FAITH VILAS TO LEAD SUBORBITAL OBSERVATORY PROJECT AT PSI
July 12, 2010 - The Planetary Science Institute is pleased to announce that Dr. Faith Vilas is joining the institute to lead the Atsa Suborbital Observatory Project, pushing the boundaries of human-tended observing into outer space.
The Atsa project will use crewed suborbital commercial spacecraft with a specially designed telescope to provide low-cost space-based observations above the contaminating atmosphere of the Earth, while avoiding some operational constraints of satellite telescope systems.
Dr. Vilas has been developing the Atsa Suborbital Observatory with collaborator Dr. Luke Sollitt from the Physics Department of The Citadel. "At the PSI, we have an organizational framework within which we can bring Atsa fully to life," Vilas said.
Dr. Vilas has a long and distinguished career as a prominent planetary astronomer, providing new insights into our understanding of the composition and history of the asteroid belt, constraining heating in the early solar system, and expanding evidence for water throughout the asteroid belt. As a scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, she designed a telescope system for the space shuttle to detect and characterize orbital debris at low-Earth orbit through geosynchronous orbit. At NASA Headquarters, Dr. Vilas was the program scientist for the Discovery Program, NASA's solar system exploration mission workhorse. She has been a U.S. representative to the Japanese Hayabusa mission science team, whose spacecraft recently returned to Earth potentially carrying the first samples collected from an asteroid. Presently, she is a science team member on NASA’s MESSENGER mission to the planet Mercury.
For her accomplishments, Dr. Vilas was honored by the designation of Minor Planet 3507 Vilas by the International Astronomical Union, and she has received numerous awards for her work at NASA.
Since 2005, Dr. Vilas has been director of the MMT Observatory, a joint venture of the University of Arizona and Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Vilas will be retiring from her position with the MMT Observatory at the end of December 2010, at which time she will begin her activities at PSI.
"My greatest pleasure over the past five years has been the opportunity to work with the first rate staff of the MMT Observatory. They are highly skilled and dedicated to supporting the astronomical community," Dr. Vilas said. "I look forward to continuing to use this wonderful facility as an observer in the future."
Dr. Vilas earned a bachelor's degree in astronomy from Wellesley College (1973), a master's in earth and planetary sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1975), and her doctorate in planetary sciences from the University of Arizona (1984). As a graduate student in 1984, Vilas was part of the team that discovered Neptune's rings. She also designed the coronograph used to obtain the first image of a circumstellar disk around another star, Beta Pictoris, with her graduate thesis advisor Bradford A. Smith.
In addition to being an accomplished planetary astronomer, Dr. Vilas is also a life-long pilot and has had a parallel career as a volunteer licensed paramedic in the state of Texas. While working at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, she also co-founded an animal rescue shelter in the southeast Houston area and served on its board of directors.
Dr. Mark V. Sykes, CEO and director of the Planetary Science Institute, looks forward to Dr. Vilas and her work on the Atsa Suborbital Observatory becoming affiliated with PSI. "We are very honored to have Dr. Vilas on board. She will be expanding our activities in new and exciting directions with human space flight that will greatly advance our knowledge of near-Earth asteroids, comets and other parts of the solar system and universe." he said.
"We look forward to making future announcements about the Atsa Suborbital Observatory under the leadership of Dr. Vilas. Design studies are under way and we will be putting up a website on the project after Dr. Vilas completes her work at the MMT Observatory," Sykes said.
CONTACT:
Dr. Faith Vilas
Director, MMT Observatory
520-621-1269
fvilas@mmto.org
Spacecraft Recovered Following Return From 7-Year Journey to Asteroid
Researchers have recovered a spacecraft in Australia that returned to Earth following a long journey that saw it touch down on a distant asteroid.
Planetary Science Institute research scientist Paul Abell was part of the mission's ground recovery operation. He was also a member of the mission's near infrared spectrometer team that investigated the composition of the asteroid while the Haybusa spacecraft was in close proximity to the asteroid.
Scientists hope the Hayabusa spacecraft was able to secure and return to Earth samples from a small asteroid named (25143) Itokawa, said Paul Abell, research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute.
