38th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference
March 12–16, 2007
League City, Texas

First Announcement

The second announcement is now available.

Did everyone get their abstracts in on time? 5 p.m. CST today was the deadline for PDF submissions; the deadline for non-PDF submissions was last week.

The program with embedded links to abstracts is now online. Frankly, though, it's probably better to go here to download en masse.

The abstract for my first conference talk is now available:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2007/pdf/2219.pdf

Baby won't let me attend this year. I am trying to assemble a small army of stalwarts to report from various talks so that I can try to keep up the tradition of reporting from LPSC.

Any volunteers here?

--Emily

I would, Emily if 1) it was in LA, and 2) they'd let me in... Can't think of a way to finagle my job to send me to Texas for a week...

Good luck with your talk VP!

edit - I see you may have some interesting discussion regarding the 'mountains'. Would be interested to see what the reaction to that is!

The final announcement is now online. And here are a couple of less cumbersome links for the abstracts: download by session and the authors index.

I think we might able to take care of 1) but 2) is a toughie

nprev,
I don't think there's any "requirements" for entry, other than money. I'd love to come but I doubt my 4 year old would have much "fun." He's a big rover fan, but I doubt he could quietly listen for more than a few minutes.

...ah, we definitely must have met in person before, then, Alex!

Hendric, that does sound insurmountable...keeping a 4-year-old entertained for more than about ten seconds at a stretch is pretty much impossible.

volcanopele - checking out your abstract - very interesting... but that map! Man, it's like a flashback to the 60s. Op art. (Not that that's a bad thing). Take a tip from a cartographer! - use more subdued colors for the larger ares, especially interfingered areas like your red and blue. Intense colors work best for small patches.

Phil

LOL, thanks for the tip. In my latest versions, I'm using a much lighter blue (like color I used for the bright stripes in the abstract) for bright terrain so it should look at bit better.

Jason, for some reason our system 'detects an error' and won't open your abstract. I've been in through the conference schedule too and the same thing happens. Is anybody else having this problem? Can anyone help? I'd really like to read it . . .

The abstract works fine for me. Didn't you also have problems with Titan flyby mission descriptions? Looks like there's a problem at your side somewhere, specifically handling PDFs.

Yes, it must be our system. There's normally no problem with PDFs. I've printed off the PDF page with all the Titan presentations listed, but for some reason the links to the full abstracts don't work. Maybe our system doesn't like links from within a PDF. I'll just have to be patient and wait for what promises to be a wonderful conference season for Titan fans to unfold in the coming months.

Doesn't Adobe Acrobat have an option to activate/de-activate links from within PDF pages? Perhaps that's your problem...

-the other Doug

Prompted by your post I went to our systems people to ask. Apparently that's not the problem but they are now going to update our version of Adobe, so I'm hopeful that will cure it. So thanks anyhow for the useful suggestion - it stopped me just shrugging and putting up with it.

I have developed a strange bug with my Acrobat Reader in Firefox, too, namely when I click on a PDF link, it opens up an empty page with no content. Not even the plugin starts. I have to save the PDF and open it in a standalone reader to read it.

For the Admin Thread compliance team - This is OT and should be moved.

It may sound obvious but first check that your preferences within Acrobat (Edit->Preferences->Internet->Display PDF in Browser) are correct.

Once you are certain of that then manually make sure you have the correct plugin files in your Browser:

For Acrobat Reader 8:
Copy "%Program Files%\Adobe\Reader 8.0\Reader\Browser\nppdf32.dll"
to "%Program Files%\Mozilla Firefox\plugins" if you use Firefox.
or to "%Program Files%\Internet Explorer\PLUGINS" if you use IE

The above should have been handled automatically the the Acrobat\Browser Installers but if you have a slightly non standard install (e.g. Portable Firefox like me) then an update to Acrobat or the Browser can leave your browser with the wrong plugin dll which usually leads to the behavior you describe.

The program for Vernadsky-Brown Microsymposium 45, which is being held at LPI immediately prior to the upcoming LPSC, is now online. Note, however, there are no online abstracts, unlike during the annual fall version of the symposium, when it is held in Russia.

Latest Studies of Mars, Saturn, Moon Highlight Conference
NASA/JSC/LPI
RELEASE: JO07-005

I just wanted to post a link to the notes from all the helpful folks who sent info from the talks at LPSC:
http://planetary.org/news/2007/0312_Report..._Lunar_and.html

In particular, I want to point out the excellent notes on two of the talks from the Mars Exploration Rover sessions. It took Tom a lot of effort to put such detailed information together, and I'm grateful for his time!

Emily

I now know first hand how hard it is to be at a conference, trying to take it all in AND try and make sense of it to retell it to others - so much kudos and thanks to Tom and the other surrogate Emily's for a great job!

Doug

Thanks. Since I knew I only was able to attend one day of the conference, I knew it would be important to make the most of it. I went in knowing I had only one shot to catch some insight into some real rover news. At previous conferences I took brief notes, and relied on my memory to fill in the gaps as I retold the stories. This time I took extensive notes. In the end, I missed some of the bigger picture stuff that would have been apparent if I had just sat back and listened to the stories.

Retelling the stories really wasn't that much work, once I was able to put my mind to it. The problem on this end was that my dialup ISP sold out to earthlink at the same time, and I had to reconfigure a bunch of software. To add insult to injury, I got tired of waiting for AT&T to bring DSL into the neighborhood, so I signed a contract for expensive wireless access with Verizon. Being on the fringe of that service, I have been experimenting with antenna locations and orientations to optimize my throughput. It has been difficult to concentrate on my favorite rovers. I have 10 more pages of notes that I need to translate into something coherent.