Suddenly fashionable...

I remember the bad old days of 5 years ago, when no one dared to talk within NASA about anything beyond low earth orbit... now, exploration is fashionable, seemingly. LPSC is a immersive experience, or has been... casual, informal, like a lot of colleagues getting together to talk about planetary science and their research in excited tones for a few days. It's... both enthusiastic and has family-reunion aspects.

Or has, until now... attendance has more than doubled, nearly tripled since my first one five years ago, up to 1400. It is straining... already the collegial atmosphere is lessening and the sessions are becoming less playful and more formal. Lots of Europeans (strong euro...) and grad students.

One interesting note is that the students attending are effectively gender-balanced -- many more women must be going into geology, astronomy, etc. as undergrads.

Yesterday... interesting talks on inferring paleoclimates on Mars from lost argon rates, and Venusian volcanoes... I was a co-author on two of the evening posters and spent time covering both. Talked to one of the Mars Society folks from two years ago in Devon who is now back in Sweden looking at the Mars Express data... went to a Univ. of Hawaii party late with CS and had, um, interesting discussions (which confirmed other impressions of mine :). And I now have a silk-flower purple and yellow lei...

Off to today's sessions, then finish my aeromagnetics poster for tomorrow, then HMP planning meetings and a dinner from 3pm-onward tonight.

Space helmets as sexual aids? LOL...

Last September Pascal went to Iceland to do a TV commercial shoot with Volvo... he was told it would be a limited distribution on European cable channels, not to worry.

Apparently he should have been more specific, as the commercials have been running on broadcast networks in Europe for weeks, at least according to UK colleagues here this week. "Yes, but I'm not yet accustomed to seeing Pascal's face several times a day, or in the middle of a football match", one said.

And... it gets better... in one of these Volvo ads, his sidekick asks him if a space helmet is useful -- as a sexual aid. Hamilton-Sundstrand, meet Good Vibes! (Pictures Pascal wearing a clear bubble, during... heh) Bwa-ha-ha... this will provide a considerable source of amusement during field tests with helmets, next summer. That, and apparently another comment he makes about other uses of Velcro... ;^).

I *must* get some PAL DVD copies from colleagues over there, before July... (grin).