Celestia Forums

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc20 ... nload.html

These are the abstracts for the upcoming Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held every year in March in Houston, Texas. They're somewhat technical, but you can get a preview of the latest thinking on Cassini at least (where results are available. Some abstracts are just placeholders without content, so the authors can present results at the conference in March).

The URL above contains links to PDF files for each session of the conference. They consist of an index at the front, and then all the abstracts for that session.

Very informative! The further links to PDFs seem to be mostly full papers, and sometimes have interesting pictures.

Are you getting to go, Evil Dr?

Spiff.

Nope... I did go when I was doing my PhD, but now my travel budget is nonexistent and besides I don't really want to cross the US border anymore (I have no desire to be photo'd and fingerprinted and that data sent to an agency that I don't trust, who won't tell me what they're going to do with that information).

Besides, it's mostly about Mars nowadays (as you can see from the session lists), and I'm more interested in the outer solar system.

Do note that those aren't "full papers" though - they're (long) abstracts that have not been peer-reviewed (not that this really detracts from the contents of the vast majority of them. In the 8 or 9 years I've been reading them, I've only ever seen one or two abstracts that would be considered "wacky".)

I also found the programme very informative. I was surprised, however how dominant the talks about Mars were, as compared to the Cassini-Huygens reports.

There is meanwhile a serious confrontation going on between our global comissions for international conferences in particle physics, accelerator design etc. and the American authorities. The procedures applied by US authorities in the context of our big international conferences are quite intolerable. Even in case of world renowned foreign laboratory directors, visa applications remained unanswered such that they had to miss crucial meetings in the US. In a number of cases, I had to write support letters to US embassies, after our postdocs e.g. from Israel, had accepted a 2 year assignment at some US lab, but were refused the visa to enter the US for no good reasons. In some cases, quite dramatic situations arose...

Our global comissions have announced NOT to endorse the location of international conferences on particle physics anymore in the US, unless the US authorities can agree on a more "predictable" procedure...

Hmm...

Bye Fridger

What boggled me was that we used to have the conference within NASA grounds. Then 9/11 happened, and the conference was moved to a hotel complex outside NASA for "security concerns". I guess from one perspective they have a point - it is a government facility after all, and we are effectively "general public" but we're talking about SCIENTISTS here, not terrorists!

Not really a huge deal, but I did think that was a bit of an unecessary overreaction.