Laboratory for Space Sciences @ Wash U Physics

From Io, with Love

I like the subtitle the editors picked for this article, it reminds me of the last Calvin & Hobbes comic:

So so awesome

Jeff Gillis-Davis wrote a great article for The Conversation on sulfur on the Moon, what it means, and what we can do with it.

Kun Wang and I were chosen to be a part of the Mars Sample Return Science Definition Team. I’m excited to working out all the analyses we’ll do on these samples, currently being cached by Perseverance, to maximize the science return of MSR.

We have a new professor in the Laboratory for Space Sciences at Wash U: Tansu Daylan! Tansu is an expert in exoplanets and will help us generalize our understanding of the Solar System to other planetary systems in the Galaxy. So excited to have Tansu here, and his office is next door to mine, how cool is that?!

The Juno mission made remarkable measurements of Jupiter and its magnetosphere. For its encore (extended mission), Juno is getting closer and closer to Io. Excitement awaits, Io never disappoints!

Grad student Mary will present her work on the lack of 26Al in cometary rocks at the Meteoritical Society meeting in Los Angeles. This is a fascinating mystery, and now we have the tools and samples to solve it!

New paper by former grad student Kainen on amazing filamentary enstatite crystals in cometary interplanetary dust particles.

Lafayette is one of my favorite meteorites.

There was always a mystery surrounding how it was found. Here’s a cool new story on recent insights into the Lafayette find.