Women @NASA: Amy Mainzer

Amy Mainzer is a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She served as deputy project scientist for NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission, an Earth-orbiting telescope designed to survey the entire sky in heat-sensitive infrared wavelengths. Following successful completion of its prime mission, this telescope was renamed NEOWISE and given a new mission to characterize asteroids and comets; Mainzer is the principal investigator. She also is the principal investigator of the proposed Near-Earth Object Camera mission, which would carry out a comprehensive survey of asteroids and comets using a dedicated space telescope surveying the solar system from a vantage point beyond the Earth’s Moon.