Elizabeth Citrin
Project Manager, Solar Dynamics Observatory, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
"As SDO Project Manager, I am responsible for the entire mission, from the building of the satellite, to overseeing that the technical requirements are met, to making sure that everything is running on cost and schedule. I pretty much spend most of my time in meetings -- that's where I find out how things are going. But when the hardware starts being put together, that's when I get out of my office and onto the floor -- where the action is!"
Louise Prockter
Instrument Scientist, MESSENGER, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory
Louise's work thus far has taken her from one end of the solar system to the other. She trained her instruments on Mercury for the first detailed orbital look of the innermost planet. When the Galileo mission surveyed Europa in the late 1990s, Prockter and other scientists found that its surface was crisscrossed with fractures, and that many of these were formed of ice mixed with organic matter that probably came up from the subsurface of the moon. She's hoping to get back to Jupiter's moon Europa. "The surface is ice, but how far down is it frozen? How deep is the ocean we think underlies the ice shell? In many ways, Galileo raised more questions than it answered about Europa, and I would love to go back and learn more."
