Suzanne E. Smrekar is an American geophysicist and Deputy Principal Investigator for the Mars

InSight Insight is the understanding of a specific cause and effect within a particular context. The term insight can have several related meanings: *a piece of information *the act or result of understanding the inner nature of things or of seeing intu ...

lander and the principal investigator for the planned

VERITAS Veritas is the name given to the Roman virtue of truthfulness, which was considered one of the main virtues any good Roman should possess. The Greek goddess of truth is Aletheia (Ancient Greek: ). The German philosopher Martin Heidegger argues ...

space probe to Venus.

Background

Smrekar obtained her B.S. degree in geophysics and mathematics from Brown University in 1984, and her doctorate in geophysics from

Southern Methodist University , mottoeng = " The truth will make you free" , established = , type = Private research university , accreditation = SACS , academic_affiliations = , religious_affiliation = United Methodist Church , president = R. Gerald Turner , pr ...

in 1990. She was a postdoctoral researcher at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

before joining the

Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center in the City of La Cañada Flintridge, California, United States. Founded in the 1930s by Caltech researchers, JPL is owned by NASA ...

(JPL) in 1992.

Career

Published works

Smrekar and colleague Ellen Stofan reported in ''

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that Scientific method, builds and organizes knowledge in the form of Testability, testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earli ...

'' in 1997 that Venus' heat loss was caused by volcanic activity and formations specific to Venus. As Venus has no plate tectonics like Earth, she and others are attempting to study its volcanalogy to draw better conclusions about the formation of Earth. Smrekar and an international team of researchers presented the Venus Emissivitiy Mapper (VEM) at a conference in 2018; this device scans the planet's surface at specific wavelengths to record the mineral composition, and uses other channels to determine cloud cover, weather, interference, and volcanic activity. Smrekar remains a team member of the joint Brown – MIT NASA Lunar Science Institute. She has jointly written several articles for the Encyclopedia of the Solar System.

NASA Missions

Smrekar has formed part of multiple

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeedi ...

teams dedicated to exploring the Solar System. In 1999, she was involved with the design of the ground-penetrant micro-laboratories

Deep Space 2 Deep Space 2 was a NASA space probe, part of the New Millennium Program. It included two highly advanced miniature space probes that were sent to Mars aboard the Mars Polar Lander in January 1999. The probes were named "Scott" and "Amundsen", in h ...

that "hitchhiked" on the

Mars Polar Lander The Mars Polar Lander, also known as the Mars Surveyor '98 Lander, was a 290-kilogram robotic spacecraft lander launched by NASA on January 3, 1999, to study the soil and climate of Planum Australe, a region near the south pole on Mars. It form ...

. She was Deputy Project Leader for the

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter ''Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter'' (MRO) is a spacecraft designed to study the geology and climate of Mars, provide reconnaissance of future landing sites, and relay data from surface missions back to Earth. It was launched on August 12, 2005, a ...

(MRO), which, in addition to monitoring the eventual descent for multiple Martian instrument landings, used its shallow- and deep-penetration radar to uncover a pool of solid carbon dioxide at Mars' South Pole – "equivalent to Lake Superior." Direct observation of the Martian

lithosphere A lithosphere () is the rigid, outermost rocky shell of a terrestrial planet or natural satellite. On Earth, it is composed of the crust and the portion of the upper mantle that behaves elastically on time scales of up to thousands of years ...

led to some of the first accurate measurements of the interior temperature of the planet. Her Magellan probe uncovered newly-active geology on the planet. She designed the HP3 and GEMS instrument packages for the

mission, which commenced in 2016. Smrekar served as Deputy Principal Investigator in addition to constructing much of the ground-penetrant instrumentation for InSight. She lightly referred to needing to obtain sub-surface results of Martian geography and geology as understanding "...the whole enchilada" of non-Earth planets.

Minor planet discoverer

On 14 June 1983, Smrekar discovered asteroid 6819 McGarvey at

Palomar Observatory Palomar Observatory is an astronomical research observatory in San Diego County, California, United States, in the Palomar Mountain Range. It is owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Research time at the observat ...

. She named it after her mother, Flora McGarvey Smrekar (1924–1977).

Recognition

* 2016 – Winner, NASA small robotics funding for VERITAS * 2015 – Elected to

International Academy of Astronautics The International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) is an independent non-governmental organization established in Stockholm (Sweden) on August 16, 1960, by Dr. Theodore von Kármán, and recognized by the United Nations in 1996. The IAA has elect ...

* 2012 – NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal *2012 – Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) lecture * 1996 – Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, nominee * 1993 – NASA Group Science Award, Magellan Science Group * 1984 – Department of Geological Sciences Senior Thesis Award, Brown University

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Smrekar, Suzanne Living people 21st-century American astronomers Discoverers of minor planets InSight Southern Methodist University alumni Year of birth missing (living people) Brown University alumni NASA people Planetary scientists Women planetary scientists