"The CV and the CK chondrites are so similar that they've been describes as a clan"-Tasha Dunn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHtlCWAi4EI

This LPI is about tracking certain small meteorites back to a parent body. For example more than half of all asteroids are fragments of Vesta. Other asteroids must be fragments of something else right? It's actually common, one vestoid may have been broken into smaller pieces for example. 

The way you find out is either backtrack the orbits and see if they merge, but that only works for something recent and flying in a noticeable cluster. Or you collect a bunch of meteorites and see that some of them are similar, and guess that they may have come from a common parent body. That's what this LPI is about. 

• Our speaker is an undergrad teacher, and as such she builds her argument from a more fundamental level than a professor free of a class schedule would. That's great for us, she spends the first half of the lecture explaining everything one needs to understand the second half of the lecture using beautiful and intuitive slides. I think they speak for themselves and need no highlighting from me.
• The meat of the lecture starts around 12:20. This is where she starts transferring away from background.
• Slide at 17:55 is when she starts the question of if CV's and CK's came from the same parent asteroid. 
• At 20:20 she demonstrates the dilemma. One parent body or two, either has redox problems.
• At 23:55 she shows a sample that may be a transitional phase between the two and therefore support the one-parent-body path. Most of the remaining lecture is interrogating this premise.
• At 44:15 the argument is complicated. 
• Conclusions at 45:05.

I find the Late Heavy Bombardment, and any kind of early bombardment fascinating. So many things seem to hinge upon it. So many asteroids, trojans, and the like seem to be fragments of it. I wonder how many Mars-sized objects there really were, or if there were more Vestas. Taking meteorites from the ground and getting a thin-slice is the primary tool we have to look into such things, so it's no surprise that progress is slow. Maybe one day we will know the origins of each large asteroid though.  

"The presence of liquid water was not all that long in terms of the full geological history."-Shannon Curry 

This LPI is about atmospheric loss on Earth, Venus, and Mars. The methods for finding those rates are headache inducing, but if you have the skills then the details you need to recreate the research are in here. 

• Slide at 1:45 our speaker defines a few categories of how atoms escape their planet. She uses the term Jean’s Escape, which just means hotter, lighter molecules escape more regularly than heavy and cold molecules. 
• At 3:35 Venus’ ion escape is highlighted. The greater the solar wind, the more Venus builds an induced magnetic field, thus slowing the erosion rate. However the ionic pressure of solar-wind protons still picks up any negatively charged atoms they come into contact with, so the slowing is weak yet turbulent. 
• Slide at 7:00, photo-chemical escape is dominant on Mars, largely because the two oxygen's in carbon-dioxide are essentially exposed. When a heavy molecule tries to escape Mars, it usually does, and Mars cannot recollect it as easily as Earth and Venus can.
• At 10:10 the most important part in my opinion, the method they use to predict past atmospheres is tricky. One can’t just scale the current rate back in time to get the old atmosphere. Certain assumptions are taken on and the modelers know they won’t all work out. The bottom line is extrapolating old atmospheres is an active field that has a long way to go. 
• Slide at 11:25, Mars must have been losing the lions share of it’s peak atmosphere over only the Noachian. You can’t wind it back from anywhere near were it is at anything close to it’s current rate of loss. The climate of Mars would have been cooling noticeably year to year as soon as Mars was solid. 

This lecture is just a bit older than the Phosphine announcement, so she doesn’t yet know of the upcoming probes heading to Venus. I was really happy to find this lecture again, I saw it when it was recent and often would refer to it, but couldn't recall detail enough to find it in LPI’s archive. When MAVEN concluded it’s primary goals they did a team press conference where all the investigators had a bit, and I think Curry was one of them. Our speaker Curry by the way is the current PI of MAVEN while Jakowsky was the original one. That talk (which I swear was a Von Karmen lecture) seems to not exist anymore but it was the best MAVEN report I saw. Much of the content in there recurs about three years later in this lecture. 

