Adriana Ocampo: _{From Dinosaurs to Exploring Planets}

Childhood in the years of the space race

Adriana Ocampo was born January 5, 1955, in Barranquilla, Colombia, although months later her family moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina. She had an interest in science from early childhood, and her transition into a grade school student happened at a time when space travel was all the rage. During the early 1960s, the USSR launched the first human into space. Soon after that, President Kennedy made his famous speech committing NASA to landing a man on the moon and the Space Race caught the imagination of children all over the world. One of those children was the young Ocampo. At age 8, she decided that NASA was where she wanted to work. She kept this goal in mind growing up in Buenos Aires, where she’d often sit atop the roof of her family's home, dreaming and designing space colonies.

Ocampo and her three sisters had big dreams. To get the careers that they dreamed of, their parents explained that education was vitally important; in fact, they called education the most important thing in life. When Ocampo tried to enroll in an Argentine public high school that specialized in science, the school administrators explained that they took only boys. That prompted her parents to take action. To give their children the best education possible, they opted to emigrate. Thus in late 1969, just months after American astronauts became the first humans to walk on the moon, the Ocampo family left Argentina for the US.

Not only did Ocampo’s parents choose the US; they went to Pasadena, California, which happened to be the location of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). That was a stroke of fortune, even if the 14 year-old Ocampo did not recognize it at the time. In her mind, NASA and the United States were one and the same. Thus, she recalls, upon landing on US soil, her first words were: “Where is NASA?”

Turning good fortune into a science career

For a teenage Ocampo, moving to Pasadena was a key event for setting up her career. Despite English not being her first language, she excelled in school. Based on her performance and interest in science, she landed a volunteer position at JPL during her junior year in high school. This led to a summer job at the lab when she was going into her senior year in 1973. For the next several years, she continued working at JPL, assisting with projects related to geology, although she enrolled at Pasadena City College (PCC) expecting to become an aerospace engineer. The PCC program was for a two-year associate degree, but as a JPL-sponsored science student, Ocampo planned to transfer to a four-year program to continue her aerospace engineering studies.

Although she worked on various geology studies at JPL, the research intersected with her aerospace engineering interest in a variety of ways. That was especially true when she was assigned to the imaging team for NASA’s Viking mission that landed two probes on the surface of Mars in 1976. She worked on technical details involving the cameras of the landing probes, and this role in the mission made her one of the first human beings to see the surface of Mars. Ocampo was fascinated by the rocks and Martian landscape, which, she observed, resembled the deserts of southern California. Thus, when receiving her associate degree from PCC in 1977, she recognized the centrality of geoscience to the study of planets, and decided she really ought to focus on geology.

Ocampo majored in geology after transferring to California State University at Los Angeles. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree in 1983 and went on to earn a master’s degree in planetary geology at another California State University campus, Cal State Northridge. Both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees took Ocampo longer than the usual time to complete because she earned them while working full-time at JPL. In fact, her master’s degree was awarded in 1997, by which time her planetary geology experience included not only the Viking mission on Mars, but also NASA’s Galileo mission to Jupiter. Along the way, she won numerous awards, including the Comisión Femenil Woman of the Year Award in Science in 1992, the JPL Advisory Council for Women Award in 1996, and an honor from the Chicano Federation in 1997. She also was chosen to represent JPL at the Leadership Conference for Women in Science and Engineering in 1994.

Weaving space missions, dinosaurs, and school

Ocampo’s unusual pathway into space science qualified her for positions on planetary mission teams with ever increasing responsibility. Galileo was a robotic probe mission to Jupiter, and Ocampo started working on the project in 1984. Five years later, in 1989, the probe was launched on a six-year voyage to Jupiter. Along the way, it flew past Venus to gain velocity and Ocampo was part of a team that studied the Venusian clouds with an instrument on Galileo called an infrared spectrometer. She used the same instrument when the probe arrived at the Jovian system – Jupiter and its moons – in 1995. This enabled detailed mapping of Jupiter and its dozens of moons. The studies went on until 2003 when Galileo was allowed to crash into Jupiter’s atmosphere after completing its mission.

Prior to crashing into Jupiter, the probe sent back data that led to numerous findings, including the discovery that one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa, contains a subsurface ocean that could be the right environment for life to develop. Ocampo also helped to discover that hydrogen peroxide was being produced on Europa’s surface ice. The research suggested that the chemical was produced because of high levels of radiation striking the frozen moon. Eventually, this gave other scientists an idea for how lifeforms that might exist inside the Europan ocean could potentially obtain energy.

During the Galileo mission, Ocampo co-discovered the Chicxulub Impact Crater on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. The research team that included Ocampo showed a layer within the crater wall to be rich in iridium – a rare element that must have come from an asteroid impact from space. The iridium layer was deposited 65 million years ago. That corresponds to the end of the geologic period known as the Cretaceous and is the time when the dinosaurs died off. This led to the theory, widely accepted today, that the dinosaurs went extinct due to an impact event that threw dust into the atmosphere, cooling the planet and cutting off the production of food.

Ocampo’s work on the Chicxulub Crater became the topic of her master’s thesis. She earned her degree in 1997, while Project Galileo was running at full speed. She continued pursuing degrees while working and ultimately earned a Ph.D. from Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where she was working with the European Space Agency (ESA).

Program Manager at NASA headquarters

As for how high Ocampo is soaring with NASA, a good answer is 3.5 billion miles – the approximate distance to Pluto. In 1998, a year after earning her master’s degree, Ocampo relocated from California to Washington, DC to work at NASA headquarters as part of the program management team for a new generation of robotic planetary exploration probes, called New Frontiers. Currently, New Frontiers includes three missions. One of these, New Frontiers 3, is launching in 2016 on a voyage to collect samples from an asteroid. The other two missions are already in space. Launched in 2011, New Frontiers 2, known as the Juno probe, will arrive at Jupiter in 2016 where it will study the planet’s atmosphere and magnetic field.

Finally, there is New Frontiers 1, called the New Horizons probe. It departed Earth back in 2006 and these days it’s the mission most on Ocampo’s mind, since it’s now sending back information from Pluto and the handful of other icy worlds that travel with Pluto in the Kuiper Belt.

People may lose interest in Pluto often because it’s not one of the major planets in our Solar System. But during Ocampo’s career at NASA, there has been a trend involving small, icy worlds. Some of the small worlds are turning out to contain oceans under their ice, and when the oceans are confirmed they become candidates for the possible presence of microscopic life. Europa is one such world. Another is Enceladus, one of the moons of Saturn. Few people are thinking about this yet when it comes to Pluto, but the potential is there.

In the meantime, Ocampo is hard at work overseeing New Horizons to Pluto and the other New Frontiers missions from NASA Headquarters, where she is now the Program Executive.

A model for budding scientists

As high as she soars, Ocampo never forgets how she got started. Therefore, amidst her science, management of planetary exploration, and all of her studies, she has been particularly active in still another endeavor: promotion of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Her STEM promotion activities range from speaking at functions for young people interested in science, to mentoring girls and women who dream of a science career, to volunteering at medical camps and acting as an English-Spanish interpreter. Within STEM promotion, her emphasis has been on young women, and Latinas in particular, who are budding scientists and engineers. Since her childhood dreams of getting up close and personal with outer space, Ocampo’s career has soared to great heights, with the New Frontiers space program for which she is lead program executive even successfully sending a spacecraft the 3.5 billion miles to Pluto and beyond. But wherever her work goes, Ocampo keeps returning her focus to Earth, giving others the best possible chance of moving forward to join her.