ANNUAL REPORT 2015 Planetary Science Institute Dedicated to Solar System exploration, PSI scientists are involved in NASA and international missions, fieldwork around the world, education, and outreach. PLANETARY SCIENCE INSTITUTE The Planetary Science Institute is a private, nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation dedicated to Solar System exploration. It is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, where it was founded in 1972. PSI scientists are involved in numerous NASA and international missions, the study of Mars and other planets, the Moon, asteroids, comets, interplanetary dust, impact physics, the origin of the Solar System, extra-solar planet formation, dynamical evolution of planetary systems, the rise of life, and other areas of research. They conduct fieldwork on all continents around the world. They also are actively involved in science education and public outreach through school programs, children’s books, popular science books and art. PSI scientists are based in 23 states and the District of Columbia, and work from various locations around the world. PSI BOARD OF TRUSTEES Tim Hunter, M.D., Chair Joseph K. Alexander Kathryn Schmoll Candace Kohl, Ph.D., Vice Chair Brent Archinal, Ph.D. Pat H. Simmons Benjamin Smith, J.D., Secretary Michael J.S. Belton, Ph.D. Mark V. Sykes, Ph.D., J.D. William K. Hartmann, Ph.D. On the cover: “Lunar Afternoon,” acrylic painting by William K. Hartmann, Senior Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute where he is a co-founder. This view shows a typical lunar view and attempts to catch the reflected light on the shaded side of lunar rocks. The painting was made one afternoon during a summer school program in Madrid, Spain, when students asked to see a demonstration of how the artist creates a “space painting.” Planetary Science Institute | 1700 E. Fort Lowell, Suite 106 | Tucson, Arizona 85719-2395 | Phone 520-622-6300 | Fax 520-622-8060 | www.psi.edu 2 “We look forward to building on our accomplishments... ere is so much to do!” elsewhere in this report. For me this award has additional meaning NOTE since it represents a generational changing of the guard. I was the original manager of the Dust Subnode, which I brought to PSI in 2004. FROM THE PSI founder Don Davis was the original manager of the Asteroid Subnode and then the merged subnode. Now, Research Scientist Eric Palmer brings new energy and vision to this important job. DIRECTOR It is also notable that PSI researchers are working on four of ve Discovery mission proposals selected this year for further consideration by NASA. One or two of the missions will be selected Strategic plans are oen not much more than a promotional tool, for opportunities to y as early as 2020. Senior Scientist Tommy dressing up organizational websites with nicely illustrated pictures Grav and I are co-investigators with the NEOCam mission to greatly to promote the idea that they are very busy and thinking about the expand our knowledge of the near-Earth object population, and future. PSI has taken a dierent approach in creating our rst strategic detect thousands of comets and millions of main belt asteroids. plan (posted on our website). We dene the broad scope of activity Senior Scientist David Grinspoon is a co-investigator of the DAVINCI and the open-ended goals toward which we are constantly working. mission to study the chemical composition of Venus’ atmosphere, We clearly identify our priorities, but most importantly, we lay out while Senior Scientist Darby Dyar is a co-investigator of the VERITAS the principles that underpin everything we do. Our strategic plan is mission that would y a shorter-wavelength radar instrument to a working document. I take every new initiative and demonstrate that remap Venus at high spatial resolution over the course of three it is consistent with our mission, advances our vision, addresses our Venus years. Senior Scientist Tom Prettyman is a co-investigator on priorities, and does so in a manner that is consistent with our principles. the Psyche mission that would explore the origin of planetary cores One of our priorities is to expand funding opportunities for PSI’s by studying the metallic asteroid Psyche. Hopefully, NASA will be scientists and educators. We are a company that has relied almost selecting two missions and not one! exclusively on NASA funding for more than 40 years, but today One of the many notable scientic results coming out of the we are reaching out to industry and even beyond our national Institute this year was Senior Scientist Joe Spitale’s determination boundaries. We have contracted with European entities in support that the well-known “jets” of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, are actually of the Rosetta mission. In December of this year, we signed a an optical illusion. A member of the Cassini imaging team, Spitale cooperation agreement with Qian Xuesen Laboratory of Space