The spacecraft returned to Earth June 13 and the search team recovered it June 14 in the Woomera Test Range in South Australia. Hayabusa visited several areas on Itokawa, an asteroid measuring 540 meters by 270 meters by 210 meters. The mission marked the first attempt to return samples from an asteroid.
While plans to fire projectiles into the asteroid's surface to cause material to enter the sample collection chamber may have been unsuccessful, scientists retain some hope that dust raised during the craft's landings on the surface kicked up material that was collected and brought back to Earth for analysis, Abell said.
"There may be a chance that during the touchdown, it might have kicked up some material that made its way into the sample container. This is a function of the microgravity environment at the asteroid," he said. "The chances are slim that we got any samples, but you never know until you actually get it back, get it into the lab and have a look."
The Japan Exploration Aerospace Agency, or JAXA, is heading the Hayabusa project, which was launched May 9, 2003. NASA is supporting the mission.
"It now will be transported to Japan for analysis and the opening of the sample collection chamber," Abell said. "They are going to basically do a CAT scan of it to see if they can see anything inside, first of all, and then they are going to open it up and check it out."
Even if no sample material from the asteroid made its way back to Earth, the mission still offered a number of critical discoveries.
"Having a sample in the capsule will be a huge bonus. We have already learned a lot about this asteroid that has changed our whole way of thinking about these kinds of near-Earth asteroids," Abell said.
Researchers had believed that small near-Earth asteroids were one solid piece, while larger asteroids have craters and are broken up or fragmented, he said. But close proximity studies of Itokawa exhibit high porosity of about 40 percent and show the asteroid is made up of pieces ranging from small gravel to big blocks and boulders up to 50 meters in length.
"You have some general ideas of what it is you are dealing with before the encounter, but it is only until you get close to it with a spacecraft that you really see what it is like. We've studied asteroids from Earth using our ground-based sensors yet when we got there with our spacecraft we were actually very surprised," he said. "Hayabusa has really changed the way we think about these asteroids, not only in terms of their internal structure and the surface properties, but also possibly their evolutionary lifetimes.
"JAXA's Hayabusa mission has opened up a whole new world to us and now we have many more questions than answers, which makes this a very exciting time to be in planetary science," Abell said.
CONTACT:
Paul A. Abell
Research Scientist
abell@psi.edu
NASA Grant to Help Students Look at Water From Many Perspectives
June 14, 2010 - A three-year, $800,938 grant from NASA will fund a Tucson-area Earth Camp where participants will be immersed in the study of water.
The Laurel Clark Earth Camp Experience, a partnership between the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, the Planetary Science Institute and Arizona Project WET at the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center, will use NASA data for the Earth to teach teens, teachers and the public about water.
"Our team of scientists and educators at the Planetary Science Institute looks forward to contributing to the expansion of the Laurel Clark Earth Camp Experience and to working with colleagues at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and the Water Resources Research Center," said David Crown, a co-investigator on the NASA project and Assistant Director of the Planetary Science Institute. "The partnership of these three Tucson institutions should result in an innovative program for improving science education."
"The PSI scientist/educator team will support the Laurel Clark Earth Camp Experience project through design of and instruction in training activities for educators and by providing expertise on the availability, manipulation, and visualization of NASA datasets for the Earth," Crown said.
Programs and interactive exhibits will look at water resources on a "powers of 10" framework, from the smallest scale properties of the water molecule to intermediate scales of water in the desert ecosystems to the global scale of climate change and predicted impacts on the water cycle.
The Earth Camp will be composed of six elements: Workshops for Informal Science Educators, Summer Earth Camp Programs for Teens, Teacher Earth Camp, Exhibit Design Workshop (with traveling poster and on-line exhibits) and Earth Clubs at Schools, with all coming together to create a cohort of Earth Stewards dedicated to education and informed environmental decision-making.
The project will expand Earth Camp, first established in 2005, in several ways, Crown said.
It will use recruiting and scholarships to include a larger number of students from underrepresented groups; increase the duration and amount of contact time with students; add teacher cohorts through professional development workshops and follow-on contact so that teachers will receive support for incorporating NASA data into their science teaching and be encouraged to establish Earth or Environment Clubs at their schools; and establish Laurel Clark Earth Stewards Cohorts for implementation of activities related to the content matter of Earth Camps at Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and community events.
