PLANETARY SCIENCE & ASTROBIOLOGY WORKSHOP 9-10 June 2010, Canberra

In honour of Phil Nicholson, professor of planetary science at Cornell University and editor of Icarus, we have a 2-day workshop to bring together the Australian Planetary Science and Astrobiology communities.

This workshop will strengthen ties between Australian researchers in planetary science and astrobiology and help introduce the younger members of our community to their co-conspirators as well as to Prof. Nicholson and Prof. Norm Sleep (Stanford University).

The workshop is organised by the Planetary Science Institute

AIAA Distinguished Lecture for 2009: “FROM EARTH TO MARS: Steps Towards The First Human Mission to The Red Planet” by Dr. Pascal Lee.

Dr. Pascal Lee is Chairman of the Mars Institute, a Planetary Scientist with the SETI Institute, and the Director of the Haughton-Mars Project at NASA Ames Research Center. He has worked extensively in the Arctic and Antarctica viewed as “analogs” for the Moon and Mars. He first proposed the Cold Early Mars Model based on his geological field work in Earth’s polar regions. Dr. Lee was recently scientist/pilot in the first field test of NASA’s new Lunar Electric Rover, a small pressurised rover concept currently under development for the human return to the Moon.

Dr. Pascal Lee will be giving a public lecture as part of the Australian Science Festival at the Menzies Theatre at the National Convention Centre on Friday May 29th at 6:00pm. This event is being hosted by the local section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and is part of a multi-city speaking tour of Australia by Dr. Lee in the last week of May.

FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT! “Elizabeth and Frederick White Conference on Nuclear Astrophysics in Australia” to be held on Monday 24th and Tuesday 25th of August 2009 (with a reception on the evening of Sunday 23rd) at the Australian Academy of Science's Dome in Canberra.

The aim of the conference is to bring together scientists from different fields to create an Australian community of researchers with an interest in Nuclear Astrophysics, and to share information on research work currently undergoing in Australia in the different areas related to Nuclear Astrophysics. During the conference we will launch the Australian Network for Nuclear Astrophysics (ANNA).

Program:

Session I   Observations of stellar abundances and thermonuclear explosions

Session II  Modelling of stellar nucleosynthesis and galactic chemical evolution

Session III Nuclear physics in astrophysics

Session IV  Signatures of stellar nucleosynthesis in meteoritic materials

Session V   International Connections

Session VI  Discussion session on the Australian Network for Nuclear Astrophysics (ANNA) and ANNA's proposal for the Nuclei in the Cosmos XII conference in Australia in 2012.

There is opportunity for contributing oral presentations (limited) and posters during the workshop. For poster presenters 5-minutes oral presentations will also be allocated. There is no registration fee and travel grants are available from the conference organizers.

Please register for the conference by sending an email with your name, institution, if you wish to present an oral contribution or poster, title and abstract for your contribution, eventual request for travel financial assistance, and any dietary requirements to maria.lugaro@sci.monash.edu.au. As participation is limited to 40 people, to avoid disappointment we encourage you to register as soon as possible, in any case before the 31st June 2009.

Accommodation is organised at the nearby University House. Rooms at the daily rates below (including breakfast) can be booked before 20 July 2009 by calling the reservation direct number (02) 6125-5275 / 6.

Twin Room: 1 guest $125; 2 guests $138

Queen suites: 1 guest $137; 2 guests $147

You will need to mention that you are part of the "White Conference" group, and will be asked for credit card details to secure your booking at the time of the reservation.

More information about the conference will be soon available at the conference website http://www.cspa.monash.edu.au/activities/white-conference/index.html.

Organising Commitee:

Maria Lugaro (Chair, Monash University)

John Lattanzio (Monash University)

Amanda Karakas (Australian National University)

Chiaki Kobayashi (Australian National University)

Marie Gibbon (Monash University)

“Life, gravity and the second law of thermodynamics”. Our colleague Dr. Charles Lineweaver will be giving a talk at the Research School of Biological Sciences (ANU), Robertson Seminar Room, on April 22, at 4:00 pm.

Map: http://campusmap.anu.edu.au/largemap.asp (E4, Building 46)

“We review the cosmic evolution of entropy and the gravitational origin of the free energy required by life. All dissipative structures in the universe including all forms of life, owe their existence to the fact that the universe started in a low entropy state and has not yet reached equilibrium. The low initial entropy was due to the low gravitational entropy of the nearly homogeneously distributed matter and has, through gravitational collapse, evolved gradients in density, temperature, pressure and chemistry. These gradients, when steep enough, give rise to far from equilibrium dissipative structures (e.g., galaxies, stars, black holes, hurricanes and life) which emerge spontaneously to hasten the destruction of the gradients which spawned them. This represents a paradigm shift from “we eat food” to “food has produced us to eat it”.

Series of Seminars with Lunar expert Mark Wieczorek (Equipe Géophysique Spatiale et Planétaire, Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris):

PSI Lunch Meeting: Thursday, April 16, from 11 am to 12:30, at RSES Jaeger 5. Mark will lead our Planetary Science Institute Seminar. We will discuss his recent paper “Did a large impact reorient the Moon?” You can find more information about our PSI meeting and the reading material here.

RSES Seminar: Thursday, April 16, from 4:00 to 5:00 pm, at RSES Jaeger Seminar Room. Mark will be giving a talk at RSES about “The interior structure of the Moon: What does geophysics have to say?”. More information about the RSES seminars series can be found here.

“The Moon is unique in the solar system in that it is the only extra-terrestrial body for which we possess in situ geophysical data. This talk will review the different data sets that are available, including gravity, topography, seismology, heat flow, magnetics, and lunar laser ranging. These data demonstrate that the Moon is a differentiated body possessing a crust, mantle, and core. The crust is on average about 40 km thick, and impact events with asteroids and comets have excavated materials to great depths within the crust, and possibly into the mantle. Moonquakes that are correlated in time with Earth-raised tides occur about halfway to the center of the Moon and suggest that the deepest portion of the mantle might be partially molten. The lunar core is relatively small in comparison with the cores of the terrestrial planets, with a size less than one-quarter of the Moon’s radius. Many important discoveries are bound to be made over the coming years as data from the ongoing and upcoming Chinese Chang'e-1, Japanese Kaguya, Indian Chandrayaan-1, and American Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter and GRAIL missions are analyzed.”

RSAA Seminar: Friday, April 17, from 3:00 to 4:00 pm, at RSAA Wooley seminar room. Mark will be talking about “The asymmetric thermal evolution of the Moon”.

“An even casual glance at the Moon shows that its surface can be divided into dark and bright terrains that are commonly referred to as "mare" and "highlands". The mare cover more than about 30% of the Moon's near side hemisphere and are known to represent basaltic lava flows that erupted on the surface over 1 billion years ago. It thus came as quite a surprise when the farside of the Moon was first imaged by spacecraft that this normally unseen hemisphere was found to be almost totally devoid of basaltic lava flows. Various explanations have been put forth to explain this observation, but it was not until the Lunar Prospector mission mapped the distribution of heat producing elements in 1998 that an important clue to this problem was recognized---Most of the Moon's heat producing elements are also concentrated on the nearside hemisphere in the regions where the basaltic lavas erupted. The origin and consequences of this discovery will be discussed in this talk.”