Kevin D. McKeegan. William Bottke. Solomon/Nittler/Anderson/Byrne. M.E. Schmidt. E.B. Rampe. Carol Raymond. Fran Bagenal. Robert Pappalardo. Ralph Lorenz. Hunter Waite. Krista Soderlund. Dale Cruikshank.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQEEtyF3xBQ

This LPI lecture is more than three hours long, so take breaks between speakers. It's meant to be a treat

The opening bit is a talk by Kevin McKeegan titled From a Sun-Kissed Moon to the Solar Nebula. It's a talk about protoplanetary conditions with emphasis on Oxygen isotopes; those being a major method of finding out which asteroid came from what parent body. Have I mentioned yet that most speakers will have a specific probe they focus on in their talk? This one is the Genesis mission. Probably the coolest looking steampunk probe so far, though future Venus landers may compete one day. Summary at 16:20.

The next talk starts at 18:58 and is titled Highlights of Planet Migration and Bombardment, by William Bottke. It's about the mysterious first billion years of Sol, and the most certain events that took place then. This is a very exciting period and knowing it better would provide a great deal of aid to current questions, but just think about it; Thea, the Mercury chaos-impactor, the two Vestan impactors, The Mars north-pole impactor (if there ever was one). All these planetesimals; each could have been a world. They existed, and the solar system was quite different then. Questions and Conclusions at 30:26.

The next talk is titled First Rock from the Sun: 50 years of Mercury Exploration. Featuring Messenger, one of my favorite probes. At 39:42 an interesting detail comes up. You see, with Mercury its high density remains unsolved. Messenger created more questions than it answered. A giant impact is evident on the surface. One that seems to have shattered off the original crust and sent ripples through the planet. It would be nice if we could tie-in that event to help explain other things like a big core, but the high percent of surface volatiles doesn't fit, and the premise of a highly reducing formation could have slurped certain metals like Iron into the core, creating a whole new headache for chemists. Beppi Colombo has been called for since Messengers message was a shrug.

The Exploreation of Venus spoken by Paul Byrne comes next. Featuring a few missions such as Magellan and ESA's crowning jewel until JUICE, Venus Express. It has come to our attention that we know way less about Venus than we should. One should be able to blow-off or confirm something as shocking as phosphine. But we never even knew how Venus replaces it's H₂SO₄. The context of Venus has changed greatly over the years. Instead of certain probe doom the tech to land something a bit more durable has appeared, and balloon probes including seismometers are viable. Venus has a number of mysteries concerning it's super-cell and crustal properties. One hypothesis that's making rounds is the idea that a Venusian volcano sat stationary atop its hotspot and grew so large that it sank and pulled the whole crust in with it. It's also possible that there are patches of stuff buoyant enough to have survived. Queries at 1:01:00. 

The next talk is titled Igneous Mars: Crust and Mantle Evolution as seen by Rover Geochemistry, Martian Meteorites, and Remote Sensing. Presented by M.E. Schmidt. I find it interesting that she opens by calling out the-law-of-superposition then noting the altitude of the Noachian. At the same time she shows a slide depicting the Hellas impact at the division of the Prenoachian and Noachian, which she doesn't follow up on, and I've never seen before. At about 1:05:00 she shows a fantastic progression on an XY graph which is showing you how probes have been constraining the mineral distribution as it's been discovered by meteorites and the rovers. Whereas this talk is one of the better information-dumps regarding Mars with many excellent observations in sequence, there still aren't a lot of answers. Altogether she does indeed make a good case to show there is evidence that Mars' lithosphere is chemically changing as it cools, grows, and thickens. Summary at 1:16:35.

There is a second talk about Mars titled The Sedimentary History of Mars as Observed by Rovers, presented by E.B. Rampe. Slide at 1:22:12, a common slide I've seen many times but with a great twist. You see, the era's of Mars tell a story that sidesteps a lot of controversy. Originally scientists with 70's era probes and information divided two Era's, the Hesperian and Amazonian. Plains vs Volcano stuff, and the volcano stuff was lumped together as where they saw sulfates from fly-by's. Sulfates form when volcanic gasses interact with water in any form, so where there are sulfates, that proves volcanoes and ice or something, were at the same place and time. Later the large flow basins were forming a pattern, so the Noachian era (Named for Noah from The Bible) was separated from the Hesperian. Then the crater counts started coming in, and there was clearly a Pre-Noachian. That's how the four era's evolved. It's never been up for debate... the Noachian flows came before the Hesperian volcanoes. Where this slide has a marker, something changed. The clays that didn't have sulfates in them before, now did. These slides are observational and packed with information. Enough to load up several hypothesis, not enough to shoot too many down. 