The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is the lead organization on the project, which is named after Laurel Clark, an astronaut who lost her life in the Columbia space shuttle tragedy.
"The expansion of the Earth Camp Experience is a very meaningful extension of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum's vision to create innovative learning experiences about our planet," said Robert Edison, ASDM Executive Administrative Director. "This represents a significant achievement in the Desert Museum's mission to foster understanding of the natural world and we are honored to be selected by NASA."
"We're very excited to receive our first NASA grant which will give students the tools to navigate the complex environmental issues and decisions they will face during their lifetimes, said Debra Colodner, Project Director and Desert Museum Education Director and Earth Scientist. "Using snapshots of the global view enjoyed by Laurel Clark, teens and teachers will learn and teach others about the connections between their lives and the changing Earth System."
The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum/Planetary Science Institute/Arizona Project Wet team was one of nine groups selected to receive a total of $7 million in grants from NASA's Competitive Program for Science Museums and Planetariums. The NASA program focuses on enhancing educational outreach related to space exploration, aeronautics, space science, Earth science and microgravity.
David Crown, Thea Canizo, Sanlyn Buxner and Alice Baldridge of Planetary Science Institute worked with Desert Museum staff to develop an education and public outreach proposal for the program.
"Science centers and planetariums contribute significantly to engaging people of all ages in science, technology, engineering and math," said James Stofan, acting associate administrator for NASA's Office of Education. "NASA wants to give the informal education community access to a variety of agency staff and resources while offering professional development opportunities for informal science educators and encouraging the formation of collaborative partnerships."
CONTACT:
David Crown
Assistant Director
520-622-6300
crown@psi.edu
Mapping project reinforces belief in huge historic seas on Mars
June 7, 2010 - A geologic mapping project using NASA spacecraft data offers new evidence that expansive lakes existed long ago on Mars.
The research points to a series of sedimentary deposits consistent with what would relate to large standing bodies of water in Hellas Planitia located in the southern hemisphere of Mars, said by Dr. Leslie Bleamaster, research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute.
Fine-layered outcrops around the eastern rim of Hellas have been interpreted as a series of sedimentary deposits resulting from erosion and transport of highland rim materials into a basin-wide standing body of water, Bleamaster said. Hellas basin, more than 2,000 km across and 8 km deep, is the largest recognized impact structure on the Martian surface, he said.
The mapping project reinforces earlier research that initially proposed Hellas-wide lakes citing different evidence in the west, he said. The new map and accompanying map pamphlet may be found at http://pubs.usgs.gov/sim/3096/
"This mapping makes geologic interpretations consistent with previous studies, and constrains the timing of these putative lakes to the early-middle Noachian period on Mars, between 4.5 and 3.5 billion years ago," he said.
A systematic search of high-resolution images revealed that eastern Hellas Planitia, where the fine-layered floor deposits were discovered, is unique in nature representing a confluence between sedimentary sources and sinks. The circum-Hellas highlands represent a significant percentage of the southern hemisphere of Mars and have served as a locus for volcanic and sedimentary activity throughout Martian geologic time. Hellas Planitia preserves the materials shed from these highlands and holds the key to further unraveling some of Mars' long held secrets. "Our mapping and evaluation of landforms and materials of the Hellas region from the basin rim to floor provides further insight into Martian climate regimes and into the abundance, distribution, and flux of volatiles through history," Bleamaster said.
The geologic mapping was published at 1:1,000,000 scale and used Viking Orbiter, Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) infrared (IR) and visible (VIS) wavelength, and Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) narrow-angle images, combined with Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) topographic data, to characterize the geologic materials and processes that have shaped this region and was supported through NASA's Planetary Geology and Geophysics program.
CONTACT:
Dr. Leslie Bleamaster
Research Scientist
210-437-2805
lbleamas@psi.edu
SCIENCE TEAM SAYS GIANT METEORITE, NOT VOLCANOES, KILLED DINOSAURS
March 4, 2010 - A team of scientists, including Elisabetta Pierazzo, a senior scientist at the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute, has concluded that a giant meteorite impact is still the best explanation for the disappearance of dinosaurs and many other species 65.5 million years ago.
