A decade of dispatches from the volcanic edge of NASA's planetary science.
Reporting RISE collects ten years of student journalism from three field expeditions — Hawaii's Kīlauea (2015), New Mexico's Kilbourne Hole (2017), and the RISE 2 program's return to the Potrillo volcanic field (2022) — into one editorial archive.
When Stony Brook University geoscientist Timothy Glotch was putting together the pieces for his Remote In Situ and Synchrotron Studies for Science and Exploration (RIS4E) grant proposal to NASA in 2013, he and his colleagues at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center thought it was important to communicate the research they were undertaking — to make the science, and its relevance to the future of space exploration, understandable to the public.
That initiative led to an unusual partnership between the RIS4E project and the Stony Brook University School of Communication and Journalism, which included the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. "Communicating science is a necessary part of the scientific enterprise," they wrote in the grant proposal. "On one end are those who are trained in communication, but perhaps have had minimal exposure to scientific research. On the other hand, trained scientists often lack the tools and skills necessary to effectively communicate their science to a general audience." The partnership between RIS4E and the Alda Center "will bridge the gap."
Among the ideas that emerged was a new "special topics" course for students in the School of Communication and Journalism who were interested in science reporting. Students would get access to a high-level scientific research endeavor by visiting scientists in their labs, interviewing them and writing articles and producing multimedia reports on their work. In addition, a small number of the student journalists would accompany a field team on its research missions to Hawaii's Mount Kīlauea volcano in June 2015, and to the Potrillo Volcanic Field in southern New Mexico in June 2017 and April 2022.
On each trip, the students and their faculty supervisors went on the team's research treks, observing, videotaping and photographing as the geoscientists tested instruments for possible use by astronauts and mapped volcanic features that might shed light on the terrain of the Moon and Mars. The journalism teams worked cooperatively with the scientists, without restriction on their reporting or prior review. Travel and lodging expenses were covered by the grant from NASA. Editorial control remained with the School of Communication and Journalism.
This website is the result of those reporting trips. Across three expeditions and a decade of fieldwork, dozens of student journalists reported on the work of NASA scientists building the science behind the Artemis Project — the mission to return humans to the Moon and, eventually, push further into the solar system.
The expeditions
Hawaii · HI-SEAS, 2015. Six undergraduate and graduate students from the Stony Brook School of Journalism embedded with the RIS4E field team for ten days at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, where the team rehearsed planetary geology instruments against the basaltic flanks of Kīlauea.
New Mexico · Kilbourne Hole, 2017. Seven students returned with the RIS4E team to the Potrillo volcanic field for six days of simulated extravehicular activities at a maar volcanic crater two miles wide, joined by NASA astronaut Barry "Butch" Wilmore.
RISE 2, 2022. By the time RIS4E grew into RISE 2, the question had shifted from whether the instruments worked to whether the data they produced could fit inside the operational rhythm of an Artemis-era extravehicular activity. Sara Ruberg reported on the program's return to Potrillo in the spring of 2022.
For a fuller record of the participating students, faculty, and field crews, see the Hawaii team page, the New Mexico team page, and the 2015 RIS4E field crew.