Ceres and Vesta: Diverse, Enigmatic Small Planets from the Dawn of the Solar System is the title of the next talk presented by Carol Raymond. Timestamp 1:36:06 "Of the Howard at you cried diet tonight" (closed-captioning is fun.) Howardite, Eucrite, Diogenite, what almost all asteroids are made of, and what Vesta is made of. You see, the Asteroid-Belt is a myth. Vesta, Ceres, Pallas, and Hygiea make up half the Asteroid-Belt by weight. And most of the rest of it, used to be Vesta. It's very likely Jupiter tacked in, then out, and compressed the orbits of Mars and the Asteroid-Belt while doing so. Warming an ice-ball Mars and bunching up objects that were further apart prior. At 1:41:42 no Olivine is exposed in Vesta's interior. That means Vesta never, never ever, even when it was whole, had an Earth-like mantle. We know it was differentiated, because we just saw that in the previous slide, and that means it was liquefied three times to some depth. The core isn't exposed but it would be interesting to see whats it there because it may have differentiated three times. The heavy stuff that sank went to the core the first time for sure, but may have stopped short later. If the Rheasilvia impact melted more than Veneneia, then there would be only one melt-limit, but if they melted about the same there may be two off-center. Some seismometers would be a blast. 

Fran Bagenal speaks for Jupiter at 1:49:20. Exploration of Jupiter is the title. At 1:52:50, the IO Plasma Torus. Probably the second most awesome thing in the solar system nobody seems to know about, right after the IO Flux Tube. Jupiter and IO are connected by a rather large voltage that traces a regular aurora around Jupiter. That’s the Flux Tube. The Plasma Torus is a diffuse ring filling IO’s orbit, very similar to Enceladus and Saturn's E-ring. The difference between the E-ring and the Plasma Torus is they are made of different stuff, and the Plasma Torus also carries a large voltage. The Galileo mission expanded on Jupiter in a number of ways, but when talking about Jupiter, we really are talking about energy in so many ways. Gravity, Electromagnetism, and Radiation. The radiation of Jupiter is mostly not emitted from Jupiter, it’s solar radiation trapped in Jup̨iter’s magnetosphere. Galileo found that Ganymede also has a rare magnetosphere, and that radiation is less, not more, above the surface of Ganymede. Normally Jupiter deletes atmospheres from it’s moons. IO is trying as hard as it can to have an atmosphere, but Ganymede can fight back a little, and does have a very slight atmosphere of mostly elemental forms of oxygen. So you see Jupiter is intimately connected with IO and Ganymede. They are practically touching. Summary at 2:00:48.

Robert Pappalardo starts his talk at 2:03:00 titled From the Moon to the Icy Galilean Satellites. You have to let it sink in how odd and wonderful Ganymede and Callisto are. Because they are icy, that builds-in alien physics with sublimation being a thing. Chondritic caps can protect what they cover, and hoodoos can form directly under what they don't. Random bubbling under a clear pane of ice will form and spray out CO₂ when heated by any little thing. The surface might at places look like Bryce Canyon made of glass, and when The-Sun hits it, snowing up like you're in the tail of a comet. None of the cameras that have been there can resolve down close enough to say that's not there, so I'm free to guess the dull cratered worlds are perhaps labyrinths of shimmering clear crystal, glorious and intimidating if you were actually there. Europa, if you haven't had this epiphany yet, is very-probably habitable by some definitions. You could engineer animals that could live there later tonight. All that's left to do is to go there, which sadly is a process we are only getting started. Europa will be a big screaming deal from now until the distant-foreseeable future. It's inevitable. Check out that slide at 2:11:37, then make sure you understand what's being told. Allow it to blow your mind. 

