FALL 2023 | 15 TRACY BECKER ’09 A planetary scientist, Becker studies moons, asteroids and planetary rings, with some of her work searching for habitability in the solar system. NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, planned for launch in 2024, will investigate Jupiter’s icy moon Europa to try to help scientists understand the conditions of its underlying ocean—how cold, deep and salty is it?—while possibly yielding crucial information about places with habitable conditions in the solar system. Using an ultraviolet instrument on the spacecraft, Tracy Becker ’09 hopes to learn about Europa while making a connection with what’s on its surface and what’s underneath. “We’re going to be looking a lot at the atmosphere,” she says. “Can we see any indications of specific compositions that might indicate the possibility for life? That would be one of the really exciting things to see there.” The Europa Clipper mission is one of many projects Becker has been involved in as she studies moons, asteroids and planetary rings, mainly at ultraviolet wavelengths of light. “When you study asteroids and moons that are different distances from the sun, they would have had different stockpiles of materials from which to build themselves up,” Becker says. “By looking at the composition of each of these bodies in different places in the solar system, we really put those pieces together to understand how the solar system came to be.” Since graduating from Lehigh with a major in astrophysics and minor in Latin American studies, the planetary scientist and group leader at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio has been involved in NASA’s New Horizons mission, which flew past Pluto in 2015 and is still exploring the Kuiper Belt, and led several programs for the Hubble Space Telescope. Becker is also working on JUICE (JUpiter ICy moons Explorer), launched by the European Space Agency, which will pass several of Jupiter’s moons before eventually orbiting Ganymede. She also analyzes data from NASA’s James Webb Space telescope. Becker’s space-related work began at Lehigh, leading to internships, including at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory and in Chile. At the University of Central Florida, she earned a Ph.D. in physics with a planetary science track and began her first work with a NASA project using the Cassini spacecraft to study Saturn’s rings. Her educational outreach includes Astronomy on Tap, space-related presentations at bars in San Antonio, and school programs that introduce kids to science and engineering jobs in their backyard. The latter helped her earn the American Astronomical Society’s 2023 Carl Sagan Medal for Excellence in Public Communication in Planetary Science.—Stephen Gross SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE
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