Brown University & Washington, DC

After Africa - will I ever return there? - I became a PhD student with the Planetary Sciences group at Brown University. Tim Mutch, who became the Principle Investigator for the Viking Landers on Mars, and Jim Head, previously involved in Apollo astronaut training, were the two planetary profs and there was an active group of PhD students so that this became the most productive research period of my life. For a while I was publishing papers and talk abstracts every month! This is when I starting going to the Lunar & Planetary Science Conferences every March in Houston and met many people in the US and global lunar & planetary community.

Most of my research concerned impact and volcanic features on the Moon, but also included parallel studies of similar features on Earth, Mars and Mercury. Jim, Tim and I published a summary paper that discussed the idea of comparative planetolgy - things learned about a geologic process for one planet help you understand the same process on other planets. Its still a powerful concept and one that I will apply in late Oct 2004 when the Cassini Radar Mapper instrument shows us the first clear images of the surface of Titan. It was during an animated discussion about craters at Brown that I held up a tea cup as an illustration, and fellow grad Mark Cintala said, "No! The saucer is the crater, not the cup!" And at Brown I met B. Ray Hawke, another grad student and ex-Vietnam Airborne trooper who drank incessant cups of coffee as he stayed up 2-3 days on end working on lunar research.

DC - and Galapagos

Although it never seemed like it would happen, I finally defended my PhD thesis (Aug 18, 1978) and left Providence the next day, with Vera, my finace and an U-Haul for Washington, DC and a post-doc at the Smithsonian Institution. On my first day at work, Tom Simkin, my mentor, said, "There has been an eruption in the Galapagos Islands. Do you want to go?"  This was another memorable trip, with highlights being the long days of sailing around the islands in a small sloop, meeting Tui de Roy, a young naturalist who was raised in the Galapagos, reaching the summit of Fernandina Caldera, and camping on the beach for a few days as food supplies dwindled (and seals became a nusiance) while waiting for the sloop to return.

While assigned to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum I also worked with friends and colleagues at the Air and Space Museum. Ann Gifford and I published a paper documenting the size and effects of the lunar Big Backside Basin (or South Pole-Aitken basin as its more commonly called). And I used Apollo-Soyuz handheld photography to study the tectonics of the Afar region of northern Ethiopia.

The Smithsonian fellowship was just one year, but I finangled a second year in the DC area by getting a National Research Council Senor Post-Doctoral Fellowship (whew!) at Goddard Space Flight Center in nearby Maryland. I worked there in the Earth and planetary sciences group with people who flew satellite magnetometers to study the Earth, used sonar to probe undersea volcanoes, and Viking data to study Mars - talk about a great place to be! My official project was to study terrestrial rift valleys, but I also helped interpret sonar data that showed surprising results for underwater volcanic explosions, and I also got to go to Iceland and ended up publishing about collapse structures in glaciers.

While in DC Vera and I got married, 25 years ago this month, and enjoyed visits by friends from my high school observing days and from Ethiopia, Brown and DC. Vera was finishing up her MA at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies when I left for a new job in Houston.

Next: Houston and NASA