Suddenly fashionable...

[jay]

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.

Comments

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

Interesting discussion with CS? I'm really curious, but figure it's probably best to wait until you get home to talk about it.

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested to hear how many women with doctorates there are. There's a christian fundie sci fi author who was saying women can't hack science. I'd like to have some figures on how many women there are in NASA just to beat jerks like him over the head with.