Well, well, well, it’s been more than three years that I hadn’t written a blogpost over here, or anywhere else for that matter I think. The last post I made was about the Rosetta space mission, at the occasion of its final moment as it soft-landed on the comet 67P. That was late September 2016. Then came 2017 and 2018. The final years of my PhD. That could may be explain why it’s been so long. But not quite, because we’re not in 2018, but in April 2020 as I’m hitting the keys right now.
Saguaro cactus in Tucson 
OSIRIS-REx wine 
Planetary mural at drake building, LPL, UoA
Then came 2019, the year I was very busy with the OSIRIS-REx space mission, as a participating scientist. Wait, did I announce it already ? I guess not, so this post will do the honours. Yes, since late 2018 I started officially working as a participating scientist of the NASA’s OSIRIS-REx space mission. And I still do, involved with the spectral analysis and image processing working groups of the science team of the mission. So I’ll try to briefly introduce the mission for those who do not know. This is a NASA New Frontiers planetary science mission, with the aim of returning a pristine sample from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, to the EARTH, to our planet. Simply put, the samples from Bennu could help us answer a lot of questions and no doubt, raise even more questions about the formation of the solar system, including planets like ours and probe into the process of emergence of life, as we know it on our Pale Blue Dot. This is not a scientific talk or a paper, so I’ll pass the details. But if you’re interested, feel free to contact me on this for more details and to know what exactly I do with OSIRIS-REx. Yeah, so I spent 2 months in Tucson, AZ at the Lunar & Planetary Laboratory of University of Arizona, for the mission work last year, actively taking part in the selection of the sampling site, which is a complicated process, at the end of which we were able to find what we thought the best (safely sampleable and scientifically interesting) area on the asteroid Bennu in last December (2019). The process took about a year from December 2018, when the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived close to Bennu and December 2019, when we chose the best site as well as a backup site. It was also the time I was living in the states for the very first time. So many discoveries, and to do that in Tucson, it was fabulous. Wait, what else I was busy with last year ? Yeah I had to do some teachings too for the Observatoire de Paris, where I was employed as an ATER (which is a French acronym for someone doing research and teachings, usually just after their thesis). Yeah, so I had to do teachings, 96 hours of them. I had to plan and arrange all that and juggle among the OSIRIS-REx mission, Master students, practical works, visits to schools around Paris to mentor several classes (yes I was mentoring several school classes) , organise their visits to the Observatory and guide the visits, etc and what not. I guess, I could be excused for not having had enough time to write something that year. You can judge my justification to the best of your knowledge. I almost forgot, I was involved with SpaceBus France for some outreach activities of astronomy and space that year. More on that later. Well, I hope.
Outreach with SpaceBus France in Lusignan ©️ SpaceBus France 
at Pima Air and Space Museum, Tucson 
A typical sunset in Tucson
Of course, I didn’t forget to take some holidays. One month in Brazil in summer with some of my close friends and one more month back home in Sri Lanka, especially for the annular solar eclipse on the boxing day.
annular solar eclipse 2019 from Jaffna, Sri Lanka © JDP Deshapriya, Chanusha Trishan and ARIS 
Outreach in Jaffna, Sri Lanka for the annular solar eclipse 26 December 2019 
Outreach with BepiColombo space mission at Fête de la science 2018 in Paris
And came 2020 ! 2020 !! Now I’m a postdoc at LESIA, Observatoire de Paris with full time available for research, working with OSIRIS-REx. But, still with a lot of time for teleconferences.
Yes, as we know it now, this is a year that probably nobody knew correctly what it had in store for us. Today is 19 April 2020 and Covid-19 is all over the planet and almost entire world is at a still in self-confinement. So this is when I could cease my ultra-busy routine and take a breath and reflect about many things that we’ve been taking for granted. And now I ended up finding some time to write something up here, a post which shares some updates of what I’ve been up to lately, with some excuses as to why I’ve not done so during last three years and half or so.
I guess that’s it for now then. Looking forward to blogging at a faster frequency, better than a post per 3.5 years.