During my junior year, I worked with Dr. Nicholas Warner at SUNY Geneseo and his team at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to create a geologic map and determine the wind direction for the region Homestead hollow, the InSight landing area on Mars. I classified over 10,000 rocks, small craters, and sand dunes in ArcGIS, which I paired with dune slip face azimuth calculations to quantify the wind direction at the landing site (Warner et al., 2020). My InSight rock classifications were utilized by JPL scientists for comparative analysis of human observed rock counting versus semi-automated rock counting techniques, with implications for future lander missions to other planets (Golombek et al., 2021).
For my undergraduate honors thesis under the guidance of Dr. Nicholas Warner at SUNY Geneseo, I quantified the morphometry of analog valley networks and bedrock canyons on Earth to better understand the nature and source of these features on Mars. This research contributes to our understanding of precipitation generated landscape erosion on Mars.
Relevant Co-Authored Publications:
Rock Size-Frequency Distributions at the InSight Landing Site, Mars (Golombek et al., 2021)
