole is swirling with cyclonic storms, and the presence of one on the terminator provides us with new 3D information about the dynamics of the atmosphere. Analysis of this storm shows that it’s a whopping 7,000 km (more than half the size of Earth) across and towers ~85 km vertically.

The public has several ways they can engage with JunoCam. Public input will drive the target selection for the camera, with proposals, discussion, and eventual voting planned to be enabled late this year or early next year. And all images taken with JunoCam are uploaded in raw format for anyone to download, process, and upload their final images. This has already resulted in some spectacular public-produced images using JunoCam data, viewable here, and should continue to result in stunning visuals and exciting science in the future!

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Plenary Talks (by Natasha Batalha)

Early Results from Juno Mission at Jupiter: Scott Bolton

Dr. Scott Bolton followed up his press conference by giving a plenary talk on Juno’s early science results. Though Juno is currently in safe mode, the team is continuing to analyze data from the close flyby from August 27. Dr. Bolton started his talk by showing a new brightness map of the northern aurora. Just from this first map the team is “seeing things we did not expect”. Both the aurora and the magnetic field are much stronger than models previously suggested. The team is working on creating new models to match their preliminary observations. Gravity science also is forcing theorists to revisit their models and on December 11th, we will have a factor of 20 improvement in this data.

Next, Dr. Bolton showed the audience observations taken with Juno’s Microwave Radiometer instrument (MWR). MWR’s mission is to understand and characterize the interior layers of Jupiter. There are six channels ranging from 1-50 cm wavelength which will each be able to penetrate down to a pressure of 200 bars (400 km). Already, the team can tell that the large banding structure that we see on the surface extends down to ~300-400 km.

Juno’s main mission is to gain understanding of the Solar System’s beginnings by revealing the origin and evolution of Jupiter. Despite the current difficulties the team is having, Dr. Bolton ended by reassuring the audience that the team will still be able to complete all the goals it sought out at the start.

Dawn at Ceres: Michael Toplis, Cristina De Sanctis

After Dawn launched in September of 2007, it spent four years focused on studying Vesta, the second most massive asteroid. Since February 2015, it has been on course to study Ceres. Dr. Michael Toplis and Dr. Cristina De Sanctis tag-teamed the second plenary to reveal preliminary studies concerning Ceres.

Like with Juno, Dawn is also trying to measure the gravity field of Ceres. Doing so will give us insights into whether or not Ceres is homogenous (is it a solid cue ball or a layered onion?). New gravity data has already ruled out a homogenous mixture. Instead, the Dawn team suggests that Ceres has a weak interior and that water and other light materials may have been partially separated from the rock. This layering is much weaker than the layering you find in Earth’s interior or even our very own Moon.

The Dawn team has also been looking carefully at the surface of Ceres. Right off the bat it is easy to see that Ceres is highly cratered, with one small exception: Ahuna Mons, a small, 3-mile-high mountain discovered by the Dawn team. Ahuna Mons is the only mountain on the entire object that might have been volcanic in origin. Along with the heavy cratering, Dr. Cristina De Sanctis discussed the discovery of phyllosilicates all over Ceres’ surface. Phyllosilicates are rich in magnesium with some ammonium in their crystalline structure. The fact that these are found all over Ceres’ surface means that the surface has been altered by some interaction with water.

The team concluded by rounding up what all the information about Ceres is pointing to. It is possible that either Ceres formed in the trans-Neptune disk before it was implanted into the main belt, OR Ceres formed closer to its present position by accreting material that drifted from out at greater distances. More data will start to yield a better image of what is going on with this interesting object.

Editor’s Note: This week we’re at the joint 48th meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) and 11th European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) in Pasadena, California. Along with astrobites author Natasha Batalha, I will be writing updates on selected events at the meeting and posting at the end of each day. Follow along here or at astrobites.com! The usual posting schedule for AAS Nova will resume next week.

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Welcome to Day 2 of the joint 48th meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) and 11th European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) in Pasadena, California! Two astrobiters are attending this conference, and we will report highlights from each day here. If you’d like to see more timely updates during the day, we encourage you to search the #DPSEPSC hashtag!

