Dr. Emily Martin in the field

Dr. Emily Martin is a planetary geologist in the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. Dr. Martin had no idea she would grow up to be a scientists when she was a child: but she discovered the field of planetary science in her senior year of college when she was really struck buy the wonderfully weird moons of Jupiter and Saturn. These moons are mostly made up of water ice and have cold, salty oceans in their interiors. ‘Ocean’ worlds are really exciting targets in the search for environments that might be habitable. Dr. Martin is most interested in how the surfaces of these icy moons fracture and crack which can tell us a lot about the oceans on the inside. Places like Saturn’s moon Enceladus are extra exciting because some of that ocean is erupting out of Enceladus’s south pole draping the surface with a snow-like material and feeding Saturn’s E-ring. Dr. Martin is also explores the surfaces of icy moons by creating geological maps. She is currently leading a project to create a map of the surface of Triton, Neptune’s largest moon.