Cathy Weitz

Dr. Weitz received her BS from Cornell University, her MS from Caltech, and her PhD in Geological Sciences in from Brown University. Upon completing her doctorate, she went to JPL as a National Research Council Associate and worked on Mars missions and began research on martian sedimentary deposits. She then transferred her Associateship to NASA Headquarters and soon became a Program Scientist in the Mars Exploration Program where she served as the Program Scientist for the Mars Exploration Rovers and the Mars Express missions. In addition to her management responsibilities at NASA Headquarters, she also spent time performing research on layered deposits located within the Valles Marineris canyon system on Mars.

She is currently a Senior Research Scientist at PSI. She is a member of the science teams on the MER, MSL, Insight, and MRO (HiRISE) missions. She has extensive experience in supporting mission operations and scientific analysis of data acquired from various NASA missions. She is currently or was a science team member on four different Mars missions, including the Mars Exploration Rover (MER), Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), Insight lander, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) missions. She is a Co-Investigator on the MRO High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera where she has mission operations responsibilities to prioritize and target sedimentary and stratigraphic features. She is a science team member on the MSL Curiosity rover mission and studies eolian bedforms and sedimentary deposits while also working with rover engineers to plan safe routes for the rover to drive. She is a science team member on the Insight mission and worked to identify safe locations around the lander to deploy the geophysics instruments. She was a collaborator on the ATHENA science team for the MER mission and performed analyses of soils and small rocks at the Opportunity landing site. She was also a science team member on the Magellan mission to Venus and the Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C mission that collected radar data of the Earth.

Weitz’s research has addressed significant questions concerning surficial processes on the Earth, Moon, Venus, and Mars. She currently has three primary research interests: (1) sedimentary deposits on Mars; (2) soils and small rocks observed at various landing sites on Mars; and (3) explosive volcanism on the Moon. Her research on Mars sedimentary deposits uses multiple orbital data sets to map out the three-dimensional distribution of sedimentary units and look at details that could provide information concerning their origin and relative ages. She also utilizes visible and near-IR hyperspectral data combined with high-resolution images of sedimentary deposits on Mars in order to constrain their mineralogy and morphology, which in turn provide insight into how and under what environmental conditions these deposits formed. Her research of small rocks and soils at the MER landing sites has been used to identify rock sources for the grains and provide information about depositional processes under past and current conditions. Weitz also analyzes soils in camera images acquired by the MSL Curiosity rover at Gale crater. She is particularly interested in measuring the sizes, shapes, and colors of sand grains on eolian bedforms, such as ripples and dunes, in order to understand current and past wind regimes on Mars. Lastly, she is using camera images taken from the Mars Insight lander to measure and characterize rocks and soil grains around the landing site. Her results were used to identify safe locations to deploy the geophysics instruments on the lander, as well as to provide new insight into rocks and soils found on the martian surface. In addition to her current research on Mars, Weitz is also mapping and analyzing high spatial and spectral resolution remote sensing data of the Moon to better refine the extent of lunar explosive volcanic deposits, identify and characterize plausible source vents, explore the geologic settings of the deposits, and characterize the eruptions that emplaced the deposits. This research represents a continuation of her PhD dissertation while at Brown University and is being used to reveal more about the eruption processes that formed the deposits and the implications of those processes for lunar volcanism and lunar volatiles.