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Town Hall: Observing the Solar System with JWST (by Susanna Kohler)

The James Webb Space Telescope, the upcoming infrared space telescope with an unprecedented 6.5-m mirror, is highly anticipated for the new view it will give us of the universe. But not all of JWST’s observations will be of distant stars and galaxies — the telescope is fully capable of making detections much closer to home.

Though JWST won’t be able to observe in the inner solar system, it will be able to examine planets, satellites, rings, asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, and comets located at the distance of Mars and outward. Here are just a few of the solar-system observations the planetary community has proposed that JWST will be well-suited to make.

1. Observations of Mars
   JWST can examine Mars’s atmosphere globally, allowing us to learn about the planet’s past habitability, its current water sources, and the chemical stability of its atmosphere.
2. Observations of Asteroids and Near-Earth Objects
   JWST can provide imaging and spectroscopy that will allow us to learn about the albedo, size, surface roughness, thermal inertia, and surface composition of small bodies in the solar system.
3. Observations of the Giant Planets
   JWST can examine auroral processes, track atmospheric dynamics after impact events on the planets, and investigate major storm systems.
4. Observations of Rings and Small Satellites
   JWST can discover new rings and moons, probe ring structure with occultations, probe the composition of the rings with spectroscopy, and investigate how these systems evolve over time.
5. Observations of Titan
   JWST can provide long-term monitoring of the changing seasons on Saturn’s moon, investigating the evolution of its atmospheric composition, clouds and hazes, and surface temperatures and features.
6. Observations of Dwarf Planets
   JWST can create detailed maps of the compositions of distant dwarf planets beyond the orbit of Neptune — in particular, those with significant inventories of volatile ices on their surfaces.

In today’s town hall, JWST Deputy Project Scientist for Planetary Science Stefanie Milam (NASA/GSFC) provided an overview of JWST, discussed how it could be used for planetary science, and gave us an update on the telescope’s status.

JWST’s progress is grouped into yearly themes: 2013’s was instrument integration, 2014’s was manufacturing of the spacecraft, 2015’s was assembly of the mirror, and 2016’s has been assembly of the observatory. At this point the mirrors and instruments are installed, and the assembly of JWST is nearing completion! 2017 will be a year of testing all the components of the telescope at the Johnson Space Center, in preparation for a 2018 launch.

Next up in the town hall, STScI Solar System Science Lead John Stansberry provided us with details of JWST’s observing modes and capabilities, and discussed what they mean for astronomers interested in proposing observing time on the telescope, particularly for planetary observations. Will Grundy (Lowell Observatory) then discussed the use of JWST for high-resolution imaging. Ultimately JWST will have roughly comparable angular resolution to Hubble, but in infrared wavelengths instead of optical. The depth and detail that this will provide should make for both spectacular images and exciting new science!

Finally, Joel Green (STScI) pitched an idea to use both JWST and Hubble for combined observations of the same targets. The two telescopes, which overlap in observing wavelength between 0.7–1.6 µm, are separated by a 1.5 million km baseline. This means that, when used together, they could produce stereoscopic images similar to the “magic eye” pictures many of us have spent hours staring at cross-eyed!

Why is this better than taking two images 6 months apart with the same telescope, making use of annual parallax to create a baseline? The advantage to using both JWST and Hubble together is simultaneity: if Hubble and JWST make their observations at the same time, we can create stereoscopic images of transient events. Potential cases where this is useful include comet/asteroid activity, cometary collisions, and cloud/storm features on giant planets.

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Second Press Conference (by Natasha Batalha)

Today’s press conference all centered around New Horizons’s mission results. Before the speakers began, New Horizons’s Principal Investigator, Alan Stern, said a few words. To give you an idea of what it has been like for the team, Dr. Stern said that during it all they “felt like doctors triaging patients.” The full press release can be found here.

