NASA Mission Science

Europa Clipper

As a Deputy Principal Investigator for the Europa-UVS instrument on NASA's Europa Clipper Mission, I focus on planning how our instrument will operate in order to return the most exquisite science when the spacecraft arrives at Europa. I am most interested in the composition of this ocean world and searching for the presence of plumes (water geysers) spouting water into space.

New Horizons

I am the Deputy Principal Investigator for the Alice instrument on New Horizons. After the incredible science taken during the Pluto flyby, this UV spectrograph is now exploring the universe from the its vantage point in the outer Kuiper Belt. I use the Alice instrument to study how Hydrogen is distributed within our Solar System and across the galaxy. 

Cassini

As a graduate student I worked with the Cassini Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) team to measure the sizes of the individual ice particles that make up Saturn's rings. I currently work on several NASA-funded research projects to continue studying the structure of the ring system, primarily by analyzing how light from background stars get scattered by the ring particles. 
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Quick Links to Publications
  1. Exploring the Composition of Europa with the Upcoming Europa Clipper Mission (Becker et al. 2024)
  2. Physical and Mutual Orbit Characteristics of Near-Earth Asteroid (163693) Atira (Deleon et al. 2024)
  3. Mid-Ultraviolet Hubble Observations of Europa and the Global Distributions of SO2 (Becker et al. 2022)
  4. HST Observations of Asteroid (16) Psyche in the UV (Becker et al., 2020) 
  5. Ganymede’s far-ultraviolet reflectance: constraining impurities in the surface ice (Molyneux et al. 2020)
  6. Io's Atmosphere Silhouetted by Jupiter Lyman-α. (Retherford et al., 2019)
  7. Probing the Hill Sphere of (486958) 2014 MU69 II. Hubble Space Telescope Fine Guidance Sensors Observations during the 2018 August 4 Stellar Occultation (Kammer et al., 2019)
  8. Io's Atmosphere Silhouetted by Jupiter Lyman-α (Retherford et. al, 2019)
  9. UVIS Ring Stellar Occultations 2.0, CO-SR-UVIS-OCC-V2.0 (Colwell et al., 2019)
  10. The Far-UV Albedo of Europa from HST Observations (Becker et al., 2018)
  11. Cassini UVIS Solar occultations by Saturn’s F ring and the detection of collision-produced micron-sized dust (Becker et al., 2018)
  12. Probing the Hill Sphere of (486958) 2014 MU69: HST FGS Observations during the 2017 July 17 Stellar Occultation (Kammer et al., 2018)
  13. New Constraints on Ganymede’s hydrogen corona: Analysis of Lyman-alpha emissions observed by HST/STIS between 1998 and 2014 (Alday et al., 2017)
  14. Detection of a hydrogen corona at Callisto (Roth et al., 2017)
  15. Detection of a Hydrogen Corona in HST Lyman Alpha images of Europa in transit of Jupiter. (Roth et al., 2017).
  16. Characterizing the Particle Size Distribution of Saturn's A Ring with Cassini UVIS Occultation Data (Becker et al., 2016)
  17. Physical modeling of triple near-Earth Asteroid (153591) 2001 SN263 from radar and optical light curve observations (Becker et al., 2015)