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A man of diverse interests and avid curiosity, Raúl A. Baragiola, the Alice and Guy Wilson Chair Professor of Materials Science at the University of Virginia, passed away 21 June 2015, only few months after his seventieth birthday. Raúl began his career at the Balseiro Institute in Bariloche, Argentina, studying electron emission from solid materials, later expanding his expertise to ion, electron, and photon interactions with surfaces. His interest in the surface properties of semi-conductors and insulators led him to the field of Space and Planetary Science, where for the last 25 years he studied the interaction of radiation with condensed ices, minerals, and extraterrestrial materials.

Born 31 March, 1945, Raul came to the US after working many years at the Centro Atómico in Bariloche, Argentina when concerns about the Argentina’s political stability and the safety of his family lead him to emigrate. He joined Ted Madey’s laboratory at Rutgers in 1988. He settled permanently at the University of Virginia (UVa) to direct the Laboratory for Astrophysics and Surface Physics (LASP) in 1990.

At UVa, Raúl started working on electronic sputtering from condensed gases and water ice in close collaboration with R. E. Johnson (UVa) and Walter Brown (AT & T Bell Laboratory), but he soon initiated key experiments designed to explore the complexities of sputtering of water ice. He had notable success in studying water ice photodesorption induced by Lyman-alpha light and its implications for interstellar ices. Subsequent efforts in a similar vein included investigating the existence of condensed O2 on Ganymede, measuring the sputtering yield of various ices, and characterizing the physical and chemical effects of radiations on laboratory analogs of planetary ices, while making laboratory data available to guide interpretation of astronomical spectra. In collaboration with R. W. Carlson (JPL), results from ion irradiation of water ice were used to explain the infrared signature of hydrogen peroxide on the surface of Europa. Raúl made numerous other significant research contributions towards understanding of the properties of planetary and interstellar water ice and the effects of radiation on these extraterrestrial surfaces. Recent ongoing research centered on laboratory astrochemistry, focusing on the synthesis, destruction and sputtering of plethora of condensed ices which include H2, CO, CO2, CH4, NH3, O2, O3, H2O2 and more complex species by ion and UV irradiation.

In collaboration with Lucy McFadden (NASA-Goddard) to understand the sulfur deficit on the surface of the Eros during NEAR’s encounter, Raul initiated research focused on the effects of space weathering on airless bodies. The combined in situ ability to measure reflectance, surface chemistry, and sputtered species due to solar-wind type ion irradiation was a hallmark feature of Raúl’s laboratory. In particular, Raúl was interested in the formation of Fe nano-particles and the effects of Earth’s atmosphere on ion bombarded silicates and minerals. With the discovery of water on the lunar surface, Raúl investigated formation for -OH species by solar wind proton irradiation of silicate minerals. Recent experiments characterizing electron emission from lunar soils echoed his early work on electron-induced secondary electron measurements.

Raúl was a prominent member in the Planetary Science and the Laboratory Astrophysics community and a frequent, vocal participant at DPS, AGU, and LPSC conferences. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics (London), receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Committee on Atomic Collisions in Solids and a NASA Achievement Award for his work on the Cassini mission. He served as a science member on the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS) team, collaborating with D. T. Young at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). Over the course of his career, Raúl published ~ 200 refereed scientific articles and book chapters, contributed to more than 140 conferences presentations and 80 invited lectures, advised more than 40 students and post-doctoral researchers on multiple continents, and collaborated with more research groups than is possible to name. His scientific legacy endures through them.

He leaves behind his dear wife of 46 years, Beatriz; three children: Verena, Valeria, and Pablo; his three precious grandchildren: Maya, Ella, and Leo who were the pride and joy of his later life; and his family of students and post-docs. All of whom will greatly miss Raul’s ability to simplify deeply complex problems, as well as his passion for life, philosophy, and wicked sense of humor.

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Catherine Dukes – Research Scientist – Laboratory for Astrophysics and Surface Physics – UVa

Ujjwal Raut – Research Scientist – Laboratory for Astrophysics and Surface Physics – UVa

Claudia J. Alexander (1959–2015), Ph.D. was a research scientist specializing in geophysics 
and planetary science. She has worked for the United States Geological Survey and the 
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. As member of the technical staff at the Jet 
Propulsion Laboratory, she was the last project manager of NASA’s Galileo mission to Jupiter 
and until the time of her passing had served as project scientist of NASA’s role in the European 
led Rosetta mission to study comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Claudia was the 17th African 
American woman to get a PhD in physics or astronomy (http://www.aawip.com/physics-astro-only-list.html)
and the winner was several awards, including the Emerald Honor for Women of Color in 
Research & Engineering by Career Communications Group, Inc.at the National Women of Color 
Research Sciences and Technology Conference. She was also very active in education and outreach, 
and a mentor to several younger scientists. Our condolences go out to her family, co-workers and friends 
at this time.

