InsaneJournal

More Puerto Rico Incidentals
One thing I forgot to post is how noisy outside gets after dark. I'm told that it's because of the coqui, which are frogs that are native to Puerto Rico. At night, they start chirping, and you hear it everywhere. You can even hear it faintly from inside our room. They aren't much to look at, being a gray-brown in pictures and only about 1-2 inches long. I haven't seen one. I have seen little lizards on the path during the day, and Janet, who is a sociologist who studies scientists*, found a crab the size of her hand roaming around outside the room. Her room was closer to the waterfront, while I'm close to the pool and the conference center.

I took a swim yesterday before lunch, and that was lovely -- the weather feels much nicer when you spend a half-hour in water, and the pool was the perfect temperature. It looks like trying to settle my stomach this noon means I can't take another one, except maybe before dinner. The session I want to go with lets out early, so that would be fine. Getting to the beach is a bit more of a pain -- the hotel's waterfront is built up and all the beaches are on an island offshore, which means it requires an excursion.

Speaking of excursions, Dan invited me along on kayaking a bioluminescent bay this evening. I don't know if he got my email, but it sounds cool and worth seeing. Hooray for boating and interesting microbes.

Last night was the conference banquet, but I didn't go. I was just going to have a quiet evening in my hotel room with take-out pizza, but Janet (see above) saw me checking my mail and asked if I wanted to come to dinner with her and a couple of friends. We went down for drinks, and then ate at a reasonably fancy restaurant -- enough that if I had thought ahead, I would have went back for my skirt. Also, the people she meant were scientists working on a Cassini instrument (CIRS), and some rover folks, and Alan Stern (principle investigator for New Horizons, and used to hold a big position at NASA). So, yeah, that was worth the extra money. The food was pretty tasty -- I had dorado, and some apple crisp for desert. Also shows the value of serendipity -- now if I interview for postdoc positions at JPL or Colorado (or a couple other places), I can say 'yeah, we talked at DPS'. Hooray for networking!

I also met a few new people interested in my work. A couple of dynamicists (including the person who predicted volcanoes at Io, and they had to rush his paper into print so it would beat the spacecraft there) and some of the CIRS folks I mentioned above. Plus some people I met before at other conferences. It really feels like I'm starting to become someone other than 'Phil's student' -- I still am, since most people in the field know my adviser**, but now I'm also known for my work. Now, to get it published.

* She and I both attended Cornell, though she's a bit senior to me, and were both in student government. She also did work at processing images from Mars -- her thesis was on the Mars rover team, and now she studies the Cassini team for NASA. She had some really interesting ideas about how teams relate to their robots and each other -- apparently, she's one of the few (if any) sociologists studying modern planetary science teams, and one of her goals is to figure out the best ways to get us all working together with minimal friction and maximum science. And, yet, she once told me she was a bit envious of us getting to work with such cool projects -- if it weren't for a couple of bad math professors, she might have tried planetary science herself.

** Someone at dinner last night described the planetary science community as a small town, in that we all know someone who is dating/shared an office with/collaborated with/etc. someone else, and that DPS is as much a venue to talk about science as it is a community. Everyone agreed. There was also the discussion about how mission drama during Galileo (which was active when I was in high school) is still shaping the outer planets community. So a bit of me is always going to be Phil's student, just like how I'll have ins to the Mars and Moon geology and asteroid communities because I've shared office space with and TA'd with their grad students. Or even outside of planetary science, because I did extragalactic astronomy at Nebraska and Wyoming, and still talk to the other groups at Cornell. Trust me -- you get two astronomers in the room together, and they will find their five degrees.

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I still haven't given you a science report, but I will -- I was kind of inactive yesterday after working off post-talk nerves, but I did get to Rings, Irregular Satellites and Icy Satellites so far, and some scattered Exoplanets talks. This afternoon is Origins of the Solar System from 2 til 5. I don't know what I'll do tomorrow. Also, expect photos and such -- on Saturday, I get to go to the World's Largest Telescope before coming home on Sunday.

Also, for those of you in Europe or up early in the morning on Friday (tomorrow), at 7:30 EDT, NASA will be dropping a used rocket onto the South Pole of the Moon to look for ice in the debris cloud. There will be a probe (LCROSS) watching it, then following it down, as well as Earth-based telescopes. I'm sure there will be streaming video on NASA's website. I'm going to watch it from the conference room here -- they've been making a big deal about it, and the registration gift was a mission patch. Which will be going on my jacket next to my Apollo 40th anniversary one. Perhaps I can find some more patches in the Arecibo gift shop.