The space center officially opened for business on December 9, 2000; it was born of shared interests among a small group of faculty.  There was a formal ceremony at which Provosts and Deans joined with us, members of our external board, and our industrial partners to celebrate a new venture for ourselves and for our university.  The center had been two years in the making, two year’s of pitching the idea to colleagues, proposal meetings, and trips to Washington, D.C.  The National Science Foundation saw us through the first three years, then there was a period of tightened belts and dumpster diving.  In 2004 the university and our congressional delegates arranged for direct funding, a situation that will have lasted four years with a year off for a continuing resolution.  With these funds we have built up the space center into what we see today, with about 14 faculty drawn from 6 departments and 2 colleges, a graduate program with 22 students, and three staff to provide support for efforts.  We have established major centralized facilities for our research with laboratories for extraterrestrial sample analysis (including ICPMS), for space simulation studies (we house the largest environmental chamber in a U.S. university), and space instrument development, and we have a planetarium  for our undergraduate teaching. 

In the last twelve months center researchers have published about 12 papers in peer-reviewed journals including Nature and Science.  We had a presence at eight scientific conferences last year with 25 space center members presenting 15 papers at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference alone.  One of our students won the Dwornik Award given for the best student paper at LPSC.  In the last eighteen months we have won three major federal grants, OPRA, Stardust and AGES giving us over $2 million in research funding.  An earlier grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation created the Keck Laboratory and an endowed professorship.  The support systems we have within the space center are essential to these efforts - they facilitate and they enable the necessary synergy.

In a few days I step down as the space center’s first director and the university starts a search for my replacement.  Hazel will step down as the manager of the space center.  It is time; ten years of leading an effort like this is enough for us both.  The center needs fresh blood, fresh ideas, renewed energy and fresh resources to do the job.  The university has worked with us from the start to provide these resources and continues to recognize our accomplishments and our potential by additionally conducting an external search for a senior person in the field to lead the center into the 21st century.  The search will be conducted by the space center.  In the meantime Dr. Larry Roe has agreed to act as interim director and our current deputy director, Dr. Rick Ulrich will continue in that role.  The role that our students have played as we go through this process is worthy of high praise.  The loyalty and confidence of the staff and faculty have been very gratifying.

So I return to research, to support our efforts in other ways. Hazel will move on in her life.  A new leadership will take over.  It has been an exciting undertaking and we have achieved far more than I dared hope in 1998.  But what satisfies us most is the support and encouragement we have received from so many directions, from Dean Geren – who first suggested we do this – to the Chancellor, the Provost, the deans and the chairs of our partnering colleges and departments, our colleagues in development, and from the faculty, staff, and students who are the space center.  We have created something bigger than the sum of its parts, with its own life and energy, and it cannot fail in its mission to make the University of Arkansas a strong presence in the national space exploration effort.

Derek Sears, Director

Marc Seigar, an affiliate of the Space Center and a faculty member in the department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, recently informed us of two upcoming publications. 

The first one will appear in the September issue of the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP). The title is “A cosmologically motivated description of the dark matter halo profile for the Low Surface Brightness Galaxy, Malin 1.”  In the paper, Seigar derives a possible mass profile for the low survace brightness galaxy, Malin 1, based upon previously published space-based and ground-based photometric properties and kinematics. Low-surface brightness galaxies are often referred to as being dark matter dominated at all radii.  If this is the case, then Malin 1 would seem to have characteristics similar to those of normal barred disk galaxies, as suggested by other recent work.

The second publication will appear in an upcoming issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.  The title is “A revised LCDM mass model for the Andromeda Galaxy.”  In the paper, Seigar and colleagues present an updated mass model for M31 that makes use of a Spitzer 3.6 micron image, a mass-to-light ratio based on the galaxy’s B-R colour profile, and observed rotation curve data from a variety of sources.  

Felix Wasiak, a Space Center graduate student, will have an article appearing in an upcoming issue of Skeptical Inquirer - The Magazine for Science and Reason titled “The Potential Habitable Zone on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus.”  The article is about the potential for microbes to live on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft continues its close flybys of Enceladus, sampling the plumes of water vapor and icy particles being ejected into space.  Because of this water, there is an underlying potential of a habitat conducive to supporting life.

Space Center graduate students Dan Ostrowski and Kathy Gietzen recently attended the Asteroids, Comets and Meteors meeting in Baltimore, Maryland.  Dan presented a poster entitled “A Study of Phyllosilicates as Possible Components of the Surface of C Asteroids.”  Kathy presented a poster entitled “A Comparison of the Class Distribution of Asteroids in the Main Belt and Near-Earth Vicinity.”

Derek Sears, the director of the center and a faculty member in the department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, recently attended the Lunar Institute workshop at NASA Ames.  He presented two posters entitled “Primitive Materials on Asteroids” and “Glimmerings of the future: A potential role for thermoluminescence and related studies in addressing current questions in lunar science.”  Fang-Zhen Teng, a member of the space center and a faculty member in the department of Geosciences also had his poster displayed.  It was titled “Iron isotope fractionation during planetary differentiation.”

71st Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society
July 28-August 1, 2008
Matsue, Japan

DPS Meeting
October 10-15, 2008
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY

Lunar and Planetary Science Meeting
March 23-27, 2009
The Woodlands, TX