It has been an eventful few weeks for space center faculty member Pro-fessor Richard Marston of the Geoscience department at OSU. First, the Environmental Institute at Oklahoma State University announced that he was to be the 2004 winner of the Sterling L. (Bud) Burkes Award for Outstanding Environmental Research.  This award recognizes an outstanding environmental researcher at OSU who has carried on the research tradition that Professor Burks established.  The criteria for the award are proven success in environmental research grantsmanship, peer-reviewed publications, and student support.  Also, $500 is allocated in the name of the winner to an environmental science graduate student who intends to pursue a career in environmental research.  Second, Dick has just learned that he has been elected Vice-President of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) with a term beginning in July 2004.

He will become the 101st. President in July 2005.  The AAG was founded in 1904; it has over 8,400 members from 62 countries and promotes scholarly research and discussion through its two journals and an annual meeting.

Dr. Marston will attend this year's meeting which will be the Centennial meeting in Philadelphia, March 14-19.  The Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers attracts over 4,000 attendees.  Nearly 3,000 attendees present their research in over 700 sessions scheduled throughout the meeting.

Julia Kennefick of the Physics department at UArk and an honors alumnus who went on to get a PhD in astronomy from Caltech followed by postdocs at Ohio and Oxford has just received a $360,000 three year ADVANCE grant from the National Science Foundation.

The goal of the ADVANCE program is to increase the representation and advancement of women in academicscience and engineering careers, thereby contributing to the development of a more diverse science and engineering workforce.  The grant will provide Julia with salary, travel, equipment and student support.  Julia is an expert on quasars and the grant will let her pursue her interests in these distant active galaxies.

Dr. Kennefick is scheduled to present a seminar on her research as part of the spring 2004 space center seminar series.  The talk will take place at UArk on Wednesday, April 21st. at 3.30 pm.

In the nearly fifty years of the space program, only four spacecraft have successfully landed on Mars.  The two Viking landers set down on the planet in 1976, then twenty years later Pathfinder landed on the surface of Mars and released the tiny Sojourner rover.  Then this January two large Mars Excursion Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, landed on opposite sides of the planets.  Both landing sites were chosen because they seem to be places where water, and therefore life, may once have been.  Gusov Crater, the landing site for Spirit that bounced down on the surface on January 4th, is a large crater that has seen the effects of large floods of water.  Meridiani Planum is a region near the equator where remote sensing has detected the presence of haematite, a mineral that is formed on Earth by the reaction of water with iron-rich minerals.

Space center faculty Derek Sears (Chemistry & Biochemistry, UArk) and Barney Farmer (Geosciences), and their students Shauntae Moore, Julie Chittenden and Aaron Meier, are especially interested in these missions because for about a year they have been using the Andromeda chamber to explore water stability on Mars.  Barney was the principle investigator for the Mars Atmospheric Water Detector on the Viking Orbiters.

Derek Sears and Hazel Sears, assistant director of the space center, were invited to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California to be present for the landing of Opportunity.

"It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  The atmosphere was electric, and the sense of relief was overwhelming," said Derek Sears after the landing.

 

Seminars take place via video conference (UArk: Chemistry Bldg., Rm. 226; OSU: Physical Sciences, Rm 147)
Alternative venues have asterisks beside them.

Wed., Jan 14, 3.30 pm
Art Lucas, Nextstep, Stillwater, Oklahoma
"A Methodology for Synthesis of BVRI Photometry of Asteroids"

Wed., Jan 28, 3:30 pm
Brandy White, Physics, OSU
"Optical Detection of Organic Compounds"

Wed., Feb 11, 3:30 pm
Shauntae Moore, Cosmochemistry, UArk
"Experimental studies of evaporation rates of water on Mars"

Wed., Feb 25, 3:30 pm
Dr. Claud Lacy, Physics, UArk
"Ground-based Observations of Near-Earth Objects"

Mon., Mar 8, 7 pm
Dr. Bruce Jakosky, University of Colorado
*Poultry Sciences Auditorium
"Life Elsewhere, Science and Religion"
The Barringer Lecture Series

Wed., Mar 24, 3.30 pm
Michael Blair, Physics, OSU
"ODIN: Motivation, Challenges, and Progress"

Wed., April 7, 3:30 pm
Henry Turner, Geosciences, UArk
"GPS Velocity Field of the Nicaraguan Forearc: Results from 2000-2003"

Wed., April 21, 3:30 pm
Dr. Julia Kennefick, Physics, UArk
"Quasars"