PLANETARY GEOLOGIST COLOMBIA, ARGENTINA, UNITED STATESI think you never stop learning when you are a scientist and you are being constantly challenged to find new solutions, new ways of thinking.
—ADRIANA OCAMPO
Adriana sat on the bleachers among the sprawling crowd of five hundred thousand people. She and the other members of Space Exploration Post 509—an aerospace engineering club for teens in Pasadena, California—had traveled all the way across the country to witness this historic event: the launching of Apollo 17, the sixth and final human mission to the Moon. They had fund-raised and worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) to earn money for the trip, and they were starting to get nervous that all their efforts might be wasted. The launch was planned for 9:53 PM, but the rocket engines had gone silent just thirty seconds before then. Now the anxious crowd had been waiting for over two hours since the scheduled time for liftoff.
As Adriana and her friends were beginning to wonder if liftoff would happen at all, the engines grumbled to life. At about half past midnight, the spacecraft launched with a force that made the ground tremble, and Adriana watched as a fiery plume made the night sky almost as bright as day. She followed Apollo 17’s path into space, and as she had many times before, she wondered about what lay beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. What did other planets look like? What were they made of? Could we travel there? Did they support life of their own? Adriana had always been interested in space science, and as she watched Apollo 17 disappear into the darkness, she again resolved to build her interests into a career that would let her explore these questions for the rest of her life.
Adriana Ocampo was born in Colombia, South America, on January 5, 1955. Before her first birthday, Adriana’s family moved to Argentina, where she lived until she was fourteen. Growing up, Adriana was fascinated by science; she especially enjoyed looking up at the stars, and she dreamed of traveling into space. On July 20, 1969, she and her family crowded around their television set with neighbors and friends to watch coverage of the first Moon landing. Adriana was transfixed by the images on the screen. In December of that same year, Adriana moved to Southern California in the United States.
Adriana used to borrow items from the kitchen and her father’s workshop to build a lunar colony.
Adriana’s new home offered many opportunities to pursue her interests in space and science. Soon after she moved, she joined Space Exploration Post 509, a science group that met at NASA’s nearby Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) and worked on projects ranging from robots and circuit boards to rockets and weather stations. During her junior year of high school, she got a part-time job at the JPL, and after high school graduation, she continued to work there while studying for a college degree. When she was only nineteen, she convinced the JPL to fund a weather station project she’d been working on with a team of friends from Post 509. There was tough competition for JPL funds, and the group had won an honor given to only the most promising of ideas and proposals.
Adriana’s expeditions in southern Mexico and Belize revealed rocks that had launched from the Crater of Doom and landed up to 200 miles away.
After college, Adriana started working full time at the JPL, where she participated in many groundbreaking projects. One of her early assignments was to help analyze images of Mars that had been taken by two probes during NASA’s Viking mission. The Viking project sought to explore the makeup of the planet and its atmosphere and to search for evidence of life. As part of her work, Adriana also coordinated observations of the two Martian moons and helped develop a map of one of those moons, Phobos. In a later mission called the Observer project, Adriana was to run a heat-sensing machine that would further determine the composition of Mars and help scientists make better maps of the planet. Unfortunately, though, scientists lost communication with the Observer three days before it was scheduled to go into orbit around Mars. Other spacecrafts have since been sent to the planet, and a few have landed successfully. Though Adriana has taken on many other projects, she continues to be interested and involved in these missions.
Beyond Mars, Adriana has participated in missions to study Jupiter and the outer planets. She studied information sent back from the two Voyager spacecrafts about Jupiter and its moons, information which surprisingly showed evidence of volcanic activity on the moon Io. She also helped guide the Voyager spacecraft toward Saturn, from which they would continue on to Uranus and Neptune and then beyond all the planets in our solar system.
Another mission, the Galileo, allowed for more exploration of Jupiter and its moons. Adriana was particularly involved in coordinating Galileo’s near-infrared technology, which was designed to gather information about Jupiter’s clouds and composition as well as the temperatures of the planet. Adriana focused special attention on one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa. Images of Europa suggested that its icy surface may have been an ocean at one time, or even that an ocean may currently exist under Europa’s frozen crust. This discovery prompted scientists to redirect the Europa-bound Galileo into Jupiter’s atmosphere, where they knew it would be destroyed. They wanted to protect any potential water on Europa from contamination by Earth-based materials.
In addition to studying other planets, Adriana is also interested in geology on our own planet Earth, and she has made exciting discoveries here too. At a conference in 1988, she noticed a ring of cenotes, or sinkholes, near the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Adriana believed this pattern might suggest an enormous impact crater from an asteroid colliding with Earth sometime in the past. She and other scientists have since looked into this theory more closely, and many believe that a large asteroid did crash into Earth at that spot sixty-five million years ago, at the end of the age of dinosaurs. In fact, Adriana and other scientists think that this asteroid may be the reason that dinosaurs became extinct. The impact of this huge asteroid would likely have caused fires, earthquakes, and massive tidal waves, and sent a thick layer of dirt, dust, vapor, and smoke in the air. Scientists theorize that the Earth would have become dark and cold for an extended time, and many species would not have survived. The asteroid impact site has been named the Chicxulub crater, sometimes referred to as the Crater of Doom.
While Adriana continues her pioneering work in planetary geology, she also spends time promoting science education and bringing scientists together on an international level. She founded a course in planetary sciences that has been held all around the world in countries including Mexico, Costa Rica, Nigeria, Egypt, Jordan, and China. Adriana is active in encouraging young people to pursue science through such organizations as the United States Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers and the Society of Women Engineers. She has taken her own education seriously, as well, following up her bachelor’s degree with a master’s degree in 1997 and starting work on a PhD soon after. She has been an executive in NASA’s international space science program and has also worked for the European Space Agency in the Netherlands. Starting in the early 1990s, Adriana organized the Space Conference of the Americas, which has brought together people from many nations to discuss and learn about space science.
Adriana has been widely recognized for her accomplishments. Among other honors, she has earned the JPL Advisory Council for Women Award and has been named Woman of the Year in Science by Comisión Femenil, an organization that promotes the empowerment of Hispanic women. In 2003 she was named one of the 50 most important women in science by Discover magazine.
Adriana’s enthusiasm and expertise have helped her succeed both as a scientist and as someone who shares her work and passion with others. As she continues to pursue the career she’s dreamed about since childhood, Adriana will undoubtedly gain further admiration and make more exciting discoveries about Earth and other planets.
AGE 13