Patrice Smith Named 2025 DPS-NSBP Speaker

This post is adapted from a press release from the AAS's Division for Planetary Sciences.

Within the partnership between the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and the National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP), Earth and Planetary Systems Sciences (EPSS) section, Patrice Smith is recognized as the newest DPS-NSBP Speaker awardee. Patrice is a PhD student in physics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, specializing in space physics and instrumentation. She is currently working with Dr. Kurt Retherford on compositional analyses of the Moon using far-ultraviolet (FUV) measurements acquired by the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) instrument on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

Patrice Smith’s award-winning talk at the NSBP Fall 2024 meeting, entitled “FUV Measurements of the Lunar Exosphere Composition with LRO-LAMP,” described work to identify the composition and abundances of atoms and molecules in the tenuous lunar atmosphere. Such work is needed to characterize the present lunar environment, and also to generate key constraints for potential in situ resource utilization that would enable future sustainable exploration of the Moon by landers and humans.

The DPS partnership with NSBP was established to jointly represent the interests of planetary scientists and students who identify as members of communities that are critically underrepresented in this discipline. Within this DPS-NSBP partnership, the top early career EPSS speaker is selected by the NSBP EPSS chairs, based on their presentation on planetary science research at the annual NSBP meeting, as the DPS-NSBP Speaker awardee. This Speaker is invited by DPS to speak at the following year’s DPS meeting, with expenses covered by the DPS.

DPS is thrilled to invite Patrice Smith to speak at the 2025 DPS meeting, which will be hosted jointly with the European Planetary Science Conference (EPSC) and held in Helsinki, Finland, in September. Smith says, “Attending the AAS-DPS 2025 meeting will provide a valuable opportunity to gather productive feedback on my work as it develops. Given that it will be a joint EPSC year, I am particularly excited about the potential for strong overlap and fostering collaboration with other European labs whose research aligns closely with mine.”