PLANETARY MUSINGS

Entries for January 2006

Stardust and paydirt...

NASA's second recent attempt to bring back tiny samples from space and pick them up in the American Southwest seems to have been a success - Go Stardust!  With this success and the imminent launch of the first spacecraft to Pluto, New Horizons, it looks like planetary science is getting off to a hot start in 2006. Congrats to the Stardust team.

GEOL 390 - Introduction to Geological Research

This semester students taking GEOL 390 will be using blog.case.edu for online journaling.  GEOL 390 is the first course in the Capstone Senior Project that Geological Sciences has been operating for a few years now.  Use of the blog system will be new to this course and will serve two purposes. First, the students will be documenting their reflections and thoughts on their path to finding a senior project and writing their project proposal.  Regular journaling (blogging) will help students get in the habit of recording their research ideas and progress on a regular basis and help keep them on track for achieving the goal of being prepared for their project.  Second, by using the blog system on a regular basis students will be writing with the realization that their writing is public and there is an audience - in my mind an important factor in all science writing.  It should be an interesting semester and I am looking forward to helping all the students prepare for and find their Senior Project.

Looking for Graduate Students

It is that time of the academic year again - I and the Department of Geological Sciences as a whole are seeking qualified students for our graduate program.

Current research strengths in the department include: surface processes, soil erosion, sediment transport, geologic sequestration of carbon, geochemistry, planetary materials, planetary geology and geophysics, and high-pressure mineral physics and chemistry. Financial assistance may be available for qualified applicants interested in pursuing M.S. or Ph.D. degrees. For more information, please see http://geology.case.edu.

Continue reading "Looking for Graduate Students"

24 million km laser link

D. E. Smith, M. T. Zuber, X. Sun, G. A. Neumann, J. F. Cavanaugh, J. F. McGarry, T. W. Zagwodzki, Two-Way Laser Link over Interplanetary Distance, Science, 311, 53, (2006), Article.

Clearly one of the coolest "simple" experiments I have seen lately.  The MESSENGER spacecraft, which is on its way to Mercury, made a two-way laser link with Earth last May.  Apparently, at approximately 24 million km (a true interplanetary distance) that is a new distance record for detecting a laser.  The link was made both by the Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) pointing at telescopes at NASA's Goddard Geophysical and Astronomical Observatory and simultaneous pointing of an Earth-based laser at the same location toward the spacecraft.  The experiment is useful as a calibration of the MLA instrument in space as well as establishing that such an experiment can be accomplished.  Two-way laser communication may become important for future spacecraft which need precise distance and other measurements, like the proposed LISA mission to search for gravity waves.

Research computing - High performance?

One of the things that I am interested in, primarily because it helps me do my research better, is high-performance computing. I have only been here at Case a few years, but issues of research computing have been around here a while I gather... The primary issue is often: is there enough? It isn't always clear what enough means. What is enough for my research group might be overkill for another researcher, or not even scratch the surface of the needs of yet another.

High-performance may mean fast CPU's to me, but super-fast networks, incredibly high-speed access to enormous datasets, or screaming 3-D visualization tools to others. So what? Well, a lot of great research comes from being at the edge of what is possible... but computational resources are expensive - especially at the edge and primarily because they become obsolete so quickly. It is not like buying lab supplies that could work for a decade or more if properly maintained, etc - optimistically, 3 years and a computer is toast. So, is there potentially an economy of scale that could allow more researchers to be closer to the cutting-edge and really expand research opportunities?

Research units working together to share computational resources could be a good thing. But what would make it good for researchers with few (no) ties other than that they use computers throwing in their resources together?

I think there are three aspects to an answer to this question:

(1) Can we do better, more cutting-edge research?

(2) Can the workloads, related to computational infrastructure, of individual researchers or research groups be reduced?

(3) Is it financially sustainable?

All important questions, but the one that interests me most right now is (1). What research could you pursue (that you can't do now) if there were significantly more resources available to you on campus than a single department (or researcher) might garner by themselves? Nice to think far forward like that.

The ACRC is thinking about this question too... anyone else?