Bio
BioDr. Adrienn Luspay-Kuti is a planetary scientist studying comets, volatile trapping in the early solar system, and the photochemistry of planetary atmospheres. Her current research focuses on the composition, structure, and volatile storage of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and photochemical modeling of cold nitrogen-methane atmospheres, such as on Titan, Pluto, and Triton. In addition, she leads an Internal Research and Development project where she applies her knowledge of solar system photochemistry to exoplanetary atmospheres. During her doctoral thesis work, she extensively studied Titan's lake kinetics through a combination of laboratory experiments in a one-of-a-kind simulation chamber that she helped build from scratch and numerical modeling to interpret the experimental data. Before focusing on Titan and the outer solar system, Dr. Luspay-Kuti studied the northern polar regions of Mars—specifically, surface-atmosphere interactions related to high-albedo events from MGS TES data. She has experience with simulating and modeling surface-atmosphere interactions of cryogenic planetary environments, astrophysical ices, volatile trapping, photochemical modeling, and gas chromatography. She is a science affiliate on the Europa Clipper mission working on the Plasma Instrument for Magnetic Sounding (PIMS) instrument and a co-investigator on the Trident mission concept to Neptune's moon Triton, proposed to NASA's Discovery Program. She was a science team member for the Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis (ROSINA) instrument onboard the Rosetta spacecraft orbiting comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko between 2014 and 2018.
Notable Awards and Leadership
Notable Awards and LeadershipYear(s) | Description |
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Year(s) 2017 - 2018 | Description Sigma XI Scientific Honor Society |
Year(s) 2015 - 2018 | Description Organized internal SwRI Space Science Seminar Series to promote collaboration and dissemination of research among scientists |
Year(s) 2014 - Present | Description Reviewer for various NASA programs |