The next speaker, Ralph Lorenz, has a talk titled Titan Since Apollo. Certainly Titan needs it's own lecture. From Voyager to Cassini was probably the largest knowledge burst in the history of space exploration. And Titan went from a shrouded mystery to a roughly North-Carolina-Avenue but certainly green on the Monopoly board tiles of real-estate. Titan has an obvious source of exploitable energy, Lunar gravity, hyperabundant water and over an atmospheric bar, so you certainly could put an outpost there, you would just need a lot of insulation and patience. Titan is quite far away, that distance gap puts this kind of speculative-fiction outside my, and probably everyone else's lifetime, but it can be done. You don't have to take my word for any of this. As proof, Dragonfly was green-lit the moment it hit the proposal table. That was a first, and I'm slightly exaggerating. Titan went from a near complete unknown to among the most interesting places in the solar system the moment it was kinda known. Even now there are few definite's to say. It's atmosphere is complex, it's dunes are complex, it's erosional history is alien and complex. It will be a core target for exploration for decades to come.  

The next talk is titled Enceladus: A Habitable Ocean World presented by Hunter Waite, and lets take a moment to dwell on a recent point. You may have noticed some of the most famous planetary scientists do not hesitate to beg-promote for probes. You would too given the audience and constraints. Dragonfly was going to be green-lit. An Enceladus mission is far less likely, but as likely as average for now. Enceladus may be, is the beauty queen of the solar system, but the Europa Clipper is already doing the trick that an Enceladus Clipper is trying to pull, and the Europa Clipper is a Special Flagship Mission, not a proposal. So it may be that a mission to Enceladus may be delayed till after we see how Europa Clipper preforms in order to build a better sniffer. It could also just be delayed to death. Venus, Europa, Titan, a Uranus or Neptune Flagship, which will put Triton on the table, did I mention Mars, they will never sit down and shut-up. Enceladus' appeal won't go away, but may have already lost it's edge. All that said, this speaker nervously dumps a ton of technical Enceladus info. Speaking for myself I have already recklessly leapt to the conclusion that Enceladus is a world that tried to rebuild from the moon or moons that were destroyed to make Saturn's rings, then rebuilt itself to a point of equilibrium where Saturn won't let it grow larger. I also believe the E-ring can compare to the Plasma Torus beyond what is currently measured, but all these speculations are nothing-but until a probe goes and gets the hard proof.  

Krista Soderlund presents her talk, Exploration of Uranus and Neptune: Looking Into the Past and Towards the Future of Ice Giant Planets. Note that both ice giants and their many moons are lumped into one talk. That's because other than Voyager and some space telescope spectrometry, they are completely unexplored. Of the moons of Uranus, Miranda is truly unique, and all the moons larger than Miranda have lower resolution images. But something's going on with the shape of Titania, and Titania and Oberon both look old. Callisto old, so the crater morphology on one or both could go a long way to narrowing the formation of the solar system mysteries. Then Neptune and Triton are obvious. There's a ton of virtually unexplored, yet certainly intriguing stuff out there, and one flagship mission cannot be enough. At 3:01:24 she gives a nice priority scale for each Ice-Giant. Conclusions at 3:02:00.

The final talk is spoken by Dale Cruikshank and titled Fifty Years of Exploring Pluto: From Telescopes to the New Horizons Mission. I'm going to pistol-whip the next person who tries to recite to me the histories of Percival Lowell or Clyde Tombaugh. A long time ago, when the New Horizons flyby was happening, there was a part of the mission where they tried to see the "dark side" of Pluto using "Charon-shine" for light. I'm getting impatient. It hasn't come. It's implicit that there's been a problem, but they haven't mentioned a problem either. There's just silence on the topic. Slide at 3:09:23 is worth watching this far. A bit of a geological map. Incomplete without the Charon-shine. The nitrogen glaciers and the "tectonics without tidal heating," are a huge deal. This truly makes large KBO's distinct from comets. KBO binaries (which will one day be the final nomenclature of the P-C system) exchange material and energy, and while the P-C System is moving away and into shadow for centuries, other KBO binaries will appear from the shadows. Looking so far away, the suns light plays angles. KBO's too distant to have come into the light will emerge as the P-C system fades. Most likely Haumea and it's cluster of KBO's have some intimate relationship. Eris and Dysnomia may have more of a classic moon relationship, whereas Charon tidally locks Pluto and the two have four satellites together that orbit them both proportionately. I think a theme of these KBO's is likely to emerge, and the P-C system is after-all the only proven binary in our solar system, making it extra special.