Ali Sundermier
4 dispatches · Kīlauea
Volcano Love
Brent Garry, a volcanologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, led the lidar team during the RIS4E field test at Kīlauea in June 2015, using laser pulses to capture the topography of Hawaii’s lava flows for comparison with volcanic landscapes on the Moon and Mars. A career built on lava flows across six countries gave him the reference library to read what the landscape was telling him.
ReadLIDAR
NASA geologists Brent Garry and Patrick Whelley hauled a 50-pound laser instrument called LIDAR across the lava desert of Kīlauea in June 2015, scanning the terrain in three dimensions. The technology gave the RIS4E team a way to spatially revisit lava flows and outcrops from the lab, and tested whether a next-generation version could one day guide astronauts exploring another planet’s surface.
ReadGuardian of the LIDAR
Patrick Whelley, a postdoctoral research fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, shouldered a 50-pound LIDAR instrument across the lava fields of Kīlauea during the June 2015 RIS4E expedition. A volcanologist who had studied craters from Chile to the world’s most remote peaks, Whelley brought the laser-ranging tool to Hawaii to distinguish lava flow types and test how such instruments could serve future planetary explorers.
ReadClash Over a Telescope
When the RIS4E team arrived in Hawaii in 2015, a protest was already well underway on Mauna Kea, where native Hawaiians had successfully halted construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope since October 2014. The standoff captured a tension older than the space age: the summit that astronomers called the Northern Hemisphere’s finest observatory was, for many Hawaiians, a sacred ancestor that no telescope could justify disturbing.
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