Special Sessions
This year’s conference will feature the following special sessions:
Special Session on New Perspectives of the Moon: Enabling Future Lunar Missions: Recent and ongoing missions coupled with new data analyses have dramatically changed our view of the Moon over the last decade. Findings from these missions provide both a fundamental scientific framework to base future missions and essential observations to reduce risk to these missions. Presenters will provide new scientific synthesis of data produced from recent and current lunar missions [e.g., Chandrayaan-I, Kaguya (SELENE), LRO, GRAIL] and data analyses and examine innovative scientific mission strategies enabled by these new insights to address important lunar science and exploration questions.
Special Session on Lunar Dust and Exosphere Featuring the First Results from LADEE: This session will address new results concerning the lunar exosphere, the mystery of electrostatically lofted dust, and other new research concerning the exotic phenomena surrounding the nearest example of a surface boundary exosphere. The focus will be on results from the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission, but will also incorporate relevant Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) exosphere/dust measurements and ARTEMIS observations related to LADEE science.
Special Session on the Structure and Evolution of Planetary Bodies: A Geophysical Perspective: Geophysical techniques provide many ways of elucidating the interior structure, origin, and evolution of planetary bodies. This session will highlight geophysical modeling and interpretation of both remotely-sensed and in situ data that constrain processes affecting the interiors of planets and moons as well as the surface expressions they produce.
Special Session on Fluids on Differentiated Bodies: Many researchers are finding samples from the Moon, Vesta (HEDs), and Mars with evidence of fluids. Veins have been described that include quartz veins, tridymite veins, phosphate veins, olivine veins, and Fe-enriched rimes of impact glasses. Until recently the only hydrous source proposed for the veins were comet/chondrite impacts, but recently it has been shown with melt inclusions, glasses, and apatite that the “very dry” bodies of the Moon and Vesta (HEDs) contained some, or significant, water. Sourcing the fluids that created these veins is vital to understanding the late-stage evolution on bodies and could have implications for the origin of life on Earth or Mars.
Fluids on Differentiated Bodies, Tuesday Afternoon,
March 18, 1:30 p.m., Waterway Ballroom 4