"And this opens a new field for the study of nuclear synthetic anomalies"-Ke Zhu

This LPI is using the relative abundances of Chromium to infer some details about what kinds of minerals were abundant in the very early solar system proto-planets. Ureilite and Aubrite meteors are often speculated to be of Mercury origin, or otherwise a protoplanet that has since been destroyed and the majority of its debris consumed in other planetary bodies. Chromium isotope dating is great for us because 3.7 million years is a pretty modest margin by astrogeology standards. 

• At 10:00 a nice overview of early chondrites
• At 15:00 he goes into the chondrules components. Some of the eldest bits known.
• At 23:30 he starts going over rocky worlds, Earth, Vesta, and Mars.
• At 46:20 he touches on the origins of Phobos and Demos as ejecta, which is widely accepted though still a bit of a secret. Chromium dating supports. 

I really like isotopic dating but I have to confess relative abundances of isotopes puts me straight to sleep. This lecture took me a minute to get though, but the good side is that it really was a thorough disclosure for those who better my attention span. It's perfect for those with aptitude for this kind of chemistry. The relevance of course is fundamental. Employment for isotopic dating is now and will continue to be in high demand. 

"If they formed in the same location they are in today [you would expect them to be much more homogenous.]"-Cathy Olkin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPEVJy3e5rQ

Skip ahead to 3:24. The formal lectures have long, tedious, speaker introductions.

This LPI is a preview of the Lucy mission to Jupiter's Trojans. It has already launched, and is flying to it's first target at the time this blog is published, which in turn is two years younger than the lecture. Trojans are objects that sit in Jupiter's Lagrange Points. There are five Lagrange Points for every planet, Jupiter has clusters of objects at L3, L4, and L5. Specifically Lucy will be going through L4 and later L5 too. L4 leads and L5 trails Jupiter. If you want to get picky, L3's objects are "Hilda Trojans," L4 are "Greek Trojans," and L5 are "Trojan Trojans." You now can call every group 'Trojans' but when they were first discovered they got different names per group. Some people remain OCD about it. 

The centers of L4, & 5 are always the same distance from the planet as the planet is from The Sun, L3 is always a little closer to The Sun. So Earths are 1 AU away. Jupiter's are 5.2 AU, but L4 and L5 are blurred quite a bit. L4 and L5 are about four AU long and two AU wide, The biggest by far Trojan is named Hektor and is 225 km in diameter, so Trojans are very small things occupying's a space too large to intuitively visualize.

• Slide at 7:55 she begins explaining why this mission got selected. 
• At 14:45 she mentions the first target, a inner main-belt C-type asteroid called DonaldJohanson, expected to be debris from a collision on a larger asteroid. Could be very interesting.
• At 15:50 she lists some of their planned targets, including a binary, only the second binary we will have had a close look at after the Pluto-Charon system.
• At 21:45 she goes over the instrument payload. Note that much of it is the exact same instruments New Horizons carried. They got their instruments off the shelf.
• At 28:20 Q&A begins. 

Trojans aren't just asteroids. Some resemble KBO's and many will be a mix. Tholins have been suspected and so that will be another interesting thing to test. Frankly we don't know much aside a loose mass and Earth-based spectroscopy, so the numbers we do have will certainly undergo refining. This mission has a lot of potential for discoveries to come out of the woodwork. 

"40% of the gold that's ever been mined in the history of humanity."-Matthew S. Huber 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0icEsOcyO8

This LPI is referring to an impact crater in South Africa, Vredefort, one of the three largest known basin forming impact craters on Earth. The lecture emphasizes not gold or mining specifically, but rather structures called granophyre dikes. Dykes are vertically shafted magma, often infiltrating a crack or two strata layers; a chimney or wall of igneous stuff that is younger than the stuff around it, and also a channel for magma to reach the surface. These dykes are not volcanic, but melt from impact energy. Most of it pools, but some fingers of that molten pool reach under the impact producing these dykes.  

