Suzanne Smrekar

Smrekar and colleague Ellen Stofan reported in Science in 1997 that Venus' heat loss was caused by volcanic activity and formations specific to Venus.[3] As Venus has no plate tectonics like Earth, she and others are attempting to study its volcanalogy to draw better conclusions about formation of Earth.[4] Smrekar and an international team of researchers presented the Venus Emissivitiy Mapper (VEM) at a conference in 2018; this device scans the planet's surface at specific wavelengths to record the mineral composition, and uses other channels to determine cloud cover, weather, interference, and volcanic activity.[5]

Smrekar remains a team member of the joint Brown - MIT NASA Lunar Science Institute.[6] She has jointly written several articles for the Encyclopedia of the Solar System.[1]

Smrekar has formed part of multiple NASA teams dedicated to exploring the Solar System. In 1999, she was involved with the design of the ground-penetrant micro-laboratories Deep Space 2 that "hitchhiked" on the Mars Polar Lander.[7] She was Deputy Project Leader for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO),[8][9][10] which, in addition to monitoring the eventual descent for multiple Martian instrument landings, used its shallow- and deep-penetration radar to uncover a pool of solid carbon dioxide at Mars' South Pole - "equivalent to Lake Superior."[11] Direct observation of the Martian lithosphere led to some of the first accurate measurements of the interior temperature of the planet.[12] Her Magellan probe uncovered newly-active geology on the planet.[13][14] She designed the HP3 and GEMS instrument packages for the InSight mission,[15] which commenced in 2016.[16] Smrekar served as Deputy Principal Investigator in addition to constructing much of the ground-penetrant instrumentation for InSight. She lightly referred to needing to obtain sub-surface results of Martian geography and geology as understanding "...the whole enchilada" of non-Earth planets.[17]

On 14 June 1983, Smrekar discovered asteroid 6819 McGarvey at Palomar Observatory. She named it after her mother Flora McGarvey Smrekar (1924–1977).[18]