Stanton J. Peale passed away on May 14, 2015 in Santa Barbara from complications of leukemia. He was 78. Stan was surrounded by family and friends prior to and during his passing. He was a kind and brilliant planetary scientist with expertise in dynamics and geophysics. His career spanned over five decades. After earning his PhD at Cornell University in 1965, he took a faculty position at the University of California, Los Angeles, and then at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he worked from 1968 until 2015. His most recent work was submitted for publication on May 11, 2015. His contributions include the prediction of widespread volcanism on Jupiter’s moon Io, the derivation of a general theoretical framework that governs the rotational states of bodies subject to tides, the study of tidal evolution in satellite systems, and the development of an ingenious procedure to determine the size and state of Mercury’s core. He was also a pioneer in the study of extrasolar planets, both in terms of their dynamics and their detection by microlensing. Stan’s work illustrated the power of physics to probe the interiors of planets. Stan was awarded the Newcomb Cleveland Prize (1979), the James Craig Watson Medal (1982), and the Brouwer Award (1992). He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2009. He was a wonderful, beloved colleague and will be deeply missed.

It is with great sadness that we report the loss of our colleague, Dr. Arvydas Kliore, who died suddenly on December 7, 2014 of natural causes. Arv was born in Lithuania and immigrated to the United States in 1949. He joined the engineering staff at JPL in 1962, where he had a distinguished career for over half a century with numerous publications and awards. A JPL Senior Research Scientist for more than 25 years, he was a pioneer in planetary radio science, especially in the study of planetary atmospheres and ionospheres, beginning with the first NASA planetary mission. Arv was a principalinvestigator or team member on every Mariner mission, on Pioneer 10/11, and on Pioneer Venus, and he served as Deputy Team Leader for the Galileo Radio Propagation Science Team. Most recently, he was a member of the Cassini Radio Science Team from 1990, serving as team leader for more than 20 years. Over his career, Arv attended nearly every DPS meeting in its 47-year history, a testament to his remarkable level of dedication and commitment to the community of planetary scientists.

Arv set high standards for scientific achievement, generosity, modesty, personal integrity, and an infectious enthusiasm for life. Those of us who had the privilege of working with him for decades have benefited from his wisdom, fairness, sense of perspective grounded in long experience, and unstinting loyalty and support. We miss him greatly, and will carry his memory and many contributions with us.

– Dick French, on behalf of the Cassini Radio Science Team

Dr. Alberto Behar, a long-time researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, died January, 9, 2015 in a small-plane accident near Van Nuys, CA.

An expert on robotics for exploring extreme environments on Earth and other planets, Behar worked in the Avionics, Instruments, and Science divisions at JPL. He played a key role in developing in situ robotic systems for measuring Earth’s ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland using submarines, ice rovers, and boats. He also participated in the exploration of Mars, serving as the Investigation Scientist for both the Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) instrument on the Curiosity rover and the High Energy Neutron Detector on the Mars Odyssey orbiter. Alberto was a research professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. He held a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California.

Thomas Wagner, the Cryosphere Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters, summed up Behar this way: “From his submarines that peeked under Antarctica to his boats that raced Greenland’s rivers, Alberto’s work enabled measurements of things we’d never known. His creativity knew few bounds. He is, and will forever be, sorely missed.”

Charles A. Barth, Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado, died on October 14th 2014.  Charles grew up in Philadelphia where he attended Central High School. He received his B.S. in chemistry at Lehigh University. After serving in the Air Force, he earned his Ph.D. from UCLA. From 1958 to 1959 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bonn, Germany, followed by six years working at the CalTech/NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. From 1965 to 1992 he was the Director of the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) and until 2002 a professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences. He became Professor Emeritus in 2002.