• At 1:15 along with a nice slide demonstrating a theme pops up, craters can be infused with ore. Gold ore in the case of Vredefort. 
• At 3:55 he explains the importance of these granophyre dykes. They are all that's left to study of the post-impact molten pool. 
• At 4:30 he shows a pretty slide with inclusions in the dyke. The inclusions have a lot of pattern and structure, this lineated form that implies the dyke was flowing in a particular direction when liquid. 
• At 12:30 he shows inclusions of a different kind, inclusions of a previous melt, implying that the material re-liquified at some point. 
• At 14:25 he starts proposing answers to all the questions he's been trailing.

Huber is a good speaker. I've seen him a few times before and his pacing and detail are somewhat refreshing to my attention span, though he can put a disinterested student to sleep.

Think about this, this gold-ore bearing impact was big and certainly not a gold nugget. The melt described in this lecture represents a mix of native and impact material, and that impact material must have been old. Gold is formed only in supernovae, so this impactor likely was older than Sol. Large and older than Sol implies that the primordial disk involved many large things, some bearing ore. 

Now apply the idea to worlds like Callisto and Mars. How many ore bearing impacts did they catch? Impact basins may be the only places a prospector can expect to find ore. For deep inside Callisto, the ice pulverized debris may settle in a lump or spread out to dilute the salinity so that each fragment separates from others. In Mars case, it may be more Earthly, but with similar dykes dropping more and longer roots. 

A nostalgic cowboy-romance in non-fiction form. This is the memoir of a supreme court justice, not about her life, but about her birthplace and her father. Think if Arya Stark wrote a book about Winterfell, but Americanized completely.

Sandra Day O'Connor and her brother write a book that spends few words on politics, however history of American law is in there regardless. At times not so subtle, this book chronicles the lives of those who lived on The Lazy B ranch, and the changing world distantly around them. If you look you can see America evolve in the background, legally, infrastructurally, and ecologically. 

Politics are downplayed to a minimal. Nothing partisan or truly controversial. It is simply inter-mountain ranching of the twentieth century laid bare for a reader to observe. 

Ken Williford & Panel discussion.

    

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqaOYSJZnNM&list=PLQ7WzZtg-qMBOwOtpLomTbsNcZEXstEmA&index=6

Skip to 13:00, the preceding is fodder.

The primary speaker is giving a pre-Percy talk that is old news by now. Pretty much all he said is dated, questions he didn't have answers for then, he would now. 

This is the first time I'm watching this LPI, and I was hoping it would have better content. It seems to be completely supplemental to the lectures of LPSC 2021 and not the lectures of LPSC 2021 (Which have still not been released.) In other words, they don't have great fact over time ratio and I'm going to discontinue highlighting them unless several people contact me and regard them as valuable. I feel responsible to this second one, but no more. The full conference collection of supplementary videos, which again, do not have any of the actual conference lectures, is here. I don't know why they do it like that, but they do. You have to wait for what they drop and there's little or no order to it.

However you are not wasting your time if you are wanting to learn what Planetary Scientists really behave like. For example at 26:00 you see them untangle a technical miscommunication. They want audience interaction so they gave people the opportunity to ask live questions. Someone asked a elementary question and it blew their minds and sputtered against their technical limitations.

The panel discussion starts at 31:05 and the panelists talk about what they enjoyed of the actual lectures, which one more time, I cannot show because they haven't been published. 

 What this book excels at is encircling "slap-in-the-kisser" type situations and giving a woman tools to recognize them. For example, say you are touchy-feely and he hates being touched, your intended affection is met with revulsion. Anyone can see how hurtful such a situation is, and this book finds and tags many such cases that commonly appear in heterosexual relationships; very effectively.

There's a lot of downside though, It isn't suitable to a male reader, it does not address sex and family planning at all, nor does it address when the best relationship might be solitude or alternative. In other words its got great ammo for a limited scope of issues. It cannot stand alone as your only self-help book and absolutely must be supplemented with others.