Pluto’s Extreme Surface Reflectance Variations: Bonnie Buratti (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) 

One of the major goals of the New Horizons mission was to answer the question of how reflective Pluto really is and how exactly it scatters light. Dr. Bonnie Buratti was excited to show a map of the albedo (reflectivity) of Pluto. The map shows a region of very high (nearly perfect) reflectivity right in the middle of Sputnik Planitia, a large geological feature on Pluto. Dr. Buratti and her team were interested in knowing what, if any, other objects in the Solar System exhibit this same behavior. They found that the only other system with a similar large range in reflectivity was Iapetus, one of Saturn’s moons. They also looked at objects in the Kuiper belt and found one object, Eris, with regions with nearly perfect reflectivity. Dr. Buratti and her team are excited because they think this might mean Eris is geologically active, like Pluto.

Possible Clouds on Pluto: Alan Stern (Southwest Research Institute)

Moving from the surface of Pluto to the atmosphere, Dr. Alan Stern continued to talk about the possibility of clouds on Pluto. Clouds are common across nearly all the planets in our Solar System: Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, etc. The New Horizons team had previously announced that Pluto’s atmosphere was enveloped in haze layers. This detection posed a number of mysteries. The hazes appeared very high in the sky and the team is still unsure how they have formed. These hazes are only about 25% optically thick, however — which means that to date, clouds, which are much more optically thick, have not been detected. Today, Dr. Stern announced the detection of 7 possible small clouds lying very low near the surface of Pluto. All together, these 7 clouds take up less than 1% the surface area of Pluto, meaning that generally, Pluto is cloud-free. In the future, it will be interesting to understand what these potential clouds are made of, and if they aren’t clouds, what we are in fact seeing.

Landslides on Charon: Ross Beyer (NASA Ames Research Center) 

Straying away from Pluto all together, Dr. Ross Beyer, discussed the discovery of landslides on Pluto’s largest moon, Charon. This is peculiar because the New Horizons data shows that Pluto is void of any landslides. And as Dr. Stern discussed in his plenary talk yesterday, Charon is geologically inactive, as compared to Pluto. So why does Charon have these features, but not Pluto? In fact, these are the first landslides we’ve seen this far away from the Sun. We don’t know what material the landslides are made of or why they are forming without a dedicated orbiter. It will be very interesting for the team to see if they can detect these landslides anywhere else in the Kuiper Belt.

Hubble Reveals that New Horizons Flyby Target 2014 MU69 is Red: Susan Benecchi/Amanda Zangari (Planetary Science Institute) 

The last press release was given by Dr. Amanda Zangari, a post-doctoral researcher at Southwest Research Institute, who was filling in for Dr. Susan Benecchi. The New Horizons mission has completed its initial mission requirements and has already started preparing for its extended mission. During its extended mission, the main flyby target is 2014 MU69. This object was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope and is located in what is called the “cold classical Kuiper Belt”. The cold classical Kuiper Belt is a very old primordial region where none of the objects are interacting with Neptune and all of the objects have very low inclinations. This leads scientists to think that 2014 MU69 is one of the ancient building blocks of the planets in our Solar System. One method of verifying this (before actually going there) is to measure the color of the object. Data from Hubble reveals that this object may in fact be part of the primordial region in the Kuiper Belt. Therefore, New Horizons will be heading there and on January 1, 2019 we will know for sure!

 

Editor’s Note: This week we’re at the joint 48th meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) and 11th European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) in Pasadena, California. Along with astrobites author Natasha Batalha, I will be writing updates on selected events at the meeting and posting at the end of each day. Follow along here or at astrobites.com! The usual posting schedule for AAS Nova will resume next week.

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This week Astrobites will be reporting from the joint 48th meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) and 11th European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) in Pasadena, California! Two astrobiters are attending this conference, and we will report highlights from each day here on astrobites. If you’d like to see more timely updates during the day, we encourage you to search the #DPSEPSC hashtag!

Monday morning was the official start of the meeting. We’ve got a joint poster for Astrobites/AAS Nova at poster #419.02 in the exhibit hall — come stop by to chat (and for stickers!). For those of you who can’t be here in person, here’s an update on the plenaries and press conferences from the first day of DPS this year.

