Deadline to Submit Abstracts For NASA 2013 Lunar Science Forum is May 8
Dear Colleagues:
The deadline to submit abstracts for the 2013 Lunar Science Forum (http://lunarscience.nasa.gov/LSF2013/ ) is nearly upon us (midnight PDT, May 8). The Scientific Organizing Committee, led by Jen Heldmann, is eagerly awaiting your abstracts, so please don’t forget to submit on time.
Although the forum will be completely virtual this year, we anticipate enough participation to engage the audience for five days, July 15-19 (~6 hours per day between the hours of 8 am-4 pm PDT). The actual times may vary from day to day, depending on the time zones covered in the presentations. In previous years, approximately 40% of the abstracts resulted in oral presentations. However, the virtual nature of this conference provides a wider range of options as we consider the balance between oral and poster papers. If a large number of high quality abstracts are received, the SOC will consider increasing the number of oral presentations by conducting multiple parallel sessions; fewer abstracts may dictate a single plenary session.
Regardless of the number of oral presentations, we intend to hold a virtual poster session as many people prefer presenting in that mode. “How would a virtual poster session work?,” you might ask. We are considering options that will allow live interactions with the poster author in the same way you would experience an in-person encounter. More details to come – we believe you will be as eager as we are to experience everything the virtual LSF will offer!
In discussing the pros and cons of a virtual conference, we have come across one idea that everyone seems to like. Please consider setting up a “hub” in your workplace to bring people together in your local area during the Forum. Each “hub” might decide to have social activities associated with their gathering and we would be happy to post these details on our lunar science institute website. There might be multiple hubs in your local area, so you can pick the group and location you wish to share the experience with, or you can participate on your own from wherever you are that week. We will all miss the social interactions we have had at each of the previous Lunar Science Forums, but between the adobe connect chat rooms we will have operating on the side, the monitored adobe chat session to gather questions and the local “hubs” many of you will create, we can make this a wonderful experience. It won’t happen without your excellent scientific content, though, so please submit your abstract.
By the way, don’t forget the NASA Lunar Science Institute Workshop Without Walls on Volatiles May 21-23 (http://lunarscience.nasa.gov/event/nlsi-workshop-without-walls-lunar-volatiles-part-1/ ). This will be a prelude to the LSF by deeply focusing on one of the many topics to be covered at the Lunar Science Forum in July. Dana Hurley (Chair) and the SOC for the workshop have put together a wonderful program, and the discussion that begins as a result of these presentations will no doubt carry over to the appropriate session within LSF 2013. Looking forward to “seeing” you at both events!
Sincerely,
Yvonne Pendleton, Director and Greg Schmidt, Deputy Director
NASA Lunar Science Institute
