KECK INSTITUTE FOR SPACE STUDIES

       



KISS Fellowships are Career-Defining

As a JPL Research Scientist and Deputy Project Scientist for the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, Abigail Fraeman uses remote sensing techniques to study the rock record of Mars and small bodies in the solar system. Throughout her career — from attending a KISS workshop as a graduate student, to continuing her studies at Caltech as a Postdoctoral Fellow, to joining the staff at JPL — KISS has been with her every step of the way. In 2012, as a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, Fraeman participated in a KISS workshop exploring remote measurement techniques on asteroids and comets. “I was invited to come out and be a part of the workshop and I discovered that KISS was this really awesome organization,” she recalls. “It opened my eyes to some problems of solar system exploration that I hadn’t necessarily considered, and it made me really interested in the techniques we can develop to help address these questions, which was an important point to help me define the research I was doing.”

As a participating scientist on the Curiosity science team, Abigail contributed to team-wide discussions and long term strategic planning. She also participated in daily tactical operations through her roles as surface properties scientist (providing assessments of drive terrain), keeper of the plan for the geology theme group (planning daily science activities), and science operations working group documentarian (recording rationale behind science decisions made each day).

Two years later, Fraeman moved to California to start her journey as a KISS Postdoctoral Fellow. “The research I did as a KISS postdoc was focused a lot on using techniques of remote sensing to help us to understand the surfaces that we’re looking at in space that we might not be able to visit.” From analyzing satellite data to developing state-of-the-art technology for future missions, she took the opportunity to explore exciting new instruments and techniques. “I did some work looking at remote sensing observations from a whole bunch of different instruments on Mars, looking over the area where Curiosity landed. And then I also got to start a project looking at a new instrument that was being developed at JPL for future inclusion on planetary missions. This was a very exploratory project, just figuring out the kinds of data this instrument would collect and then what were the interesting scientific questions we could answer with this data that were previously unanswerable.”


The KISS Fellowship really was career-defining for me because it brought me to Caltech and to JPL.

According to Fraeman, that freedom to pursue an exploratory topic is one of the hallmarks of the KISS experience. “I was very thrilled to find out that I could come work at Caltech,” she says. “This was my number one choice, both because of the awesome flexibility that the fellowship provided to work on the research projects I really wanted to do, but also because I knew I would be part of the KISS community.” As a postdoctoral fellow, she worked closely with researchers at both Caltech and JPL, developing a network of support that bolstered her confidence as well as her career. “The KISS Fellowship really was career-defining for me because it brought me to Caltech and to JPL,” she explains. “I mentioned to a few people that I interacted with at JPL through these projects that I was really excited about being here. They let me know as soon as an opportunity became available and really encouraged me to apply for the position. And I think since they knew me, it helped a lot.”




Opportunity Knocks

Now the Deputy Project Scientist for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Opportunity, Fraeman can truly appreciate the arc of her own trajectory. As a high school student, she got to visit JPL when the MER mission first reached Mars, “to be in the room when the rovers landed, with the scientists and the engineers.” That experience turned out to be the first step toward achieving a lifelong dream. “I knew from that moment that I really wanted to participate in planetary exploration and drive rovers on Mars. To be able to be now a research scientist now at JPL and the Deputy Project Scientist of that exact same rover that inspired me to become a planetary scientist is just so thrilling.”

Abigail first became involved with the Spirit and Opportunity Rover missions as a high school junior through the Planetary Society's Student Astronaut program, and continued to be involved as graduate student where she served as a science operations working group documentarian and science team member. She was appointed deputy project scientist in April, 2016, and in this role worked closely with both the engineering and science teams on many aspects of the mission.

CRISM is a visible to near infrared hyperspectral imager onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It searches for the residue of minerals that form in the presence of water that may have existed on the surface of Mars. As a CRISM Co-I, Abigail contributed to general science team discussions, selected targets for the instrument to observe, and have worked to develop techniques for acquiring and processing data that have been oversampled in the along-track direction.


Exploring the Final Fronteer

From her JPL office, Fraeman puzzles out the mysteries of the martian landscape. “One of the hardest parts of doing geology remotely is you don’t have the tools available to you that you might otherwise have on Earth,” she says. “So you have to think about clever ways to look at the data to piece together the story.” That kind of detective work appeals to the sense of discovery she cultivated working with KISS. “I love the exploration aspect of planetary science: the fact that I get to look at data and pictures every day from these worlds that no human has ever been to and be the first — sometimes the first human — to ever see what this area looks like, and then to have the tools to try to figure out what it all means in terms of the history and evolution of our solar system.”


The research I did as a KISS postdoc was focused a lot on using techniques of remote sensing to help us to understand the surfaces that we’re looking at in space that we might not be able to visit.

Abigail Fraeman