DPS 2012 Reno, NV
Events
- Narrated Tour of Carson City and Lake Tahoe with Boat Cruise
- The bus departs from the Grand Sierra Resort at 9 am and heads south along the foothills of the Sierras. Interestingly, Reno is at an elevation of about 4,400 feet and the tour destination, Lake Tahoe, has a surface elevation of 6,225 feet. Enjoy the narrated tour as the bus passes thru Carson City. This city, named after frontiersman Kit Carson, grew from a stagecoach stop in 1851 to the capital of Nevada in 1864. From Carson City the bus proceeds west onto Route 50 to Zepher Cove on Lake Tahoe. Here the bus stops so passengers can take the 11 am sightseeing Tahoe cruise on aboard the M.S. Dixie, a Mississippi-style paddlewheeler. The 2 hour narrated boat tour on the lake includes Emerald Bay, one of the most photographed spots of Lake Tahoe. On the boat there is hot and cold food available for purchase at a nominal price and a full bar. When the boat returns, there will be time to take additional pictures and visit the local shops and/or purchase lunch snacks. The bus will leave around 2 pm and follow Route 28 along the east side of the Lake Tahoe. This small winding road provides many vistas of the rocky shores and clear shallow waters of the lake. The bus will take Route 431 over Mt Rose (elevation 10,776 feet). On the way to the top, a stop at the overlook will give passengers time to photograph the panoramic view of much of beautiful Lake Tahoe. The bus returns to the Grand Sierra Resort by 4 pm.
- Cost is $82/person. This includes the narrated bus tour and the admission ticket for the 11 am boat tour.
- Mineral Museum tour at the University of Nevada
- Enjoy a tour of the W.M. Keck Earth Science and Mineral Museum on the campus of the University of Nevada in Reno. The museum houses an outstanding collection of minerals, ores, fossil specimens and photographs, in addition to mining related relics. There is special emphasis on early Nevada mining history with samples from famous mineral districts such as the Comstock Lode, Tonopah, and Goldfield. It houses the spectacular Mackay Silver collection, created by Tiffany and Co., for John Mackay and completed in 1878.
- Free bus transporation is provided to and from UNR. Passengers are to meet at the front entrance to the Grand Sierra where they will ride the bus to the museum on the UNR campus. At UNR they will be met and guided to the front of the museum where the 1 hour guided tour begins. Then, back to the bus for the return trip to the Grand Sierra.
- Bus will pick up passengers:
- Tuesday, October 16 at 12:30 pm for the 1 pm tour
- Tuesday, October 16 at 2:30 pm for the 3 pm tour
- Wednesday, October 17 at 8:30 am for the 9 am tour
- Wednesday, October 17 at 10:30 am for the 11 am tour
- Each tour requires a minimum number of 10 people and is limited to 20 people.
- There will be a sign up sheet at registration during the meeting. If you would like to sign up before the meeting please email Tracy Beale.
- These tours have been made possible through the support of the Mackay School of Earth Sciences and Engineering at the University of Nevada in Reno.
- Web sites that tell more about the museum are:
- Anyone is welcome to go to the museum and take a self guided tour in case they are unable to sign up for a group tour.
- Banquet
- Will take place on Wednesday 17 October at 6:30 pm at Grand Theater Stage in the Grand Sierra Resort Hotel. Registrants may sell their banquet tickets onsite to another registrant during the meeting. More information will be posted soon.
- Join us for in the stunning Grand Theater at the Grand Sierra Resort and Casino for a memorable night of good food and good friends. McAvoy Layne, renowned Mark Twain impersonator, will provide insight and laughs in a performance on one of most beautiful stages in the world.
- For twenty four years now, in over two thousand performances from Leningrad University in Russia to Piper's Opera House in Virginia City, McAvoy Layne has been preeminent, in preserving the wit & wisdom of "The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope," Mark Twain.
- McAvoy is the ghost of Samuel Clemens in A&E's biography of Mark Twain, and in the Discovery Channel's Cronkite Award winning documentary, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He is a winner of the Nevada award for excellence in school and library service, and author of a soon to be published memoir, "Becoming Mark Twain."
- The cost of tickets are as follows:
- Regular: $80
- Student: $60
- Business Meeting - Tuesday 16 October 10:30 am - noon
- Workshops
- ExoPAG - Saturday 13 October and Sunday 14 October 7:30 am - 5:30 pm
- NASA has formed the Exoplanet Exploration Program Analysis Group (ExoPAG), responsible for soliciting and coordinating community input into the development and execution of NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program (ExEP). The ExoPAG serves as a community-based, interdisciplinary forum for analysis in support of activity prioritization and for future exploration. It provides findings of analyses to NASA through the NASA advisory Council (the Council) within which the ExoPAG Chair is a member of the Astrophysics Subcommittee.