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Jonathan Eberhart Planetary Sciences Journalism Award (by Natasha Batalha)

The meeting kicked off with the presentation of the Jonathan Eberhart Planetary Sciences Journalism Award, which was awarded to Nadia Drake. Nadia has been an instrumental figure in space sciences communication. She’s reported on everything from other worlds to exploding stars, to the fabric of the universe. Her work is an inspiration to many of us here at Astrobites. Be sure to check out her stuff!

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Plenaries (by Natasha Batalha)

The Rosetta Mission: Matt Taylor

The Rosetta Mission gathered huge media attention in November 2014 when its robotic lander, Philae, landed on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Almost two years later, Matt Taylor stands on the stage of Ballroom D to report on the mission’s current status. Rosetta was given its name because, like the Rosetta stone, the spacecraft is a key to deciphering the origin of the Solar System. Dr. Taylor begins by showing just a small fraction of the copious amounts of images that were gathered. Comets, which were previously thought of as icy dust balls, are now known to be geologically complex places, he discusses. Rosetta has paved a completely new field of cometary geology and they’ve still only analyzed about 5% of all the data that was collected.

“Now that we have the whole data set we are revising our numbers to get a sense of the whole picture.” 

From measurements of the molecular oxygen, combined with the detection of nitrogen, noble gases and the D/H ratio in the water, we know that this comet was born in a very cold region in the protoplanetary nebula, far from the Sun. Meaning, this comet might offer us a glimpse of what the building blocks of planets and moons may have been. The D/H ratio also tells us that Earth’s water was likely not delivered from comets, since the D/H values from the comet do not match those from Earth’s oceans. But from looking at the data taken from Noble gasses, it’s possible that other complex material may have been.

In late September of this year, the Rosetta mission concluded its mission as planned with a controlled impact onto the comet. On decent they were able to successfully study the comet’s gas, dust and plasma very close to the surface.

“We’ve got the Rosetta stone, now we have decades or work to do to analyze the data.”

The Latest Views of Venus as Observed by the Japanese Orbiter: Takehiko Satoh

Just one year ago, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency held a press conference to announce the successful arrival of Akatsuki, Japan’s very first planetary orbiter, into a Venus orbit. Dr. Takehiko Satoh is here to today give an overview of the mission. Understanding the atmosphere of Venus has been difficult because of the thick cloud decks that inhibit our ability to see down to the surface.

Dr. Satoh explained that Akatsuki’s mission is to understand and detail the atmospheric dynamics of Venus, get a 3-D view of wind fields and describe any spatial and temporal variations in the atmosphere. This includes answering the long standing question of whether or not Venus has lightning and/or volcanism. Akatsuki is also the first and only meteorological satellite orbiting a planet other than the Earth, which will lead to some very interesting data in the near future.

Unfortunately we will have to wait a while to answer all of those questions considering first light images were taken in December of 2015 and regular observations started on April 1, 2016. Nevertheless, Dr. Satoh was able to show some very exciting preliminary studies:

1. They visualized the cloud motion and variations of minor gases on Venus by acquiring multi-wavelength images continuously through time.
2. They looked at fine scale features in order to attempt to detect lightning in the night (none have been detected so far).
3. They detected SO2 absorption and also detected an unknown absorber at 365 nm! Dr. Satoh poses the questions, what is actually there? And how are they related to atmospheric dynamics and cloud formation?
4. They mapped thermal emission from the surface and detected an E-W elongated low temperature region.

Dr. Satoh ended by explaining that their team has a lot of work to do in order to fully synthesize all of these discoveries but that in the near future we should expect a lot more interesting science!!

New Horizons: Overview of Results From and Plans After the Exploration of the Pluto System: S.A. Stern

The last plenary talk was given by Dr. Alan Stern who gave an exciting overview of the New Horizons mission. He started by showing the massive scientific payload that allowed New Horizons to accomplish, what he says is as much science as several Mars missions, combined.  In fact, the mission met all of its science objectives, published over 40 studies and presented findings at over 200 meetings. New Horizons also just recently won and initiated its extend mission, which warrants a massive congratulations to the New Horizon’s team! So what were the major scientific studies you should be on the lookout for?

