Dr. Eric E. Palmer Ph.D. in Planetary Science University of Arizona, 2009 M.S. in Space Studies University of North Dakota, 2000 M.A. in Political Science Purdue University, 1991 B.S. in Computer Science Purdue University, 1990

Contact:

Current Research:

The Dawn mission to the asteroid Vesta (4) with Dr. Mark Sykes and Project Mercator, a joint project with Raytheon to develop naviation software using only a terrain model and the horizon.

This set of images was taken on June 20th as Dawn approached Vesta. We created this movie from a sequence of 20 image taken over about one hour. Exposure time was 9ms. The image on the left is the original image, while the image on the right was sharpened and interpolated to bring out as much detail as possible.

Projects:

Stability and Transport of Carbon Dioxide on Iapetus
Photolytic Generation of Carbon Dioxide
Aqueous Alteration of the CM Chondrites
Asteroid Database Data have been derived from the asteroid database at Lowell, Binzel's database, and data from the PDS. The data should be a direct reflections of the data sets that they came from, so their accuracy should evaluated accordingly.

Published Papers:

• Palmer, E. E. and Lauretta, D. S. "Aqueous alteration of kamacite in CM chondrites." Meteoritics and Planetary Science. Vol 46, pp. 1587-1607.
• Palmer, E. E. and Brown, R. H. (2010) "The Detection and Production of Carbon Dioxide on Iapetus Icarus. Volume 212, pp 807-818.
• Palmer, E. E. (2009) Volatiles on Solar System Objects: Carbon dioxide on Iapetus and Aqueous Alteration in CM Chondrites Ph.D. Thesis.
  • Chapter 1 - Introduction
  • Chapter 2 - Stability of Carbon Dioxide
  • Chapter 3 - A Possible Trace Carbon Dioxide Polar Cap
  • Chapter 4 - Production of Carbon Dioxide on Iapetus
  • Chapter 5 - Aqueous Alteration of Kamacite in CM Chondrites
  • Chapter 6 - Conclusion
  • Appendix A- Full Listing of EMPA Data
  • Appendix B- Summary of Alteration
  • References
• Palmer, E. E. and Brown, R. H. (2008) "The stability and transport of carbon dioxide on Iapetus" Icarus. Volume 195, Issue 1, pp 434-446.
• Palmer, E. E. and Brown, R. H. (2007) "A possible trace carbon dioxide polar cap on Iapetus." Astrophysical Journal, Letters. Volume 666, Number 2.