 Juliane Gross, L. Miche Aaron, Szilard Gyalay, and Gavin Tolometti. LPSC 52 March 15th 2021.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=846Gqox-E4A&list=PLQ7WzZtg-qMBOwOtpLomTbsNcZEXstEmA&index=4

This is a portion of a conference and also a newish LPI format. Clearly a format they have high hopes for. I'm not sure I like them, they mock the honor of my attention-span, so if any viewers like them, you are going to have to tell me. 

In this LPSC 52 series, this is the first of four videos I'm going to try and break down, each representing a day at the actual conference. In this video there are four speakers, loosely focusing on Mars. 

Skip ahead to 10:30. There's nothing but a failed introduction format/process before 10:30. 

• The core speaker does an Apollo to Artemis talk. She calls attention to an Apollo core sampling; literally an astronaut whacking a tube into the ground. Core samples are hard to come by and you can bet they will gradually become a bigger and bigger deal. I promise any Europa drill will have a LED and a camera on the side. Artemis will be able to test some prototypes.
• The Q&A extends to 23:20 and is ok...
• But then the whole rest of the talk is a panel discussion. It's an awkward experiment LPI did/is-doing in order to try and home in on a way to pack multiple young speakers in a video. I miss when they gave them 5 minutes to blurt out the TLDR of their thesis then beg for a job. putting them in a chat seems to be the trend lately but they end up spending a lot of time in transition or referring to their common experiences. Anyhoo, there is some facts in it, it just doesn't flow great. 
• At 44:15 they announce things they are personally excited about. So you do get good behind-the-scenes context from these panels videos.
• At 48:10, a bit about ammonia on icy worlds. I'm a sucker for the topic of ice-minerals, but alas, it's all hypothetical for now.    

"This is what is referred to as the black hole shadow."-Katie Bouman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGL_OL3OrCE

[Correction]. This sentence below had a number of ways to bite me in the ass. I wrote it for reasons, but they weren't good enough reasons. Let's replace it with a better link, that links to an even better link, and specify Tidal Disruption Events (TDE)s usually don't eject so long after the parent stars consumption. This TDE material was traveling unusually fast, and the implication seems to be that it was asymptoting in a tiny margin near the Event Horizon for a period of nearly three years. 

Yesterday it has been proven that something can escape a black-hole. More specifically something can escape the event-horizon if that something be a particular type of star, and this something undergo an aggressive reprocessing. One wonders what kinds of rare elements come and go in such a process.

This video can show you the last major black-hole event for context. They are deeply related, because so much of black hole observation is an extraordinary and tedious process. This video came after the first black-hole was imaged; an event that was in all the headlines for about 48 hours. But the mightiest nerds among us kept interest longer. 

Katie Bouman had just gotten credit for this discovery and tenure at Cal-Tech, so she's noticeably excited while she zooms through her slides, but good context for the spit-out black-hole is abundant here. 

• At 2:10 I love that animated slide for obvious reasons.
• Another animated slide at 4:10 shows the event horizon as it can be imaged. This would be the same black hole physics, though the scales be different when compared to yesterdays event. 
• She describes methodology for much of the remaining lecture. How they take black hole images turns out to be satisfyingly difficult. She does exactly what she should for the subject matter, meaning it gets mathy and you need physics skills to interpret much of it. But not really, it's more radio physics and you will get the idea from her nomenclature and slide images.
• 45:58 is where you can see where that image is a big deal. Because it isn't certain other specific images.
• At 50:00 she demonstrates that the black hole "evolves" over time, but intentionally does not offer a cause such as plasma, falling material, or magnetism. This is the thing the astrophysicists will be trying to relate to the spit-up black hole. 

The summary has got to be... black holes are hard to measure. Event Horizons alone take this much labor. That's why this is such a big deal. Both the first image and, even more, the event-horizon-burp-thingy.  