Between 1962 and 2002, Charles was active on numerous experiments studying the Earth and other planets, including Mariners 5, 6, 7, and 9, OGO-2, 4, 5, and 6, Atmosphere Explorer-C and D, the Solar Mesosphere Explorer, the Student Nitric Oxide Experiment, and instruments on Apollo 17, Pioneer Venus, Galileo, and Cassini. As a professor, he especially valued giving undergraduate students their first taste of space and planetary science by allowing them to design, build and operate spacecraft. He mentored and inspired many undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and scientists, producing a lasting legacy of friends, colleagues, and outstanding scientists. He will be missed greatly.

Transmitted by A. Hendrix

Dr. Barney Conrath passed away peacefully in his sleep on April 23, 2014, at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, after a bout with cancer.  He is survived by his wife, Marjorie, three children, and five grandchildren.

He was born June 23, 1935 in Quincy, Illinois and grew up near Hannibal, Missouri.  In 1957 he graduated from Culver-Stockton College in northeast Missouri with a BA in Physics, then earned an MA in Physics at the University of Iowa under the direction of James Van Allen.  In July 1960, Barney joined the staff of NASA’s new Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where he would spend most of his professional career.  However, Goddard was not ready to accommodate him, since the Center’s buildings were still under construction.  Goddard’s scientists and engineers were housed in temporary quarters scattered over greater Washington, D.C., and Barney spent nearly two years working at the US Naval Receiving Station in the Anacostia section of the city.  Later, he won a Robert Goddard Fellowship and took a leave to earn a PhD in Physics at the University of New Hampshire in 1966, his dissertation being on the violation of the 2nd and 3rd adiabatic invariants by hydromagnetic waves.

Fortunately for atmospheric science, Barney fell in with the wrong crowd at Goddard, and his career in space plasma physics was short lived.  The atmosphere at the Center in its early days was charged with excitement: Earth-orbiting satellites were being launched at a regular rate and Goddard was supplying many of the experiments.  Barney’s group was heavily involved with the Tiros and Nimbus weather satellites, which, respectively, had radiometers and spectrometers to measure the thermal radiation field of Earth’s atmosphere.  This was a new area of exploration, and techniques were needed to interpret the observed radiation and derive physical atmospheric parameters, e.g., the distributions of temperatures, clouds, and gaseous constituents.  Beginning in the mid 1960s, Barney contributed a series of seminal studies on the inversion of planetary infrared spectra observed from space-borne platforms, which was to occupy much of his career.

The course of Barney’s work was strongly influenced by his close association with Rudolf Hanel, who built a series of Infrared Interferometer Spectrometers (IRIS) that were onboard the Nimbus satellites, and then on spacecraft that went to Mars (Mariner 9) and the outer planets (Voyager 1 & 2).  Barney was a co-investigator on all these experiments and became the Voyager IRIS principal investigator in 1986.  Early on, Barney appreciated the value—and sheer enjoyment—of combining the activities of data acquisition and spectral inversion with detailed theoretical modeling of the results.  His passion became understanding the atmospheric thermal structure and dynamics of the bodies he observed.  Using terrestrial analogies to interpret data from strange worlds is usually a reasonable starting point, but sometimes one’s mind needs to be nimble.  This was true of the hydrogen-dominated atmospheres in the outer solar system, where Barney and his colleagues discovered that conversion between the ortho and para forms of molecular hydrogen in disequilibrium could be an important energy source driving atmospheric motions.

Barney twice received the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement (1981, 1990), and he became a Goddard Senior Fellow in 1990.  In 1996 he received the DPS Kuiper Prize for his scientific contributions to planetary science.  He retired from Federal service in 1995 and became a Senior Research Associate at Cornell University, continuing his close collaboration with Peter Gierasch that had begun during the Voyager IRIS days. During this time, he participated in the Mars Global Surveyor Thermal Emission Spectrometer experiment. He was also a co-investigator on Cassini’s Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS), an ambitious Fourier Transform Spectrometer that built on the earlier IRIS instruments.   He worked with other CIRS investigators in studying the seasonally varying thermal structure and dynamics of Titan’s stratosphere and the large structural changes effected by Saturn’s great northern storm, which erupted in late 2010.  He actively pursued his research until the end, preoccupied with determining the helium abundance of Saturn’s atmosphere—thus far a challenge—by combining CIRS data with radio occultations and with stellar occultations observed by the Cassini Visual Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS). 

In his career, Barney led by quiet example, and he epitomized unselfish cooperation in research.  He was attentive and encouraging.  His integrity and competence were unquestioned.  Those who knew him well will never forget those qualities, nor will they forget him.

Prepared by Michael Flasar, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center