Posted by
Far_view on Saturday, December 16, 2006 4:41:32 PM
I just got back yesterday from the
Fall AGU meeting in San Francisco.
It was a good meeting with a lot of neat Planetary Science results
(among lots and lots of other geoscience results of course). I am
biased of course but I think some of the most interesting stuff was
from the Remotely Sensed Mineralogy of Mars sessions on Tuesday morning
(
part 1 and
part 2).
There were lots of good results in those sessions from OMEGA, THEMIS,
and TES. I had a talk in the second session with early results from an
analysis I'm doing under the Mars Data Analysis program on the Mawrth
Vallis region. On Wednesday, there were some early results from the
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Some of the early CRISM results over Mawrth Vallis dovetail nicely with
what I've seen in the publically released OMEGA data. The early HiRISE
images are stunning. There's one locale called Mojave crater which has
channels which for all the world look like they were carved by rainfall
fed channels. On Thursday afternoon we had the
Mars Exploration Rover
sessions. I didn't have a talk for those sessions, but was a co-author
on a couple of the presentations. It was like a public forum "end of
sol" session. The telecon end of sol sessions that we have are good,
but there is definitely something to be said for having people together
in the same room. It wasn't necessarily all MER science team people
talking to each other either. There were some presentations by non-team
members doing work with the publically released data.
It ought
to be a good year for Mars science what with all the data coming down
from MRO and with plans ramping up for the Mars Science Lab mission.
This summer there will also be the
Seventh International Conference on Mars in Pasadena so that should be very interesting as well.