"We are flying the entire payload. Nothing was terminated."-Curt Niebur

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjG3TVxr3O4

When you dig through LPI's YouTube channel you find a lot of videos. Most aren't lectures per se, and the ones that are come with great variety. Small vids showing a gif of something are common, talks about how the scientific community can de-jargon, outreach to students, a group of students giggling at their own jokes while feigning to give a talk, all these things are common. So are videos that cover budgets and plans. 

This a sort of a staffing, planning, and budgetary video, also it's a list of active missions. Sounds a little more boring than it is, but the major upside is that it's providing overviews of everything JPL is overseeing from the time of this talk. Much of that is old, but now you have new context. It's easy to forget how many active and ongoing missions there are; I can't remember them all. These types of talks help remind, and give a clear behind the scenes look.

• OSIRIS-REx at 6:55, now old news, the practice maneuvers put the very recent DART impact into Dimorphos in perspective. On that note here's Dimorphos at the point of impact.  
• DART gets a slide at 8:10 
• LUCY at 8:25. Will be going to Jupiter's Trojans.
• Europa Clipper at 9:35
• SIMPLEx at 12:15 is a program involving five sub-programs, all involve low-budgets and some proof-of-concept.
• Mars Sample Return at 13:00.
• Artemis III (yup "3",) at 21:30.

I saw this when it was new, and later couldn't pick it out in my memory or in LPI. I was reminded because someone and I had a chat about Europa Clipper, and no one was sure what instruments were adjusted or cut, but we both were sure something was. From timestamp 24:45 you see why I went looking. Since this video is dated, I cannot swear by it, but I wanted to show everyone because I feel like these budget & management videos offer a lot of context.

"When you don't know anything you find out people think you're a hero."-Bruce Banerdt

InSight is among the most exciting Mars missions, and though it's on it's last legs, it's also not done. It's actually hard to find definitive stuff. I swear I read a paper one day only to find it redacted or lost the next. Neither surprises me anymore. Twenty new Mars-ish articles come out every day and most of them are hot garbage. 

Bruce Banerdt is the PI of InSight, and even he seems to be playing it close to the chest. This LPI is nearly three years old and still is the last LPI Mars lecture, meaning there is probably still a lot of back-office debate. However certain things have become clear. 

• At 26:60 The largest Marsquakes may not be able to differentiate from highway and ocean noise on Earth.
• At 27:50, Marsquakes resemble Moonquakes, not Earthquakes, implying the cooling and lithospheric thickness and differentiation are more Lunar and less Terran. 
• Q&A after 40:30. 
  

Most likely InSight data are neither confirmed nor fully redacted. It's likely a case of seeing a lot of what was unexpected or unpreferred, therefore big evidence is needed and still being worked on. One thing that is pretty well established though is that S-Waves are missing, probably due to porosity of the upper crust. This means a lot, but must be considered suspect until another lecture comes out, simply because articles and papers seem to conflict, or offer information that would situationally conflict until specified. 

It gets weirder. The crust is still ambiguous, partly for the lack of S-waves, and the mantle is as well. It seems the whole mantle may be solid, or there's a thin outer mantle that's a little squishy. Sometimes the terminology is clearly talking about surface-waves, sometimes about shear-waves, either way the crust is consistently referred to as porous. 

This refers to Khan et al, which is (at least mostly) redacted. This is where the old articles were coming from, but the newer articles are not nearly so confident in their findings. That's probably for the best, but the end result is there's really not enough to stick ones neck out on. The best we can say is that the lithosphere appears to be layered with two or three strata. 

I found one more vid that I was hoping could constrain things a bit more. At 3:20 it starts talking about InSight, but again nothing really good. Note that it also refers to Khan et al even though it's younger than the redaction (which is probably a selective and contentious redaction anyway,) while the NASA articles talk about a broadly differentiated lithosphere of 37 km, Khan et al talks about a 500 km lithosphere out of a 6779 km planetary diameter. 

