The Space Center has been awarded a $403k research contract for two years from NASA’s Planetary Instrument Development Program to design and demonstrate an instrument for planetary, asteroid and comet landers.  The Optical Probe for Regolith Analysis (OPRA) will consist of a sharpened spike with windows down the side, each window leading to a fiber optic cable connected to an infra-red spectrometer in the lander body. This spike can be inserted into soil, regolith, ice or cometary snow to provide a spectral analysis of the material as a function of depth with a minimal amount of sample disturbance.  The spike might be about a foot long for planetary surfaces such as Mars or the moon but could be much longer for low-strength surfaces such as comets and icy moons.  There could be as many as ten windows per foot of length, each having two fiber optics leading back to the spectrometer; one for illumination and the other for returning reflected light back to the unit.  The advantages of this approach are that only one spectrometer is needed to measure spectra from a variety of depths, the spectrometer electronics do not have to be down-hole, and there is minimal heating of the regolith by the technique, enabling ices to be measured in-situ.  Wavelengths from 0.5 to 5 microns were chosen in order to be able to measure both rocky and icy materials.  OPRA will be compact, robust and redundant.

OPRA will be developed in the new Planetary Instrument Facility in the Old Museum Building with work commencing in early Fall.  The proposal and development work is in close association with our industrial partner, Space Photonics Inc.  They are providing their considerable expertise in fiber optics, space-based electronics, and high-reliability components.  Both the development of flight instruments and the opening of the Planetary Instrument Facilities were priority objectives in the Space Center’s five year plan.

The project PI is Rick Ulrich, the deputy director of the Space Center and a faculty member in the department of Chemical Engineering.  The co-I’s are Derek Sears, director of the Space Center and member of the Chemistry and Biochemistry department, Vincent Chevrier, a Space Center post doctoral fellow, and Larry Roe, a member of the Space Center and a faculty member in the department of Mechanical Engineering.  Space Photonics’ representative is Matt Leftwich.

At the end of two years, the researchers will have proven the concept as being viable and effective at its performance goals through both individual testing of system components and through the fabrication of an operational prototype.  As this work is in progress, the researchers will be working with NASA to identify a suitable mission for OPRA, probably to either the moon or Mars in the early part of the next decade.  The idea for OPRA grew out of the W.M. Keck Laboratory for Space Simulation and the multidisciplinary nature of the team.

Julie Chittenden, a space center graduate student, recently received the Geological Society of America’s Stephen E. Dwornik Award for the best student poster presentation at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Houston, which is hosted by the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) and NASA.  The title of the poster was the “Effect of Wind on the Stability of Water Ice Under Martian  Conditions”.  Julie will receive a plaque at next year’s LPSC conference in Houston, as well as a check from GSA.

The Dwornik Award was started in 1991 with a generaous endowment by Dr. Stephen E. Dwornik, who wished to encourage American students to become involved with NASA and planetary science (to qualify, students must be first author and American citizens).

NASA - Roses 2007
Solicited research programs (in order of proposal due dates)
 

The Space Center undergraduate students recently attended the 91st Annual Meeting of the Arkansas Academy of Science, held at Arkansas Tech University in Russellville.  Other attendees were:  Derek Sears, the director of the Space Center and faculty member in the department of Chemistry and Biochemistry; Rick Ulrich, the deputy director of the Space Center and a faculty member in Chemical Enginnering; and Shelly Bursick a Space Center graduate student.  The titles of the presentations are below.

Modelling the Post-Impact Cooling of Asteroid Ejecta.  Michael Hinds and Rick Ulrich

Improvement of Moderate Redshift Quasar Surveys Utilizing Infrared and Optical Data.  Ashley Stewart, Shelly Bursick, and Julia Kennefick

Modelling Mars:  Culturing of Metal Respiring Microorganisms.  Tanushree Thote and Mack Ivey

Quasar Variability with the NFO WebScope.  Josiah Walton and Julia Kennefick

The Space Center would like to congratulate all of the students who presented!

Jan Dixon of the University of Arkansas Libraries and John Dixon, a member of the space center and a faculty member in the department of Geosciences, will have a proceedings paper included in the 2006 Geosciences Information Society Proceedings volume.  It is titled, “Historical Imagery Collections in a Spatial Library: Key to Discovery of Past Landscapes”.

The University of Arkansas (UA) Libraries, the Center for Advanced Spatian Technologies (CAST), and the Geosciences Department are collaboratively building a digital library collection of historically significant remotely-sensed imagery, which was donated by Emeritus Professor Harold MacDonald of the UArk Geology department.  The funding for this two-year collaborative project was provided by the space center.