LPSC Meeting 2024, part 1

Another LPSC (Lunar and Planetary Science Conference) has come and gone. While there’s a Japanese and a Euro conference each year, and more recently British and Chinese meetings, let’s put it on the table: LPSC is big, especially since Ryugu results are presented as well as OSIRIS-REx talks. It’s difficult, understandably, for me to wrap it up in just one blog post. Here’s a first.

-The big Bennu announcement was… not here. Phosphates- lots of phosphates- had already been announced before, and full papers on the OSIRIS-REx samples are still being written/reviewed/rendered. Therefore, LPSC was both too early and too late, depending on your particular lab’s analysis and allocations on Bennu. Dante Lauretta, U-Arizona professor and OSIRIS-REx lead, says there are dozens- dozens– of papers on the way.

-Similarly, it’s been a few years since the return of Hayabusa2, with Ryugu material. Really big news would have been spotted by now. I will say, however, that the synergy between Haya2 and OREX resulted in broader/deeper work, such as context and comparison between two samples. They both show us space weathering, yet on slight variations in target material. They both show us “ground truth” compared to spacecraft/telescope remote sensing, and on slightly different grounds to be truthed. And asking hypotheses for one is priming and prompting more-stimulating hypotheses on the other.

-Mission updates/statuses were given, more later. There were also interesting talks on ground-based observations of small bodies, though by comparison to returned samples it’s a bit harder to get excited on that.

-One interesting line of work in the past few semesters is dark comets- objects that, in a telescope, palpably resemble asteroids, yet show a clear sign of cometary activity: an acceleration that doesn’t follow Kepler’s Laws. These objects are, we deduce, emitting gas, yet without the dust that would reflect sunlight and lead to the status of official “comet”. (Also, these are low-albedo asteroids- not very reflective- hence “dark comet.”) An LPSC talk suggests that the number of dark comets in near-Earth space is a substantial fraction of the low-albedo asteroids. In other words, those “asteroids” orbiting around us- accessible asteroids- are composed of roughly… oh… one-eighth, to possible one-fifth, very weak comets or fragments of comets.

Keep reading, I’ll keep summarizing!