Asteroid Impact: An Evening with Dr. Elena Adams, DART Mission Systems Engineer

Elena Adams is the Mission Systems and the Spacecraft Systems Engineer for the Double Asteroid Redirect Mission (DART), which is scheduled for impact on September 26, 2022, and a member of APL’s Principal Professional Staff. As a postdoctoral researcher, she worked on the Microwave Radiometer (MWR) instrument for NASA’s Juno mission. Since coming to APL, Dr. Adams has served as an instrument systems engineer for the Van Allen Probes, an instrument scientist for the ExoMars Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer (MOMA) instrument, the Deputy Project Systems Engineer for the Europa Clipper mission, and the Payload Systems Engineer for the Parker Solar Probe mission. She has worked with NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office on a survey study of near-Earth objects and with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on the future of space-based architectures. She was a Principal Investigator for multiple new technology grants from NASA, including projects to develop a low-gravity hopper for asteroids (the Planetary Object Geophysical Observer, or POGO) and a sampling system for Enceladus plumes (the Enceladus Funnel, or EFun). Dr. Adams serves on the NASA Small Bodies Assessment Group steering committee as a technology lead and is a member of Standing Review Board for NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveillance Mission (NEOSM). She has a B.S. in applied mathematics from the University of Virginia and an M.S. and Ph.D. in atmospheric, oceanic, and space sciences and an M.E. in space systems from the University of Michigan.

Kevin Lewis researches problems in planetary geophysics, from the scale of a grain of sand all the way up to the crust of a planet. He has worked in depth on the nature of sedimentary rocks of Mars, and what they might record about that planet's past climate and habitability.  He is also interested in understanding the large-scale properties of planetary lithospheres using magnetic, gravity, and topography data sets.