Champions of Change
She is a meteoriticist and co-lead, with Carl Hergenrother, of Target Asteroids!, a citizen science project of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission, led by Dante Lauretta of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona. In addition to her work analyzing meteorites, she has a lifelong interest in amateur astronomy and began as co-lead of Target Asteroids! in 2011. Amateur astronomers are important partners in the field of asteroid science, and their observations for Target Asteroids! aid the OSIRIS-REx mission, future missions to asteroids, and in understanding asteroids potentially hazardous to Earth. Target Asteroids!’s citizen scientists contributed 73 observations of 17 near-Earth asteroids in the first year of this decade long program that expands the role of citizen scientists in cutting edge asteroid research and serves as a model for other scientist-citizen scientist collaborations.