First Drawings at LPL

Well I'm now officially a first year PhD grad student at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, at the University of Arizona.  Now that I'm fairly well settled in, and I'm in a class/research routine, I've found some time to actually do some drawing!

I'm currently taking "Space Systems Engineering" for fun - and as part of the class, we must design a complete  unmanned, planetary space mission.  (This involves designing all of the subsystems, such as propulsion, communication, etc., and integrating them all together over the course of a semester.)  Between the options of a mission to the Trojan asteroids, or Mars, I chose the asteroids.  And since I'm me, I made an unnecessary mission patch for the project. 

And since I was in the mood, I made a mission patch for the other project: a Mars mission:

My current research project at LPL is analyzing Herschel Space Telescope observations of transition disks.  Transition disks are protoplanetary disks (aka young solar systems, less than ~10 million years old), that are in the process of losing their gas disks.  In a moment of spare time while some of said data was being downloaded and processed, I drew up a cover for my binder of associated papers.

Making use of the nice Tucson weather, I spent one Saturday afternoon outside of LPL, enjoying the sun, and  drawing a sketch of the Kuiper Space Science building:

Resorting to my usual repertoire, here's a drawing of a Saturn Ib:

Since I wanted to draw something different, I asked one of my officemates, Kelly, what to draw.  She suggested a meteor shower...

...now I'm just waiting for the other officemate(s) to give me suggestions...