User:Flavinista/AdrianaOcampo

Early life and education
Adriana Christian Ocampo was born on January 5, 1955, in Barranquilla, Colombia. Her mother is Teresa Uria Ocampo, and her father is Victor Alberto Ocampo. Her family moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina before her first birthday and then emigrated to Pasadena, California, in 1970, at the age of 14 where she was able to study physics and calculus. During high school, Ocampo was part of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) troop 509. In 1973, while a junior in high school, she got a summer job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she analyzed images sent by the Viking spacecraft. In 1980, Ocampo attained U.S. citizenship.

She began her higher education in aerospace engineering at the Pasadena City College while participating in a Jet Propulsion Laboratory sponsored program. Ocampo then transferred to California State University where she changed her major. She earned her B.S. degree in Geology from California State University, Los Angeles in 1983, while working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 1983, after graduation, she accepted a full-time job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a research scientist. She earned her M.S. degree in Planetary Geology from California State University, Northridge in 1997, and she finished her Ph.D. at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam in The Netherlands.

Nasa career
Adriana Ocampo currently serves as the led program executive for New Frontiers. The New Frontiers Program mission is to take the top priorities and goals of the planetary scientific community and address them employing medium-class spacecraft missions that furthers the understanding of the solar system. Some of the missions encompassed in this program are the Juno mission to Jupiter, the New Horizons mission to Pluto, and the asteroid sample return mission OSIRIS-REx.

Viking mission to mars
In 1973, Adriana Ocampo worked in a multi-mission image processing laboratory. She was a member of the imaging team for the Viking program were she planned, analyzed, and produced images from Mars satellites, Phobos and Deimos, published by NASA in 1984 and utilized to plan the Russian Phobos mission. During this mission the team detected 100 km downward from the dense atmosphere of Venus, this was particularly useful to study the "night side" of venus. Consequently, the team of scientists constructed the night-side maps of Venus with resolutions 3 - 6 times better than earth-based telescopes.

Chicxulub impact crater
The Chicxulub impact crater is located underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. It was hypothesized that this crater was formed by an asteroid leading to mass extinctions in Earth. This was previously postulated, in the early 1980s, by the physicist Luis Walter Alvarez and his son Walter Alvarez a geologist. However, the only evidence to back this theory was the presence of Iridium n the K/T boundary since this element was mainly present in asteroids and comets. While looking for water resources in Yucatán using satellite images in 1989 and 1990, Ocampo, her then-husband Kevin O. Pope, and Charles Duller, found cenotes related to this crater. Adriana Ocampo and her Colleges hypothesized that the cenote might be near the impact site and their findings where later published in the scientific Journal Nature in May of 1991. In 1991, the Exobiology Program of NASA Office of Space Science and The Planetary Society (TPS) of pasadena sponsored an expedition led by Adriana Ocampo and Kevin Pope. During this expedition, Ocampo and her colleges discovered two new sites containing two layers of material, called ejecta. This means that particles were ejected upon impact of the asteroid and flowed like lava generating ejecta lobes. The ejecta lobes at Chicxulub are key to better understand Mars since most of that planet is covered by it. Ocampo defended her master thesis on the Chicxulub impact crater at California State University.

Belize ejecta site
The Exobiology Program of NASA Office of Space Science and The Planetary Society (TPS) of pasadena sponsored another expedition to the second ejecta site in Belize. Ocampo led the expedition in Belize on January 1995, 1996, and 1998. During these expeditions small particles, like green glass, later identifies as tektites were found in the site. These particles are from when exposed to high temperatures likes the ones generated during the impact, linking this site to other ejecta sites in the Caribbean and Mexico.

Galileo mission
Ocampo was part of the team in the Galileo's mission. She was in charge of the near infrared mapping spectrometer (NIMS), on Galileo's project, as the science coordinator for flight project mission operations. Galileo space probe was launched in 1989 in route to Jupiter, bearing four remote-sensing instruments, one of them being NIMS. Ocampo was in charge of scheduling the observations of Jupiter's moon, Europa, and leading the data analysis. Adriana Ocampo and her colleges published the results of this study in the Icarus journal titled "Galileo's Multiinstrument Spectral View of Europa's Surface Composition". Adriana incorporated math examples that highlighted the Galileo spacecraft in high school math books.

Juno mission
As the lead program Executive, Adriana Ocampo was part of the Juno Mission. Her team was in charge of developing strategic plans and recommendations for the research of this planet. This mission is the first time that a spacecraft is propelled with solar panels with more than 8 meters in length.