Adriana C. Ocampo: 1955—: Planetary geologist
Image from Wikipedia
Adriana Ocampo was born on January 5, 1955 in Columbia, and the family moved to Argentina before she was one year old. Her father was an electronics technician, teacher, and salesman, and he encouraged her interests in science by buying her a chemistry set and telescope. The dolls she played with were outfitted as astronauts. One of her favorite authors was science fiction writer Jules Verne.
From her birth to the time she entered high school, world events had primed her interest in space exploration. Russia had launched the first man and first woman into space in 1961. The United States had its Mercury and Gemini programs in 1958-1963 and 1961-1966, respectively. Apollo had begun in 1960, and the tragic launchpad fire aboard Apollo 1 (January 27, 1967) didn't stop 3 uncrewed test flights (1967-1968) and 4 crewed flights (1968-1969) by the time she was ready to start high school With the American space program so prevalently in the new, she showed her interest by writing to NASA right around the time of Apollo 11's landing on the Moon. NASA responded with a letter in English, which she couldn't read at the time, and a postage stamp of Neil Armstrong on the Moon, which delighted her to no end.
Image from Smithsonian National Space Museum
She was not like other girls and played mostly with boys. Her girl friends' ambitions were lower (nurse, not a doctor), and they weren't interested in stories about space like boys were. She might have acquired a rebellious nature from her mother, a native Argentine who taught at a Montessori school -- characterized by hands-on activities, and self-directed work instead of traditional lectures and tests. Her junior high school (Colegio Nacional de Vicente Lopez) was painful for her. She disliked the white robe required to go over her clothes, and she refused to follow suit with a long hair style like other girls. Lectures in class bored her.
At home, she learned to fix radios and her uncle's car, and she designed winged space shuttles even though they were 10 years away. Adriana even flew her own paper airplane designs off the roof where she built a "space center" that included a launch pad and rocket ship using kitchen utensils and materials from her father's electrical workshop. She even built her own lunar colony model there with domed habitats, a greenhouse, an oxygen lab, and a centipede-shaped moon rover.
Because of the weakening economy in Argentina and its unstable government, Adriana's father left for Los Angeles to find work in September 1968. In letters, she continued her engineering self-education by asking her father technical questions like how to repair the washing machine.
Adriana felt suited for engineering, and a high school aptitude exam showed she was "good at numbers and that her mind was analytical; she could break down a big problem into steps and solve it". However, they placed her in a business school instead of a technical school, perhaps because of stereotypical gender roles back then. In December 1969, the family moved to Los Angeles where her father had a job in an auto factory. Her first question was "Where is NASA?" In high school, she studied English and got special permission to take boys-only classes in woodworking, drafting, and car mechanics.
The Boy Scouts visited her school to describe a special new branch called Space Explorers Post 509, sponsored by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL). She started attending weekly meetings in 1972, and in 1973, Adriana got a summer job at JPL in Pasadena. There, she toured off-limits areas of JPL and was exposed to robotic spacecraft like Pioneer (first launched in 1958) and Mariner (10 probes launched 1962-1973).
She worked among men with doctoral degrees on a project called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), which used radio telescopes to study space. Regular telescopes collect data through glass lenses, and their resolution is limited to the size of the lens. Radio telescopes work differently by collecting radio waves from objects in space. The VLBI project used the data from several radio telescopes and the distance between them (many miles) to expand resolution as if they were using a glass lens telescope that many miles in diameter.
How VLBI works with only 2 radio telescopes. (from Geodesy)
Based on that experience as a technician, she started university with a major in aerospace engineering. During her part-time work at JPL in college, she analyzed images sent by the two Viking spacecraft on Mars in 1976. Those images and the possible meanings they held caused her to change her undergraduate major at the California State University to geology (graduated 1983), and then her master's there became planetary geology. Compared to strict schooling in Argentina, California's university lifestyle was wonderful. She wrote: “In geology, you have to do a lot of fieldwork — and it was great that they offered the options to do this over the weekends. The professors tried to allow students that flexibility....I was one of the many students who studied part time and worked full time. I needed to find a university that would allow me the flexibility to do that, to take classes in the afternoons, evenings and weekends. I found that the CSUN Department of Geology was very receptive" (CSUN, vol. 67)
Geologist Adriana Ocampo (from Space Rocks: The Story of Planetary Geologist Adriana Ocampo)
In 1980, while Adriana was doing her undergraduate work, scientists hypothesized that an asteroid had hit the Earth 65 million years ago and caused the extinction of dinosaurs. This was based on the discovery of iridium in several locations all at the same geologic level consistent with that time. Iridium comes mostly from asteroids. Based on the amount of iridium found, they estimated something 6-14 km in diameter hit somewhere on Earth.
In the 1940s and later, Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) was drilling for oil in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico near the village of Chicxulub. In 1978, its geophysicists noticed a 180-km-wide circular anomaly of their magnetic and gravity data there. The cause was unknown. The simply felt there was something enormous and circular underground that has different physical properties from the surrounding crust.
