Amara Lynn Graps

Amara Graps, (PhD Physics University of Heidelberg, 2001, Asteroid: (9027) Graps), winner of the 2018 Europlanet Public Engagement Prize, has been working professionally in the international astronomy, astrophysics, and planetary science research field since 1981. My life's work since 1981 demonstrates a principle of career driving one's education, rather than the other way around. On the small scale, my PhD and postdoc scientific work is in cosmic dust charging and dynamics. On the large scale, working for twelve different NASA research teams for 18 years as a computational physicist in the first half of my career grew my space network and granted me access to academia, where I was publishing papers before I earned my PhD (2001) on two continents. Starting in 2014, my reach for my own society-meaningful space projects began. In 2014 was my try for creating planetary small bodies department at the University of Latvia. The years 2015-2016 were the co-founding and closing of the Latvian subsidiary of the asteroid mining company: Deep Space Industries, which taught me my first space resource utilisation business lessons. That 2016-year also began my work on the intersections between asteroid miners and asteroid scientists (‘ASIME’). Continuing my space resource utilisation interests, in 2016-2018, I supported my partners at the Irish company Terrestrial Celestial Materials’ (TCM) to fund a 6M€, 3D metal printer in microgravity project in Luxembourg, where we wrote 5 yr, 10 yr ISRU business plans. Since ‘Baltics in Space’ (BiS) had become my established (2017) non-profit, I used BiS to support my development and successful implementation of the local organizing for the 1000-Abstract, 40 country-participant conference: European Planetary Science Congress 2017 Riga, where I led the local organization of a 4-country, nearly 200 person, and 145 K€ effort. Thus the integration of Baltic space entities was born. Large impact project development continued: in 2018-20; I developed a Baltic 2M€, 4-country, then 6-country, 10-partners, climate-change-with-a cubesat, citizen science project: “ELLF” in two large H2020 proposals. We didn’t win either, but the second we scored highly (12.5) in a 3% selected rate competitive call, and we will try again. In my ESA and NASA missions support work, I have assisted mission planning and analyzed data from the space missions: New Horizons, Rosetta (most recently: as a GIADA instrument data archive reviewer), Ulysses, GORID/Express, Cassini, Galileo, SOHO, Kuiper Airborne Observatory, NASA's ER-2 aircraft, Voyager 2, Pioneer Venus Orbiter, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), the Space Shuttle's SpaceLab 2, and ground-based telescopes in Latvia, Hawaii, California, and Arizona. Additionally, The data includes calibration star cluster fields, dust from Saturn's and Jupiter's magnetosphere and Earth's geostationary orbit, the Sun, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, Comet Halley, Supernova 1987a, Venus, Mars, Io, Mercury, the Moon, Saturn's and Uranus' rings, asteroids, Earth's atmosphere, protostars, molecular clouds, galaxies, novas, main-sequence stars, and the exhaust-cloud around the Space Shuttle. I’m on the Science team of ESA’s new Comet Interceptor mission. I am an active advocate for asteroid mining, Eastern European planetary scientists, girls in STEM, and Baltic Space workers.