\n<\/p>\n
\u201cI was not interested in science until I got to high school, and I didn\u2019t find what I wanted to focus on as far as what I liked the most about science until I was in grad school. I spent a summer doing an internship at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab focused on Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa, completely fell in love with Europa, and completely fell in love with planetary science.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI found it amazing that this world was covered in ice and had an ocean underneath. I was mapping this area on Europa called Conamara Chaos,<\/strong>\u00a0where we believe that the surface is locally heated. Because of this, there are\u00a0ginormous icebergs that broke off and floated around in this slushy ice, so I learned to map [that part of the surface]. Having my physics and math background and thinking about a world with a subsurface ocean, I was like, \u2018OK, this is a good marriage of fluid mechanics and heat transfer. Europa is a nice world to study that will combine my background with this new planetary science thing that I love.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cWhat happened with Europa Clipper was I decided to do my dissertation topic on [the moon]. We\u2019d\u00a0seen images of\u00a0these beautiful south polar plumes on Enceladus, these geyser-like plumes, but Europa is much bigger. It has much more water and receives much more tidal\u00a0heating. Why didn\u2019t the Galileo spacecraft see plumes on\u00a0Europa? Why don\u2019t we see geysers?<\/p>\n \u201cMy dissertation focused on what it would take to have this geyser activity on Europa and for spacecraft cameras to image it. I remember defending my dissertation well but sitting there thinking, \u2018People will think I\u2019m a quack because we\u2019ve never seen geysers on Europa.\u2019 That was in May, and by December, LorenzRoth\u2019s paper came out that Hubble may have detected geysers on Europa. That\u2019s when I was like, \u2018Oh yes, I might actually have a career!\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cShortly after that, the call came out for instrument proposals. Zibi\u00a0Turtle\u00a0[Principal Investigator for the Europa Imaging System] met me at a conference and said, \u2018We\u2019re writing\u00a0a proposal for a camera for the Europa mission. Would you want to be on it?\u2019 At that point, I was a year out of my Ph.D. and was like, \u2018Are you kidding me?\u2019 Because that usually never happens. Usually, the people on these instrument teams are more senior. They\u2019ve been around longer, so it\u2019s very rare to be just finishing up your Ph.D. and someone asks you. I felt like it was the best thing in the world because Europa was already my favorite place in the solar system. It would be like a dream to be on the team that will send a spacecraft there to study it. That doesn\u2019t happen very often. So, I said, \u2018Sure. I would love to.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cOur camera got selected, and is an instrument on the\u00a0Europa Clipper mission, and my role on the team is to look for those geysers! I\u2019ve come a long way from thinking, \u2018Well, I did this whole dissertation on geysers, what it would take for them to erupt, for a spacecraft to see them, and that people might not take me seriously as a scientist because of\u00a0it,\u2019 to being on the Europa Clipper camera team involved in investigating these plumes\u00a0and ensuring we can image them if they\u2019re there. It\u2019s a full-circle moment.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2013\u00a0Dr. Lynnae Quick, Ocean Worlds Planetary Scientist, NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center<\/p>\n