News Items

Terrestrial Magnetism's Roy Britten dies at 92

Former staff member Roy Britten died January 21 at the age of 92. He joined DTM in 1951 as a member of the biophysics group. In 1971 he began his association with Caltech as a research associate in molecular biology.

The Fall CarnegieScience Is Out

Learn what's up with the Moon, a potential cancer cure, what diamonds tell us about the Earth, and much more in the tablet-friendly fall issue of CarnegieScience.

Newsletter for Summer 2011 Now Available

The Summer 2011 edition of the Carnegie Science newsletter is now available in tablet-friendly format.

Secretary Steven Chu visits HPCAT

U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, right, visited Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) on Friday, June 3. Russell Hemley, (left) Director of Carnegie's Geophysical Laboratory, presented an overview of the High Pressure Collaborative Access Team (HPCAT) and led a tour.Photos here

New Generation of the Carnegie Airborne Observatory Launched

Thursday, June 2, 2011 —Greg Asner and his team unveiled the latest version of the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO-II), an aircraft that combines laser and spectrometer remote sensing, with high-tech inertial motion sensors to track the aircraft’s position and orientation. The CAO produces high-resolution mapping of the 3-dimensional structure of vegetation and terrain.

Anna Michalak joins Global Ecology faculty

Anna M. Michalak joins the Department of Global Ecology.. Her research focuses on characterizing complexity and quantifying uncertainty in environmental systems.

Linda Elkins-Tanton to Direct Carnegie’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism

Mitsui Career Development Associate Professor of Geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Linda Elkins-Tanton, will become the seventh director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM). She succeeds retiring Sean C. Solomon who has been at the helm since 1992. Elkins-Tanton will begin her directorship in September 2011.

Success! MESSENGER Orbits Mercury

At 8:45 PM EDT, March 17, 2011, the tiny MESSENGER craft began its successful burn to make it the first spacecraft in history to orbit the innermost planet Mercury.Carnegie's Sean Solomon is the principal investigator. At about 10:00 PM engineers in the MESSENGER Mission Operations Center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., confirmed that the craft made a “perfect” transition into orbit, where it will begin a year of science observations in a few weeks. See APL press release

Watch live webcast of Mercury orbit insertion March 17, 7:55 PM Eastern Time

Sean Solomon, director of Terrestrial Magnetism, is also the principal investigator of the MESSENGER mission to Mercury. After 16 years of planning and preparation, the tiny craft will finally be inserted into orbit around the innermost planet the evening of March 17, 2011. Watch the live webcast.

Quantifying Carbon in Hawaii’s Forests

Scientists from the Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology and the USDA Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Research Station (PSW) have developed new, more accurate methods for mapping carbon to accurately quantify the amount of carbon held in forests. The techniques, appearing in an online issue of the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, are being used in Hawaii.