Gail Stoops attended a recent Honors Colloquium taught by Derek Sears on the Exploration of Space. She and her husband Gordon had careers with NASA, she as a technical writer and public affairs manager, and he as engineer on the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs. There were great number of reminiscences, most of them exciting, some of them funny, and one or two of them were painful, such as the loss of the Apollo 1 and Challenger crews.

Derrick Ankomah-Nyarko, a former Space Center REU student, recently wrote to us to let us know how he is doing. He was an Space Center REU student during the summer of 2006 and his mentor was Dr. Rick Ulrich.

Since his graduation from Berea College in Kentucky, Ankomah-Nyarko has held positions with JPMorgan Chase and The McGraw-Hill Companies. Currently, he holds a position with the Chase Home Lending division of JPMorgan Chase Bank. His current position is IT Operations Analyst for Chase’s Prime Investor Reporting Unit.

Patricia Gavin, a former Space Center REU student in the summer of 2005, recently tied for Best of Show for the Physics and Space Sciences De-partment at the Florida Institute of Technology’s Senior Showcase this year. Each spring semester, the College of Science and the College of Engineering hold a showcase in which undergraduates display their semester research or design projects. Her poster was entitled "Effects of Heating and Impacting on the Spectral Properties of Clays on Mars." The poster investigated how ancient Martian soil is transformed under high temperatures and the shock from an impact. Her poster was a culmination of work done over two summers at the Space Center. The poster was judged and chosen out of a group of about 40 posters from the Physics and Space Sciences Department. Gavin will graduate from FIT this semester with her bachelor’s degree in Space Sciences. Congratulations Patricia!

Several members of the Space Center recently attended The Science of Solar System Ices (ScSSI): A Cross-Disciplinary Workshop in Oxnard, California. The workshop was a chance for experimentalists, observers and modelers to come together to share their knowledge, learn and discuss the present understanding of solar system ices, summarize outstanding issues, and identify future research thrust areas. The conference was sponsored by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Lunar and Planetary Institute as a response to a growing need for cross-disciplinary dialog and communication in the planetary ices science community.

Vincent Chevrier, an Assistant Research Professor at the Space Center, presented a poster entitled "Laboratory Measurements on Water Ice Under Simulated Mars’ Conditions.’ Katie Bryson, a Space Center graduate student, gave an oral presentation entitled "Sublimation Kinetics of CO2 Ice on the Surface of Mars."

American Astronomical Society Meeting
June 1-5, 2008
St. Louis, MO

Asteroids, Comets, Meteors Meeting
July 13-18, 2008
Baltimore, MD

NLSI Lunar Science Conference
July 20-23, 2008
NASA Ames Research Center
Moffett Field, CA

71st Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society
July 28-August 1
Matsue, Japan