- Planning your Solar System Observations with JWST - Sunday 14
October 9:00 am-noon
- The James Webb Space Telescope is an infrared-optimized telescope to be placed at the Earth-Sun Lagrange 2 point. It is scheduled for launch in 2018, and will have a robust suite of astronomical instrumentation (imaging and spectroscopy) that will available for General Observer proposals. This workshop will provide you an opportunity to learn about the current instrument specifications and observing modes, as well as the observatory constraints such as brightness limits, moving targets, tracking, and others. JWST Project members will present preliminary case studies from the JWST Science Operations Design Reference Mission, selected to verify the capabilities of the observatory and instruments. Themes probed in this preliminary set of programs were diverse and included key science for Solar System studies; some specific cases are listed here. For example, in order to enhance our knowledge of the detailed diurnal cycles of various gasses and aerosols in the Martian atmosphere, a program was designed using NIRSpec and MIRI to obtain synoptic monitoring over the entire disk at varying timescales and seasons. Another focus has been to monitor a large sample of periodic comets and new targets at various distances in their orbit to fully characterize the dust, ice, and gas composition as well as constrain cometary activity at large distances by obtaining images near the nucleus and spectra of various volatile species not easily measured from the ground. A similar program was considered for icy dwarf planets (Pluto, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, and Sedna), where detailed studies of the surface and atmospheric composition, isotope ratios, and distributions of these constituents will be made. While these programs have broad implications for solar system science, they are not inclusive of the full capabilities of JWST. Our goal is to fully engage the Solar System community to provide them with the tools they need to begin planning their observations with JWST. A key output of the workshop will be capability objectives for the JWST team to consider for further pre-launch operational studies, so that a broad suite of Solar System observations will be enabled.
- NASA Grant Writing Workshop - Sunday 14 October 12:30 pm - 4:00 pm
- This NASA sponsored workshop is open to all interested planetary scientists at no cost. At some time in your career as a scientist, you will need to obtain funding to conduct your research. Perhaps that time is now, perhaps it is still a few years away, but that time will come. Are you prepared for it? Fortunately, NASA awards funding every year for research like yours. But even in the best of times NASA selects only one out of every three proposals submitted for funding. Proposal writing is a necessary skill for every scientist, and just like the rest of your skills it needs to be developed. The session will be presented by Dr. Curt Niebur, a program scientist and NASA HQ, and will focus on understanding NASA's research programs and will include information on how to write a research proposal, where to apply for funding, and pathways for participation on missions. Light refreshments will be provided during breaks. Please register by October 1st, for our food ordering purposes: http://bit.ly/NGWW2012.
- Boosting the Effectiveness of Your Education and Outreach Efforts - Sunday 14 October 1:00 pm - 5:00 pm
- This workshop is intended for scientists and students who are involved - or want to be involved - in Education and Public Outreach (E/PO), and are interested in increasing the impact of their efforts. The session will explore several pathways available to scientists to meaningfully engage audiences in planetary science topics and the nature of science. Topics include public lectures and outreach events, teacher professional development, and getting into classrooms. Time will be available for participant-selected topics as well. For each topic, research-based best practices, lessons learned, tips, available resources, and participant experiences will be explored. Participants will consider what types of E/PO efforts are the best fit for their interests and available time and resources. Possible funding sources will be presented.
- Remote Observations of Rosetta Target Comet 67P - Sunday 14
October 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
- The workshop shall bring together comet observers to discuss and coordinate observations of the Rosetta target comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in support of the mission's comet phase in 2014/2015. The current knowledge about the comet shall be reviewed and requirements for observations as well as opportunities and plans for observations from ground-based telecopes and space missions shall be discussed.
- Planetary Science with Reusable Commercial Suborbital Spacecraft -
Sunday 14 October 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
- The most recent Planetary Sciences Decadal Survey report, Visions and Voyages for Planetary Science 2013 - 2022, highlights the potential advantages of using suborbital platforms for planetary science experiments. Suborbital vehicles not only provide platforms for science observations and experiments, the modest costs and development times for suborbital missions mean they also provide excellent training opportunities for future spacecraft mission PIs and developers of spacecraft instruments. Suborbital platforms also offer advantages for increasing technology readiness level for flight experiments at a fraction of the costs of traditional orbital platforms. Visions and Voyages discusses only balloons and rockets, but reusable commercial suborbital vehicles also provide a new opportunity to do science outside the traditional and costly, low-risk approach. This workshop will examine how commercial suborbital vehicles can be exploited to use new approaches to instrumentation, spacecraft and mission design to answer planetary science questions. Composed of talks and panel discussions, this workshop will: Present science results and lessons learned from planetary scientists engaged in research using reusable commercial suborbital vehicles; Explore opportunities for flying and funding experiments; Discuss the most promising research, teaching, and outreach applications for these vehicles.
- Europa Mission Studies Update - Tuesday 16 October noon-1:00 pm
- This Town Hall meeting is proposed to bring the community up to speed on the current status of the NASA descoped Europa Flagship mission studies. It is envisaged that there would be a half hour of presentations on the two mission concepts still being studied, followed by half an hour of discussion.
- Publishing Your Paper: A Guide for MSc and PhDs - Tuesday 16
October noon - 1:00 pm
- Publishing research in well known scientific journals is one way that researchers build reputation in their community and allow the wide dissemination of their work. This presentation will go through the history of journal publishing, introduce best practice tips and hints when writing a paper, highlight the editorial process, and detail the main ethical issues that face authors, reviewers, editors and publishers on a day-to-day basis, with examples from the DPS offical publication - Icarus
- Women in Astronomy Discussion Hour - Wednesday 17 October
noon-1:30 pm
- Join us for an informal meeting and discussion hour over lunch. We will have a focus on Work-Life Satisfaction with a brief presentation. Please feel free to bring any information/announcements related to women in astronomy and planetary science to share. Due to the generosity of an anonymous donor and the DPS committee, we will be able to provide lunch this year. All are welcome, but pre-registration at http://bit.ly/WL_2012 is required for this event due to space limitations.
- Meeting of the IOPW Atmospheres Section - Wednesday 17 October 3:30pm-5:00pm
