(POST DOC)
| Email: | jessica.noviello@nasa.gov |
| Phone: | 301.286.1111 |
| Org Code: | 693 |
| Address: |
NASA/GSFC Mail Code 693 Greenbelt, MD 20771 |
| Employer: | UMBC Univ. of MD, Baltimore |
Astrobiology
I am the executive officer with the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) project science team at NASA Goddard. My tasks are to help organize meetings, take and organize notes and files, coordinate communication amongst the community members, and prepare deliverables for NASA stakeholders.
Theory & Modeling
The role of cryovolcanism on these bodies has not been fully assessed, mainly because many details of this process are still unknown. Here, we ask: How does cryovolcanism work, and how might it be expressed on different icy bodies? Charon is an understudied but particularly well-suited world at which to examine these questions. A wealth of data from the New Horizons mission indicates strong surface evidence for extensive cryovolcanism. One region, Vulcan Planitia, covered with relatively smooth material made of ice and ammonia, has been interpreted as a massive cryovolcanic flow that occurred as a subsurface ocean froze and caused global extension, creating tectonic features that may have served as cryovolcanic sources (Beyer et al., 2017). This interpretation is complicated by a lack of large, embayed craters and a paucity of small craters (although this may reflect a dearth of small impactors in the Kuiper Belt; see Singer et al., 2019). More seriously, crater counts put the likeliest age of the smooth terrain at ~4 Gyr (Singer et al. 2019), whereas thermal models put the likely timing of a large freezing event, and therefore the extensional tectonism, between 1.7 and 2.5 Gyr ago (Desch and Neveu 2017). The uncertainties surrounding the origin of Vulcan Planitia’s smooth terrain hinder efforts to infer Charon’s evolution: the explanation of extension driven cryovolcanism fails if the time of ocean freezing cannot be reconciled with the crater derived age of the smooth material. By using modeling and the rich dataset at Charon to resolve this discrepancy, we can finally time the evolution of Charon’s surface and interior, constrain the role of cryovolcanism in resurfacing Charon, and extend our findings to other icy moons.
PhD in Geological Sciences (Planetary Geology) -- Arizona State University (2019)
Dissertation Title: Identification and Quantitative Classification of Europa's Microfeatures: Implications for Microfeature Formation Models and the Europa Clipper Flagship Mission
BS in Physics -- The Johns Hopkins University (2014)
BA in Earth and Planetary Science -- The Johns Hopkins University (2014)
2022. "Let It Go: Geophysically Driven Ejection of the Haumea Family Members." The Planetary Science Journal 3 (9): 225 [10.3847/psj/ac8e03] [Journal Article/Letter]
2022. "VALENTInE: A Concept for a New Frontiers–Class Long-duration In Situ Balloon-based Aerobot Mission to Venus." The Planetary Science Journal 3 (7): 152 [10.3847/psj/ac7324] [Journal Article/Letter]