The 41 scientists, from Europe, Mexico, Canada, Japan and the United States, published their results today in the highly respected scientific journal Science, concluding that alternative hypotheses are inadequate in explaining the abrupt mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period.
Scientists refer to this point in the geologic record as the K/Pg boundary, and attribute it to extreme climate change caused by the Chicxulub (Chick-shuh-loob) meteorite impact.
Pierazzo, who began modeling the impact as a Ph.D. student, was the first scientist to develop high-resolution, 3-D simulations of the Chicxulub event as an oblique impact. This work was done in collaboration with David Crawford, of Sandia National Laboratory. The results clearly showed that the effects on Earth's climate were even more dramatic than had been previously hypothesized. The simulation showed huge amounts of sulfur oxides were ejected into the upper atmosphere, drastically altering the Earth's climate.
However, some scientists have disputed the Chicxulub hypothesis, attributing the climate change and mass extinctions to volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps, an area on the Indian subcontinent. They theorize that global cooling and acid rain resulting from this volcanic activity were the major cause of mass extinctions, not the Chicxulub impact in Mexico.
"Large amounts of sulfur oxides were injected into the atmosphere during the Deccan volcanism," Pierazzo said. "But they were distributed in several pulses that extended over several hundred thousand years before - and after - the K/Pg boundary. Yet, the major, large biotic changes at the end of the Cretaceous era appear to have happened abruptly and exactly at the K/Pg boundary, when Chicxulub hit."
Marine and terrestrial ecosystems showed only minor changes during the 500,000 years leading up to the K/Pg boundary, the researchers conclude in the Science article. But an abrupt and major decrease in the mass of living things and species diversity occurs precisely at the boundary.
This data, along with new data derived from ocean drilling samples and continental sites, as well as reanalysis of previous K/Pg boundary studies, leads the research team to conclude that the Chicxulub impact hypothesis has grown stronger than ever.
"Combining all available data from different science disciplines led us to conclude that a large asteroid impact 65 million years ago in modern-day Mexico was the major cause of the mass extinctions," says Peter Schulte, assistant professor at the University of Erlangen in Germany and lead author of the review paper.
According to analysis of the Chicxulub crater in Yucatan, Mexico and other data from the geologic record, scientists conclude that the meteorite was between 10 and 15 kilometers in diameter and hit Earth at a speed 20 times faster than a rifle bullet. The resulting explosion was a billion times larger than the Hiroshima atomic bomb and a million times larger than the biggest nuclear bomb ever tested.
NASA Awards PSI $750,000 to Help Teachers Improve Science Education
Feb. 18, 2010 - The Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute has received a $750,000 NASA grant to help teachers improve science education. The grant will fund professional development workshops and creation of teaching resources for elementary and middle school teachers in Arizona, Texas and Wisconsin.
PSI scientists are collaborating on the project with the Tucson Regional Science Center, a partnership of three independent school districts and several charter schools that is led by Tucson Unified School District. The RSC supports member districts with nationally recognized instructional kits that include books, readers, teachers' guides and other materials that support science curricula.
"This collaboration will lead to further opportunities to engage teachers and students in space science, and will increase innovative and effective educational efforts to apply real-life applications to how we learn science," said RSC Coordinator Joan Gilbert.
Recent budget cuts to education have reduced or eliminated many professional development opportunities in Arizona, which makes the PSI workshops even more important, said Larry Lebofsky, a PSI senior education specialist.
"Our workshops give teachers the credit hours they need to renew teaching certificates, as required by the State of Arizona," Lebofsky said. "The workshops also provide teachers with experience and knowledge that will help them pass the AEPA (Arizona Educator Proficiency Assessments) Middle Grades General Science Test. This test is a state requirement for those who teach science at the middle-school level."
Materials developed through the grant also will be used to enhance science education in Texas and Wisconsin, where some of PSI's scientists are located, said David Crown, PSI assistant director and principal investigator on the project. PSI includes researchers in 15 states, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Russia and Australia. "PSI's distributed nature makes it possible for us to easily expand our programs and provide resources to many other communities" Crown said.
He noted that NASA received 103 proposals for its newly created program -- Opportunities in Education and Public Outreach for Earth and Space Science -- and PSI's proposal was among the 28 selected.
