Meeting Highlights

The topical conference Differentiation:  Building the Internal Architecture of Planets was held May 7–10, 2018, in Pasadena, California. This was the second conference in the LPI’s The First Billion Years initiative. It focused on how planetary differentiation created the basic architecture of the planets and established the initial chemical and physical conditions for all subsequent stages […]

The LPI’s First Billion Years initiative is designed to support an interdisciplinary study of planetary accretion, differentiation, bombardment, and habitability in a series of four topical conferences. The third installment in that series, Bombardment, investigated the range of collisional events that occurred after planetary accretion when an extended period of bombardment may have been punctuated […]

In mid-June, more than 30 Mars scientists and 17 students gathered in Lakewood, Colorado to outline the current understanding of active processes and environmental conditions occurring within the recent “Amazonian” and present-day martian climate, and the atmospheric and geologic records that those processes and conditions have created. This meeting was intended as a supplemental topical […]

With the growing need for more missions to the outer solar system and lack of data for certain planetary bodies, experimental laboratory work helps supplement mission planetary data and modeling. Laboratory work on the chemical and physical behaviors of ices can lead to surprising research, helping us better understand the processes that we detect and […]