In 1988, archaeologist/geologist Kevin Pope was at a scientific conference talking about cenotes (freshwater sinkholes) in Yucatan, where he and NASA researcher Charles Duller were working on a project on surface water and Mayan archaeology. Cenotes were all over the peninsula, but Adriana asked him about a curious ring of cenotes Pope and Duller had found there to the west of many other scattered cenotes. She wondered if the ring might be evidence of an asteroid crater, so they set out on an expedition to investigate.
Adriana (center with hat) with part of the Chicxulub expedition
(image spliced from The Planetary Report, 1995)
The cenotes weren't formed directly by the asteroid. They formed naturally in the underground limestone, but the asteroid impact has weakened the ring area on the crater's edge. Together, they used this data and the PEMEX data to confirm it in 1991 and 1993.
Left: Location of Yucatan and Chicxulub crater
Middle: PEMEX gravity map
Right: Gravity map superimposed on sinkholes
During her full-time work at JPL as she studied for her master's degree, she investigated not only the surface of Mars, but its surroundings. In 1984, using Viking Orbiter data, she coauthored a pictorial description of Mars' moon Phobos ("Phobos: Close encounter imaging from the Viking Orbiters"). She also coauthored a paper "Mars: Satellite and Ring Search from Viking" in 1988. (No rings or additional moons were found.)
Model of Viking lander with Carl Sagan, and first color image from Mars.
In addition to studying the data from the Viking landers, she was also involved in the Galileo mission to Jupiter. She joined the team in 1984. The robotic probe launched in 1989 and reached Jupiter in 1995 for orbital analysis of the planet and its moons. The Galileo used Near Infrared Mapping Spectrometry (NIMS) to analyze layers of Jupiter's clouds at different wavelengths. Different gases and clouds absorb specific infrared colors, so by looking at which colors are missing or strong, scientists identify gases like methane, ammonia, and water vapor.
Top wavelength: red spot showing features what eyes can barely see
2nd wavelength: ammonia ice, with red to yellow are, blue where none exists
3rd wavelength: cloud heights, with the highest clouds in red (10-20 km higher than others)
Bottom wavelength: shows the lower surrounding clouds.
NIMS image of Venus (Vision Learning)
Her job as science coordinator, Ocampo scheduled the observations of Jupiter's moon Europa, and led the data analysis in 2005 after Galileo was allowed to end its mission in 2003 by entering Jupiter's atmosphere.
Adriana checking the NIMS data (Space Rocks: The Story of Planetary Geologist Adriana Ocampo)
She got her master's in 1997 rather than sooner because she was spending so much time working at JPL. But during that time, she was recognized for her efforts. For example, she received the Woman of the Year Award in Science in 1992.
In 2006, she began working as the head of the Juno mission, NASA's second probe to Jupiter and the first one using solar panels for power. Its goal (still ongoing since its arrival in 2016) is to "understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter".
During all of this time, she kept up her research into the Chicxulub crater and published extensively. With her international connections, she decided to pursue a doctoral degree in planetary geology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where she studied "ejecta layers"—shattered rock and debris thrown hundreds of miles wide by the asteroid impact—from the Chicxulub crater. In particular, she investigated tiny green glass spheres called tektites—rocks that were melted by the heat of the impact. She started her PhD around 2009 and completed it in 2012-2013.
Microtektites from Chicxulub, about 1 mm diameter (from EurekAlert, AAAS)
At NASA she served as the lead program executive for New Frontiers, which included the Juno mission to Jupiter, the New Horizons mission to Pluto, and the asteroid (Bennu) sample return mission OSIRIS-REx. When New Horizons flew past Pluto, it collected data on Arrokoth, the 36 km (22 miles) long dumbbell-shaped asteroid, the most distant and most primitive object ever explored by a spacecraft. Adriana was one of 133 coauthors on a paper about it. Ocampo retired from NASA in 2023.
Artist rendition of Arrokoth with the New Horizons spacecraft (Universe Magazine)
Shortly after gettingi her PhD, Adriana won the 2016 National Hispanic Scientist of the Year award.
Receiving the award, October 23
Aside from administrative duties at NASA and her planetary geology research, Adriana has also helped spread science to the world. With sponsorship from The Planetary Society (TPS), she organized a program to bring planetary science to developing countries beginning in 1987, and reaching Mexico, Costa Rica, Columbia, Nigeria, Egypt, Argentina and China through 2003. TPS, the United Nations, and the European Space Agency sponsored additional workshops in some of those countries. Ocampo worked with the United Nations to develop these workshops, and she also founded the Pan American Space Conference to promote international communication and cooperation in space science and technology. She promotes STEM learning by speaking at functions for young people, mentoring girls and women with dreams of science careers, and volunteering at medical camps. To no surprise, her emphasis has been on young women, and Latinas in particular, who are future scientists and engineers.
Her office at NASA
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