Crown said the funding will allow PSI to:
- Offer a series of professional development workshops that target elementary and middle school teachers in the Tucson area.
- Create a series of instructional rock kits to be used in the workshops and that teachers can take to their classrooms.
- Generate materials, including scientific visualizations and web-based virtual tours of planetary surfaces, to teach key concepts in earth and space science.
- Establish a web-based "Ask-An-Expert" site where students, teachers, and the public can directly interact with PSI scientists.
The grant will help PSI to further develop and expand the NASA-supported teacher workshops (www.psi.edu/epo/papt) it has been conducting since September 2008. So far, 57 science teachers from 42 schools in Tucson have attended six offerings of three different workshops in the "Planets are Places Too" series: "Moon- Earth System," "Exploring the Terrestrial Planets," and "Impact Cratering." Teachers who attended the workshops teach approximately 3,600 students in grades 1 through 9.
"Most elementary school teachers have limited backgrounds and training in the sciences" said Thea Cañizo, a PSI education support specialist. "These workshops help teachers gain knowledge about astronomy, geology, and planetary science. They participate in hands-on exercises using images, maps, and the results from their own experiments, modeling the processes and skills scientists use. They can then take this knowledge of how science is conducted into their classrooms with greater confidence in their ability to teach science."
Teachers who have attended the workshops cite hands-on activities, learning the scientific process, and interaction with scientists as the top three benefits, Lebofsky said.
Marguerite Samples, a teacher at Tucson's Dunham elementary school said, "Recently I took a class offered at PSI and was thrilled with my experience. Not only did I gain insight about Mars and our neighboring planets, but I discovered a new resource that I can tap into to enrich the minds of my students. Besides offering classes to teachers, PSI has wonderful resources you can bring into the classroom and guest speakers who can come and talk with students."
"It was a great experience and I am excited to see what other classes they have to offer," she said.
In addition to principal investigator David Crown, the project team includes PSI educators Lebofsky, Cañizo, Sanlyn Buxner and Steven Croft, as well as PSI scientists Alice Baldridge, Les Bleamaster, Frank Chuang, Steve Kortenkamp, Elisabetta Pierazzo, and Aileen Yingst. Others involved in the project include Steven Anderson, director of the University of Northern Colorado's Mathematics and Science Teaching Institute, and Christopher Andersen and Bill Schmitt of the Science Center of Inquiry.
Teachers work with a radionuclide decay chart during one of PSI's "Planets Are Places, Too" workshops.
PSI Scientist Describes Wind-Driven Rovers in Chapter of New Mars Book
Jan. 11, 2010 - Wind-driven research platforms that could roll like tumbleweeds across the surface of Mars are the subject of a 38-page book chapter written by Kim Kuhlman and her colleagues.
Kuhlman, a senior scientist with the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute, is the lead author on "Tumbleweed: A New Paradigm for Surveying the Surface of Mars for In-situ Resources." The chapter appears in "Mars: Prospective Energy and Materials Resources," published today by Springer Publishing Co.
Tumbleweeds are lightweight, inexpensive vehicles that can carry a variety of instruments and cover large swaths of terrain as winds push them across the landscape. They are designed to bridge the gap between large-scale surveys done by orbital platforms and intensive, small-scale research conducted by rovers, Kuhlman said.
The vehicles, some of which resemble beach balls on steroids, are based on well-developed and tested technology, Kuhlman added.
An inflatable Tumbleweed was tested in Greenland in 2003 and in Antarctica in 2004 by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The latest version, deployed in Greenland in 2004, covered more than 200km across an ice sheet on a four-day run. During that time, it communicated via the Iridium satellite network to a ground station at the JPL. The Tumbleweed gathered data on temperature, pressure, and its GPS location.
Since Tumbleweeds are light and relatively inexpensive, several could fly on one mission, and they could hitch rides on larger missions, she noted.