Cerberus Fossae had been focused and misrepresented to high-hell during InSight's mission, image at 12:25. Those are not volcanoes. They are, like Vallis Marianis, and the space in and around Alba Mons, unambiguous rifts. That is fascinating, Mars is cooling and undergoing thermal contraction, Rifts get wider, flatter, and more spacious, not smaller, so the mass-rifting of Mars is a huge mystery. Since Alba Mons in particular seems to be a tremendous Volcano, and a rift zone, that's maybe a good spot to land the next seismometer, and I suspect another, or several, will be needed at this point.

The bottom line seems to be InSight has raised more questions than it answered. At least so far. 

"There's gonna be lot's of pretty pictures." K.S. Martin-Wells, J. Partee, and J. Nebel-Crosson

This LPI is from the last series of Crater Consortium lectures. It focuses on melt structures on Luna and whereas it is unrelated to Artemis, spotting the melt-zones in Artemis craters will be a handy thing to be able to do, since when you see half a melt covered by shadow or maybe ice, you can guess what's under it. 

Tycho crater is always visible when the lower half of the moon is. It is well defined, under Mare Nubium, the southernmost Mare. (The bright yellow splat in the map below.)

https://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/usgs/I703/

• 3:50. The craterlets from Tycho's ejecta will sometimes end up in crater walls that face Tycho. Good rule to keep in mind.
• At 6:10 you see an image that maybe was a melted piece of ejecta that came in at a low angle and smeared itself across the surface.
• The image at 6:35 looks much like a flow of Andesite that broke up at the margins leaving big boulders and cracks perpendicular to the flow direction. Typical igneous stuff.

And that's the whole premise of the lecture. Blobs of molten ejecta smack into something downrange, flatten out and slide downhill, break-up at the end and make boulders. Like a drop of honey on pixie stix dust, the boulders may be concretions of molten stuff that rolled up the local breccias.

With the pictures seen you see how to spot a small crater in a big crater wall, and get a sense of a flow. Some of these slides are especially good because one cannot easily tell uphill from downhill looking from straight down, but the speaker demonstrates how she can quickly do it. Exposing ourselves now may help pick out Artemis South-Pole features later.   

 

Far more relevant than I had been lead to believe. The pathos is sharp and omni-effective. It is still a classic to be sure, and will grow as one. Mandatory before one can be called literate.

"I updated it a little bit since last year, but a lot of it is the same."-Parvathy Prem

You can safely skip ahead to 4:20 (The timestamp, not something else.)

Artemis is going to happen, eventually, and so Lunar stuff is heating up. This LPI is brand spank'in new, and opens up with a disclaimer that it hasn't been much updated for a year, which still counts and brand new by planetary science standards. Without a probe or telescope-time, things tend to advance to a point, and stop.

This is a very elementary lecture, but that's a good thing in this case. It covers a lot of mid-range details people miss out on. It's not that condescending form of elementary you get from NASA's websites lately. However it is directed at a student audience.

• At 17:40 she talks solar system bombardment.
• At 22:08, Lunar interior. 
• 31:08, Lunar volatiles. Totally worth the whole vid. 
• Lunar Volcanism at 36:50. No volcanoes you would expect, a lot of outpouring from dykes. 
• That glass beads thing she mentioned at 38:20 is an interesting topic worth looking into if you've never heard of it.
• 43:07 is yet another great slide. I think I can let these slides all speak for themselves. Much of what I write in these bullets is context to set-up and simplify. I don't think that's necessary for this lecture.
• Note that she calls attention to several current and future missions. Those are going to fly, and have wiki pages.
• Closing Thoughts at 48:40.

This LPI is three days older than this post. Whereas it's very normal for me to select a lecture five years or more older, this is the first lecture LPI has posted from a very recent conference. They don't always upload many lectures, sometimes they drop several in one day. But I hope and expect this will be the first of a large batch of new videos.