It’s the New Year, time for another SBAG (Small Bodies Assessment Group) Meeting. Day 1 was largely programmatics:
Icebreaker for Early-Career Attendees
10:00 AM Lori Feaga Introduction and Logistics
10:05 AM Adrienne Dove UCF Welcome
Agency Updates
10:15 AM Curt Niebur NASA Planetary Science Division (PSD) Update
11:15 AM Lindley Johnson NASA Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) Update
11:30 AM All Open Mic
Early-Career Presentations
12:15 PM John Noonan Invited Presentation 1: Addressing the Sulfur Depletion Problem with the Legacy Archival Cometary Sulfur Survey
12:25 PM Milagros Colazo Lightning Talk 1: Asteroid Phase Curves and the Phase Coloring Effect: Insights from Large-Scale Photometric Surveys
12:27 PM Brittany Harvison Lightning Talk 2: Icy Compositions of Medium-Sized TNOs
12:29 PM Alan Martinez Lightning Talk 3: Mineralogical and Textural Analysis of Cosmic Dust Collected During the 2012 Draconids Meteor Shower
12:31 PM Abhinav Jindal Lightning Talk 4: RoSCo: A New Tool to Navigate Rosetta’s Dataset
12:33 PM Lucas Hutton Lightning Talk 5: Modeling the Shape of NEA (25330) 1999 KV4 Using Lightcurve Inversion
12:35 PM Karolina Dziadura Lightning Talk 6: Detection of the Yarkovsky Effect and Asteroid Density Determination Using Gaia Astrometric Data
12:37 PM Ziyu Huang Lightning Talk 7: JWST Unveils Hydration of Psyche: Tracing Magnetic Fields through Solar Wind Interactions with Small Bodies
12:39 PM Allison McGraw LightninTlk 8: Investigating thUnordinary Ordinary Chondrites
12:41 PM Elias Mansbach Lightning Talk 9: Building Paleomagnetic Viewpoints into Return Sample Missions
12:43 PM Aaron Deleon Lightning Talk 10: Characterizing Physical and Mutual Orbit Properties of Binary NEA (163693) Atira
12:45 PM All Open Mic
Agency Updates, Facilities
2:30 PM Lindley Johnson Response to SBAG #31 Findings
2:45 PM Amanda Hendrix Natl Acads Space Studies Board Rept: NASA at a Crossroads: Maintaining Workforce, Infrastructure, & Technology Preeminence in the Coming Decades
3:00 PM Jacqueline Keane Natl Science Foundation (NSF) Astronomy and Planetary Update
3:15 PM Patrick Taylor Natl Radio Astron Observatory (NRAO) — Greenbank Update
3:30 PM All Open Mic
Data, Software, Archiving, Access, Tools
4:00 PM Gerbs Bauer, Eric Palmer Planetary Data System-Small Bodies Node (PDS-SBN; UMD/PSI)
4:10 PM Federica Spoto Minor Planet Center (MPC)
4:20 PM Beatrice Mueller Efforts to Get Rad. Data into PDS-SBN (Goldstone & Arecibo)
4:30 PM Mark Bentley European Sp Agency (ESA) — Planetary Science Archive (PSA)
4:40 PM Yukio Yamamoto Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) — Data ARchives and Transmission System (DARTS)
4:50 PM Jon Giorgini Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Horizons
5:00 PM All Open Mic
If there’s a running theme, it’s that NASA is overextended and underfunded. The immediacy of Europa Clipper (and to an extent Perseverance rover, etc.) alongside future programs meant Psyche was under-staffed. This, in an era of competition for tech talent from Silicon Valley and other tech firms, caused Psyche’s flight software to fall behind schedule and, in turn, delay the launch by a year. Now repeat this for, oh, almost every other NASA program.
A second theme is data management- formatting, curation, reduction, etc. All programs that return nontrivial datasets must deal with this. It’s a sign of maturity is that ESA and JAXA, too, have volumes of data needing dedicated ‘librarians’ and other overheads… despite competing for tech developers skilled in coding and databases, see above.
Day 2 coming…