The Division for Planetary Sciences meeting has been over for a week and I'm still processing my notes. Today's story is about a presentation by Sriram Bhiravarasu on some interesting minerals mapped around a fresh crater on the Moon. Like the other talks from DPS that I've been writing up, it's not an Earth-shattering result, just an illustration of the kinds of processes by which scientific research inches forward. I liked this paper because of how international it was -- the talk featured data from India's Chandrayaan-1, Japan's Kaguya, images and spectra from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and radar data from orbiters and Arecibo.

In fact, the presenter is a postdoc at Arecibo, and is currently displaced from there by loss of power and water to his home thanks to hurricane Maria. So I also wanted to highlight his talk because I cannot imagine being a young researcher trying to establish my cred and having a historically awful hurricane devastate the community in which I was working. In general, I was stunned by how many Arecibo workers were at DPS and able to talk science despite what has been a traumatic couple of months for them all. If you are reading this and feel like supporting local recovery efforts, I suggest Antonio Paris' gofundme for his delivery of supplies to his home state of Utuado, and the USRA's gofundme to help Arecibo staff. Arecibo has been a major center for relief for the local area -- they've been supplying drinking water and generator power and a helicopter landing pad for relief flights, among other things.

Anyway, back to the Moon. This is the Moon. You may recognize it. But you don't usually see it from this perspective; you would have to be an astronaut to see it from this point of view. Near the top of the picture is a very pretty rayed crater named Giordano Bruno. Rays generally mean a relatively youthful crater. Over time, micrometeoroid impacts and other space weathering processes make the rays fade.