Other scientists who contributed to the chapter include: Alberto
Behar, Jack Jones, Max Coleman and Daniel W. Wilson, of the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory; Penelope Boston, of New Mexico Tech; Jeffrey
Antol, Gregory Hajos and Warren Kelliher, of NASA Langley Research
Center; Ronald Crawford, of the University of Idaho; Lynn
Rothschild, of the NASA-Ames Research Center; Martin Buehler, of
Decagon Devices; and Greg Bearman, of Snapshot Spectra.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's six-foot tumbleweed rover took a seven- day, 80-mile journey across Antarctica in 2004. Credit: NASA
PSI Receives $2.5 Million NASA Grant to Archive Asteroid and Dust Data
Jan. 5, 2010 - The Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute has received a NASA grant of nearly $2.5 million to continue archiving data relating to asteroids and space dust.
PSI has been part of NASA's Planetary Data System (PDS) effort to preserve, organize and make mission data available to the scientific community since the PDS was formed in the early 1990s.
The grant, which runs for five years, will fund PSI work on the Asteroid/Dust Subnode of the PDS Small Bodies Node, said Donald R. Davis, a PSI senior scientist who is the principal investigator on the project. The Small Bodies Node is one of a half dozen groups in PDS, and each group includes additional Subnodes, such as the one administered by PSI.
"NASA established PDS as a long-term archive for data collected on planetary missions," Davis explained. "NASA's Planetary Science Division spends more than a billion dollars each year to acquire data, and the PDS is the primary way in which this data is made available to the scientific community, both for immediate analysis and for future use."
There's a lot more to archiving than simply tossing data into a computer file and noting where it is, Davis explained. Data must be archived in a way that makes it easy to retrieve and scientifically useful.
"We make sure the data is well described so that scientists ten, 15 or even 50 years from now can understand how it was taken, the instrument used, the spacecraft and the mission objectives," Davis said. "All of this has to be adequately described and documented. Without this background, a bunch of tables, numbers or images are much less useful. We also include published papers that are based on a particular dataset."
PSI has developed an On-Line Archiving Facility (OLAF) that guides mission scientists in preparing their datasets for inclusion in the Asteroid/Dust Subnode. The data and its accompanying support material is then peer reviewed and any weaknesses in the dataset are referred back to the researcher or researchers for further clarification before the data is added to the archive.
All this generally takes place quickly because researchers can apply for NASA funding to analyze the data only after it has been archived in PDS, Davis explained. "So it's important that the data gets in, gets validated and gets peer reviewed in a timely manner," he said.
PSI also is developing a Data Ferret that will make it much easier for a scientist to sift through the increasingly voluminous holdings in the Asteroid/Dust Subnode to find what he or she is looking for.
This tool, which should be operational sometime in 2010, will allow a scientist to query the archive using standard scientific terms, rather than computer-specific terminology. The Data Ferret will then search through the holdings and return a list of datasets, which the scientist can ask the Data Ferret to further sift and refine.
The Small Bodies Group also includes ground-based observations in the archive to make it even more useful, Davis said. "A mission can tell you an awful lot about a single body, but you really want to be able to extrapolate that to the entire population of thousands of comets, millions of asteroids, and endless amounts of space dust," he said. "We're really interested in populations, not just individuals visited by missions, and the larger datasets in small bodies are taken primarily by ground-based observations."
The group also is including data gathered by amateur astronomers, who have the knowledge and sophisticated equipment -- CCDs and half-meter class telescopes, for instance -- to do professional quality work. Nearly all the data on asteroid light curves, for instance, is now collected by amateur astronomers, Davis noted.
All of this effort to preserve data in a scientifically useful archive will be as important in the future as it is now. "After all, there is no use-by date on scientific data, and researchers frequently want to re-examine old data as new theories and data analysis techniques are developed," Davis explained.
Reprocessing data with modern data-reduction techniques can lead to new discoveries, he noted. In addition, comparing current observations with previous ones identifies changes that have occurred, which gives scientists new insights into processes working on solar system bodies.
Fifty years from now, this data will form a priceless archive to help future generations in their quest to understand the solar system and their place in it, Davis said.
The Planetary Science Institute is a private, nonprofit corporation founded in 1972 and dedicated to solar system exploration. It is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona.
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, dynamics, the rise of life, and other areas of research. They conduct fieldwork in North America, Australia and Africa. They also are actively involved in science education and public outreach through school programs, children's books, popular science books and art.
The Institute's researchers are based in 15 states, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Switzerland and Australia.