was able to reproduce the jets observed by assuming the eruption Technology (Qian Xuesen Lab) in the People’s Republic of China to of curtains of water from the length of the squiggly “tiger stripe” advance our mutual interests in facilitating the open-ended expansion fractures in the moon’s south polar region. Folds in these erupting of the exploration of the Solar System and to use the knowledge thus curtains along the line of sight give the appearance of concentrated gained in supporting the expansion of human activity beyond the jets. It made the cover of Nature magazine and is a nice demonstration Earth. We have a very deep science bench with experience in Solar that in science we can never take anything for granted. System exploration that extends back to the days of the Apollo NASA remains our core enterprise. We are funded from every program. We look forward to identifying opportunities not just at planetary research program and participate on almost every planetary home in the United States, but throughout the world. mission. We look forward to building on our accomplishments as we In the meantime, this year PSI received a $4 million, ve-year reach out and pursue all areas where our science is relevant, including cooperative agreement from NASA to manage the Planetary Data additional opportunities for Solar System exploration. System’s Asteroid and Dust Subnode. PSI has provided PDS archiving ere is so much to do! services for more than 20 years, beginning in 1994, maintaining a — rapidly expanding archive of mission and ground-based data described Mark V. Sykes 3 the Sun to study the solar wind, specically the Sun’s magnetic eld, MERCURY MESSENGER using Faraday rotation. is unique set of measurements added a low-resource, high-impact, scientic contribution to the dearth of MISSION GLEANS knowledge on the heating paradox of the Sun: how you make heat ow from something cool – the 6,000 degree Kelvin surface – to something hot – the 6 million degree Kelvin corona. MORE DISCOVERIES Another result from Jensen’s work on MESSENGER’s Solar Coronal Faraday Rotation observations was the passage of a Coronal NASA’s MESSENGER spacecra ended its scientic operations Mass Ejection (CME). ese are massive plasma structures that can by crashing into Mercury April 30, 2015, and PSI scientists looked trigger Earth’s space weather, or geomagnetic storms. Measuring the back at a mission that provided new discoveries on the planet closest magnetic eld within a CME so close to the Sun is extremely rare to the Sun. Senior Scientist Catherine Johnson and her group have played key roles in the characterization of Mercury’s magnetic eld, including the major discovery that the magnetic eld is oset from Mercury’s body center. Her group’s work has contributed to identifying the large-scale structure of the magnetosphere and the internal eld, demonstrating the existence and properties of eld aligned currents, and ux of the solar wind to the surface. Senior Scientist William Feldman was responsible for the conceptual design of the MESSENGER Neutron Spectrometer. is instrument provided the data to conrm the presence of water ice near the surface of permanently shaded craters near the north pole of Mercury. Senior Scientist Faith Vilas’s work identied spectral absorption signatures of surface mineralogy in wide-angle color images of bright geologic surface features called “hollows” in Mercury’s craters Dominici and Hopper. Studies of temperature eects on spectral properties of suldes suggest that the hollows mineralogy incorpo- rates MgS (magnesium sulde), CaS (calcium sulde) and darker and valuable to enhancing our ability to predict their eects on our background material. Mercury’s surface is spectrally bland, and satellites and ionosphere. these are the rst solidly identied reectance absorption features And Senior Scientist Robert Gaskell’s digital elevation for Mercury’s surface. models were used to better understand Mercury’s geology, both on Senior Scientist Deborah Domingue’s work focused on the surface and within the planet. He used images acquired by the photometry, where she used the Mercury Dual Imaging System Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) to derive information on the instrument to study how Mercury’s surface reects light, depending shape and topography of the innermost planet. is information has on how you look at it. She contributed photometric standardization been used to model and constrain the characteristics of Mercury’s for the images, enabling the construction of mosaics, both internal structure. monochrome and color. One of her key contributions was the Aer the spacecra crashed and ended scientic operations, review paper published in Space Science Reviews on the space PSI researchers were awarded funding for another year to study and weathering of Mercury’s surface in comparison to space weathering archive data collected during the mission. on the Moon and asteroids.