Dr. Stern says the most surprising finding (for him) was the stark difference between Pluto and Charon. Pluto and Charon have similar densities and sizes and New Horizons also showed that there was, at some point, some degree of atmospheric transfer from Pluto to Charon. Besides that though, everything else (surface & atmosphere) about the two bodies are wildly different. Pluto has a complex and active surface. Some terrains on Pluto are brand new, while others formed over four billion years ago. Pluto also has a complex atmosphere, which contains molecules such as water, methane and nitrogen. They also found that these molecules are not uniformly distributed around the planet. Charon, on the other hand, has no detectable atmosphere — or, if it does, it is smaller than the atmosphere of our very own Moon. Charon’s terrains are also all older than four billion years old, with no new activity.

Dr. Stern says they is still a lot of work to be done to answer exactly how these planets ended up with such different properties. And THIS Sunday all the New Horizons data will be available, so you too can download it and start to analyze some of these peculiar features.

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First Press Conference (by Susanna Kohler)

The first press conference of the meeting opened with a talk by Piero D’Incecco (German Aerospace Center), who discussed evidence for recently active lava flows on Venus. Using clever numerical modeling techniques combined with observations from ESA’s Venus Express mission, D’Incecco and collaborators have looked through Venus’s thick cloud cover in infrared wavelengths to detect several lava flows from the top and eastern flank of the volcano Idunn Mons, which is located in Venus’s southern hemisphere. The team’s work has focused on identifying the location and extent of these flows to learn more about volcanism on the surface of Earth’s “twin” planet. The full press release can be found here.

Next up was Nick Schneider (Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder), who spoke about the most recent results from the MAVEN mission to Mars. Three interesting findings have come from MAVEN’s unprecedented ultraviolet coverage of Mars:

1. Observations of “nightglow” emission on Mars’s night side, as its atmosphere emits light in UV due to chemical reactions that start on its day side. These observations reveal information about Mar’s high-altitude winds.
2. Evidence that ozone in Mars’s atmosphere accumulates inside a vortex at Mars’s pole during the winter time — again, providing critical information about the global circulation about Mars’s atmosphere.
3. Beautiful observations of afternoon cloud formation over Mars’s four giant volcanos, suggesting cloud formation happens there in a similar way to cloud formation over Earth’s mountain ranges.

The full press release can be found here.

Next came a series of three talks on the intriguing comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The first was by Mattia Galiazzo (Western University, Canada), on a study of the origin of comet 67P. Using computer simulations, Galiazzo and collaborators modeled the comet’s most probable orbit in order to discover where the body came from. They find that 67P is likely relatively new to the inner parts of our solar system, having lived in the scattered disk — the outskirts of the solar system — for millions of years. Perturbations by other bodies in our solar system then tweaked the comet’s orbit until it arrived in the inner region only ~10,000 years ago. The full press release can be found here.

Stubbe Hvidd (German Aerospace Center) next gave a dynamic talk on 67P as the “creaking and cracking comet”. Hvidd used high-resolution imaging of the comet to demonstrate that its surface has several recently-formed cracks — especially in its neck, the narrow region between its two lobes — that indicate it’s under stress as it hurtles through space in its orbit. Hvidd and collaborators have modeled the forces on the comet to show that its rotation and activity are creating stresses that will likely change the shape of the comet over the next several hundred years.

Finally, Jordan Steckloff (Planetary Science Institute) wrapped things up with a discussion of outbursts from comets like 67P. Steckloff suggests that, rather than being caused by internal pressure like geysers on Earth, comet outbursts might the result of avalanches on their surfaces. He showed that material sliding down the comet’s surface to a local low-potential point can enter a region that is sublimating due to sunlight exposure. As the granular materials slide into this region, they can be blown off in a tightly collimated plume that matches observations of comet outbursts. The full press release can be found here.