Antarctica Direct: Fly the Drake Passage

Amy Mainzer is a professor of planetary science at UCLA where her research interests include the orbital and physical properties of asteroids and comets, in particular those that come close to the Earth. She builds and uses space telescopes to detect and discover near-Earth objects. She served as the principal investigator for NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission, an Earth-orbiting telescope that searched the skies for Earth-approaching asteroids and comets for more than a decade. Currently, she is leading the development of the Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission, a new telescope in development that will launch in late 2027 with a mission to find the majority of the near-Earth asteroids large enough to cause severe regional impact damage. She also has a research interest in remote sensing of invasive plants using airborne instrumentation. For this work, she has been recognized with NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement, Exceptional Achievement, and Exceptional Public Service medals, and she is a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society. Prior to coming to UCLA, she was a professor at the University of Arizona and a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She received her bachelor’s degree in physics from Stanford, a master’s degree in astronomy from Caltech, and completed her Ph.D. at UCLA in 2003. Mainzer was the host and science advisor for the PBS Kids TV series Ready Jet Go!, which taught space and Earth science to children ages 3-8, and has served as science advisor for the Netflix film Don’t Look Up, History Channel’s The Universe series, among others. Asteroid 234750 Amymainzer is named after her.