Dr. Bonnie J. Buratti is a JPL Fellow and Senior Research Scientist. She is currently serving as the Deputy Project Scientist for the Europa Clipper mission. She has held numerous leadership positions on flight projects, including the NASA Project Scientist for Rosetta, the European Space Agency’s mission to study comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko during its perihelion passage. Her main research areas are volatile transport in the outer Solar System and utilizing photometric theory to understand the physical properties and evolution of planetary and satellite surfaces. Using synergistic data sets of both ground-based and spacecraft data, she led a team that tracked seasonal frost transport on Pluto and Triton, the large moon of Neptune. She also led a Cassini team that discovered CO2 on Saturn’s moon Iapetus and another large Cassini team that combined the results from 6 instruments to understand the relationship between the rings and small inner moons of Saturn. Her current interest is to use Palomar Observatory’s adaptive optics system to study changes on the ice giants, Neptune and Uranus, and on their moons, in preparation for the next flagship mission to the outer Solar System.
She has also been involved in several missions to comets and asteroids and is on the science team for New Horizons, which explored Pluto in 2015 and continues through the Kuiper Belt. She has authored 277 peer-reviewed papers, and is the author of a popular book “Worlds Fantastic, Worlds Familiar” (Cambridge) that offers a tour of the discoveries in the Solar System from the viewpoint of a scientist in the field.
Dr. Buratti has held leadership roles in the scientific community. She served as the Chair of the Small Bodies Assessment Group (2019-2022), as Chair of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society (2014-2015), and as Secretary of the Planetary Sciences Section of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). She served on the editorial boards of Icarus and Reviews of Geophysics.
Dr. Buratti also has a passionate commitment to outreach and mentoring. She was awarded the Carl Sagan Medal for Excellence in Public Communication in Planetary Science in 2018. Her educators’ workshop “Teachers Touch the Sky”, a one-week hands-on workshop at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for teachers in grades 4-8, was conducted at JPL for 20 years, reaching over 300 teachers and 80,000 students, 90 % of whom came from underrepresented groups.
She has received numerous honors for her scientific research, service, and outreach. She is an elected Fellow of the AGU, as well as the American Astronomical Society (AAS). She was awarded the NASA Exceptional Achievement and Exceptional Public Service Medals, the JPL People Leadership Award, and the Magellan Award. She received over two dozen NASA Group Achievement awards. In 2022 she was awarded the Gerard P. Kuiper Prize for outstanding contributions to the field of planetary science “for her distinguished achievements in the understanding of planetary and small body surfaces through photometry, her career-spanning leadership in the planetary science community, and the legacy she has created through mentoring early career scientists.”
Dr. Buratti is also engaged in mentoring of other scientists, especially early career ones from underrepresented groups. She advises her colleagues on how to maintain a research career while engaged in project or management work. She facilitates mentor programs for postdoc advisors, and she served as a mentor for the AGU College of Fellows.