Margarita "Mars" Marinova

Ph.D. Student, Deepworker Pilot

Expertise: Planetary surfaces
Affiliation: California Institute of Technology, Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences
Certification/Education:
B.Sc. - Aeronautics and Astronautics, MIT
M.Sc. - Planetary Science, Caltech
Ph.D. (current) - Planetary Science, Caltech

Biography

Margarita was born in Bulgaria, and completed high school in Toronto, Canada. She went on to obtain a Bachelor's Degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT in 2003, and is currently a graduate student in Planetary Sciences at Caltech.

Her goal is to merge knowledge of aerospace engineering and planetary sciences to design better instruments and gain a deeper understanding of natural systems.

Margarita has been involved in a number of field work expeditions, such as studying debris flows and setting up a weather station in the Canadian High Arctic, looking at carbonate structures in the Sahara, and measuring environmental factors including UV levels in the Atacama Desert, Chile.

Her research projects at Caltech focus on using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) modeling to characterize planetary-scale impacts on the terrestrial planets and examining the Moon-forming impact.

At Pavilion Lake, Margarita is responsible for underwater instrumentation (temperature & light sensors), modeling water properties and light penetration, helping with weather station setup, and diving support.

Major Science Goals at Pavilion Lake

Characterizing the physical environment of the lake, specifically the light, temperature and mineralogy regimes, allows us to understand the importance of physical parameters on microbialite formation. Any apparent correlations between microbialite morphology or size with physical parameters can then be compared and contrasted with biological correlations to understand the relative contribution of physical and biological processes on the formation of the microbialites.