Final Announcement

Meeting Location and Date

The Space Weathering of Airless Bodies:  An Integration of Remote Sensing Data, Laboratory Experiments and Sample Analysis Workshop will be held November 2–4, 2015, at the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) building, 3600 Bay Area Blvd, Houston, Texas.

Important Note about Parking

Limited parking is available at the USRA building, so workshop participants are asked to park in the University Baptist Church (UBC) parking lot. A shuttle bus will run throughout the workshop to take participants to and from their cars.

Directions from Bay Area Blvd.: Turn left on Middlebrook Drive and continue 0.4 miles. The UBC parking lot will be on the right, just past Glenshannon Drive. There are plenty of parking spaces available for workshop participants, and signs will be posted at the shuttle pickup and drop off location at the north side of the lot.

Note:  Only employees with USRA Parking Passes will be approved to park in the USRA lot.

Purpose and Scope

In preparation for missions to primitive asteroids and to better interpret recent remote sensing datasets from Mercury, the Moon, and other objects, we need a better understanding of how the space environment alters the surfaces of airless bodies from a remote sensing perspective, how analysis of returned samples provides ground truth for interpreting the spectral data, and how laboratory experiments provide quantitative constraints on the processes involved. The purpose of the workshop is to bring together scientists across a range of disciplines to discuss and exchange ideas about space weathering processes and their effects from their different perspectives. These discussions will allow us to assess the current state of knowledge and to identify the major gaps in our understanding of space weathering in preparation for new asteroid encounters and sample return missions.