Photo by Emily Berg ’28
The rubble-pile asteroid Bennu is almost as tall as New York City’s Empire State Building; some scientists suspect that it contains organic materials.
By Emily Berg ’28
Science & Environment Editor
Mount Holyoke College’s Astronomy and Physics Speaker Seminar Series recently brought Dr. Erica Jawin ’12 to campus, who shared her experiences with NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security-Regolith Explorer — shortened to OSIRIS-REx — mission, and provided inspirational glimpses into how her time at Mount Holyoke influenced her research and career.
A full house of Mount Holyoke students, faculty and staff across many departments gathered in Cleveland Hall to attend the lecture on Feb. 25. Jawin’s lecture primarily explored NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, as well as the Bennu asteroid’s “journey across the Solar System towards its current orbit, and its recent surface evolution, as well as initial perspectives from analyses of the returned sample,” according to the event description. In an interview with Mount Holyoke News, Jawin shared insights into how several of her experiences at the College followed her career journey and research methods within this mission.
The OSIRIS-REx mission was a seven-year long voyage to collect and deliver a sample of ancient asteroid material to Earth. Orbiting as a near-Earth asteroid, Bennu was the “rubble-pile” target of this mission due to its “pristine and primitive” qualities as a parent body. “Rubble-pile” is a term that classifies a specific type of asteroid, a coherent parent body that was blasted apart into fragments that eventually gravitate and compress together again. Almost as tall as the Empire State Building, Bennu is suspected to contain organic and water-bearing materials from the earliest parts of the solar system, around the same time life first formed on Earth. While this material does not necessarily have biological implications, it can advance scientists’ search to uncover the role organic-rich asteroids played in catalyzing life on Earth, especially in our oceans, as much of Earth’s core geologic evidence is lost due to tectonic plate activity.
Jawin is a postdoctoral research geologist in the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, where her most recent research consists of characterizing Bennu’s global geology through its boulder population. As a science team member with expertise in geomorphology and comparative planetology, Jawin is involved with several active NASA missions, including the Shallow Radar — or SHARAD — experiment on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission, and the OSIRIS-APEX mission to asteroid Apophis. Following her Ph.D. program at Brown University in 2018, Jawin became involved with OSIRIS-REx as a postdoctoral fellowship, wanting to apply her skills from studying the moon, Mars and Mercury into researching asteroids.
Jawin’s role in this mission was two-fold: Her job included research on Bennu through the mission itself, and performing outreach and educational roles at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. She explained that this museum component was the first time she questioned her career goals, as she found fulfillment in public interaction after considering a tenure-professor track during graduate school.
“Working with Darby Dyer and all of the fantastic professors [at Mount Holyoke College], I saw how much you could impact people's lives by being a professor, and so I thought that I wanted that,” Jawin said. She enjoyed inspiring enthusiasm in people about science, and eventually took up a second postdoctoral position at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum because of this transformational experience.
Jawin also found fulfillment in the pressure of actively working within a team on the research component of the mission. “It's this very dynamic, not necessarily high pressure, but high intensity or high stakes experience, because whatever you're doing, even if it's a very minuscule, seemingly not that important task, it can all have really impactful results … so even though I was a small component of the team, I really felt like I was a fundamental part of the team,” she said.
This aspect also proved to be one of the more challenging parts of Jawin’s experience, as working on an active mission can be unforgiving and mentally fatiguing at times. “I was part of a small group of people who helped to characterize some of the final four candidate sites, which included mapping and measuring the size of every resolvable particle in every sample site. So I was counting like tens of thousands of individual particles in a very short time scale. I literally had dreams about measuring particles: What I had just been doing all day,” Jawin said.
Additionally, the mission suffered complications in finding a safe site on Bennu to obtain a sample. High-resolution imagery, obtained after the sampling technology was developed, revealed that there were no “smooth, sandy beaches” that the instrument could land and retrieve from. Originally engineered to navigate within a 2000 square yard area on Bennu, which NASA’s website describes as about the size of a parking lot with 100 spaces, OSIRIS-REx needed to maneuver an area of less than 100 square yards — about five parking spaces worth of space on Bennu’s rocky surface.
“Do you maybe risk the spacecraft and risk breaking it in trying to collect a sample from a place that was not what the hardware was designed for, or do you not collect a sample even though the entire point of the mission was sample return?” Jawin said. Navigating this challenge required intense effort from the entire OSIRIS-REx team, as it reached a critical decision point for the continuation and success of the mission itself. “Basically every mission encounters … challenges that you didn't foresee when you proposed the mission, because you assume that everything would happen in a certain way, and so you have to be flexible and be willing to change how you're going to get things done.”
During her lecture, Jawin also explained some of the unexpected research methods she encountered in examining the sample from Bennu. One of these methods was coding, a common component of humanities research methodology, that consists of translating unstructured, qualitative data into specified categories. While analyzing the morphology of four different boulder types on Bennu’s surface, Jawin eventually realized that she was reinventing this method on her own, when she could have easily learned about this method from another source.
“It's not just to make this funny story, but also to say that qualitative research methods are critically important in all fields, because a lot of times they do get a bit maligned in the social sciences as not being as … hard or as important as quantitative methods,” she said. Her advice to student attendees at the lecture was to take a diversity of classes at the College and to embrace the liberal arts education experience, because it could develop a background of interdisciplinary research methods for students’ future careers.
Reflecting on how students can prepare for a career in planetary sciences as undergraduates, Jawin explained the importance of gaining research experience from labs or internships, taking applied foundational courses like statistics and computer science, and emphasized building a strong relationship with a professor during their time at the College.
“I have that person in the form of Darby Dyer from the Astronomy Department. She's been a huge influence in my personal life and my career, and I'm so thankful that I still have her as a resource, because I still go to her now with questions and advice about my career. So that's definitely not the kind of thing that … ends when you graduate,” Jawin said.
However, Jawin also advises Mount Holyoke students to make the most of their undergraduate experience in an enjoyable way, as students have plenty of time to develop their career beyond their time spent at Mount Holyoke.
“There's so much pressure on every single person these days to exceed in everything that you do and be perfect in everything that you do, and we've lost a lot of time to just enjoy life where we are, when we are; so my biggest piece of advice is just to enjoy being at Mount Holyoke,” Jawin said.
Madeleine Diesl ’28 contributed fact-checking.
