Planetary Science Seminar - winter-2025
Volatile Degassing and Thermal History of Lunar Volcanic Glasses
Jan. 9, 2025
noon - 1 p.m.
Slichter Hall # 3853
Presented By:
- Ni Peng - UCLA
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Fire fountain eruptions on the Moon produced pyroclastic deposits containing characteristic glass spherules, green, orange, red, yellow, or black in color. These special specimens have attracted scientists' attention since their return by the Apollo missions due to surface-correlated volatiles and, more recently, high contents of indigenous H2O, F, Cl, and S. In this talk, I synthesize existing data to reconstruct the volatile degassing and thermal history of the Apollo 17 orange glasses.
Icy pollution of Uranus and Neptune’s atmospheres: influences on thermal evolution and composition
Jan. 16, 2025
noon - 1 p.m.
Online: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/91711550027
Presented By:
- Eva Zlimen - UCLA
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In the Nice model of Solar System formation, Uranus and Neptune undergo an orbital upheaval, sweeping through a planetesimal disk. We find that the ice giants undergo an extreme bombardment event, with collision rates as high as ∼3 per hour assuming km-sized planetesimals, increasing the total planet mass by up to ∼0.35%. I will discuss how the resulting atmospheric enrichment may have impacted the atmospheric composition and thermal evolution of Uranus and Neptune due to the effects of latent heat production and inhibited convection.
Discovering small asteroids with WISE data
Jan. 16, 2025
noon - 1 p.m.
Online: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/91711550027
Presented By:
- Emerson Whittaker - UCLA
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Synthetic tracking, involving the shifting and stacking of images, allows for the detection of fainter asteroids than traditional methods by increasing S/N by the square root of the number of frames stacked. We use the synthetic tracking software SALTAD on the WISE spacecraft's W3 images to stack 4 - 9 images in subfields covering nearly the entire sky, where preliminary results suggest we will discover 4,200 - 13,100 asteroids.
Integrating Thermal, Visible, and Spectral Observations to Create a Global Map of Martian Frost
Jan. 23, 2025
noon - 1 p.m.
3853 Slichter Hall
Presented By:
- Serina Diniega - JPL
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The annual cycle of CO2, seasonally moving between atmospheric gases and surface frost, is a dominant driver of Martian atmospheric, landscape, and landform activity. We produced the first global map of the seasonal distribution of CO2 frost through a single Mars year, integrating frost indications in visible (HiRISE/CTX), thermal (MCS/THEMIS), and spectral (CRISM) datasets.
How much water do small exoplanets contain?
Jan. 30, 2025
noon - 1 p.m.
3853 Slichter Hall
Presented By:
- James Rogers - U. Cambridge
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Twenty years after their initial discovery, the nature of super-Earths and sub-Neptunes remains largely unknown. In this talk, I will discuss recent work addressing their interior compositions and formation pathways, focusing on the prevalence and origins of water.
The “solar abundance” problem: Decades of discrepancy, today’s progress and implications for outer solar system origins and habitability
Feb. 6, 2025
noon - 1 p.m.
Slichter Hall # 3853
Presented By:
- Ngoc Truong - SouthWest Research Institute
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The Sun’s heavy element abundances play a critical role in shaping the formation and composition of solar system objects, and as benchmarks for understanding other stars’ elemental compositions. However, a long-standing tension exists between the spectroscopically determined heavy element abundances and helioseismology constraints, often referred to as the 'solar abundance' problem. Recently, spacecraft missions to primitive solar system bodies have uncovered intriguing details about early solar system chemistry. Combined with new data from solar C-N-O neutrino and solar wind measurements, I will describe some recent progress to revise the solar composition and its implications for understanding the origin and potential habitability of outer planetary systems.
FROM THE SURFACE OF MARS TO THE OCEAN OF ENCELADUS: ADVANCING THE FRONTIER OF EXPLORATION WITH ADAPTIVE AI-DRIVEN ROBOTS
Feb. 13, 2025
noon - 1 p.m.
Slichter Hall # 3853
Presented By:
- Prof. Hiro Ono - Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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Robots have been at the forefront of Solar System exploration for over seven decades. Most recently, NASA’s Perseverance rover is on its mission to find a sign of ancient Martian life that might have existed billions of years ago. However, current Mars exploration requires ample environmental knowledge accumulated over decades and across multiple missions, resulting in a slow progression toward exploring unvisited worlds beyond Mars. I envision a new robotic space exploration (RSE) paradigm called RSE 3.0, in which a highly adaptive robotic system would explore previously unvisited worlds in one shot. As an instantiation of RSE 3.0, we developed the EELS (Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor) robot, a snake-like robot designed for exploring the potentially inhabited subsurface ocean of Enceladus, a small icy moon of Saturn. EELS combines highly versatile robotic hardware with intelligent, risk-aware autonomy so that it can flexibly adapt its behaviors after landing. We built prototypes of EELS and successfully tested them in a wide range of environments, including natural vertical holes on Athabasca Glacier in Canada. Adaptive and intelligent robots like EELS will be a key enabler of the RSE 3.0 paradigm, which would open the door to the exploration of more distant and challenging worlds than Mars. This seminar will start by describing the autonomous motion planning capability of the Perseverance rover, followed by research on AI/ML applications for future planetary rovers. The technologies and the field demonstrations of EELS will be presented in depth, with particular emphasis on autonomy. Finally, the vision and the potential of RSE 3.0 will be discussed with the audience.
Exploring the interiors of Super-Earth
Feb. 20, 2025
noon - 1 p.m.
3853 Slichter Hall
Presented By:
- Jie Deng - Princeton
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Little is known about the physiochemical state of super-Earths. I will present our recent calculations on the super-Earth interiors and discuss the implications.
New probes of gas and ice giant interior physics from seismology
Feb. 27, 2025
noon - 1 p.m.
3853 Slichter Hall
Presented By:
- Chris Mankovich - JPL
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The deep interiors of fluid planets are typically studied by measuring their static gravity fie and magnetic fields. I'll describe recent efforts to develop the third pillar offered by normal mod seismology, which has brought new insights for Saturn's core structure thanks to Cassini ring seismology, and may be a crucial window into Uranus's interior in the era of the Uranus Orbiter and Probe.
Temperature of Mars' Surface: 16 Years of Mars Climate Sounder Observations
March 6, 2025
noon - 1 p.m.
3853 Slichter Hall
Presented By:
- Sylvain Piqueux - JPL
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Since 2006, the Mars Climate Sounder instrument onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been acquiring ground temperature measurements. I will present a set of global maps generated from these observations, and I will discuss how they are linked to current and past processes shaping the Martian crust.
Connecting the compositions of Outer Solar System Small Bodies with JWST
March 13, 2025
noon - 1 p.m.
3853 Slichter Hall
Presented By:
- Matthew Belyakov - Caltech
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Dynamical instability models for early Solar System evolution predict a shared origin for Trojans, Irregular satellites, and the Kuiper Belt. However, the observational evidence for this connection remains sparse. In this talk I will present the JWST spectra of the giant planet irregular satellites in the context of other small body populations in the outer solar system, seeking to explain their compositional diversity.