Candice Hansen-Koharcheck

Professional History

Dr. Hansen earned a Bachelor of Science in Physics from California State University, Fullerton, in 1976. The next year she began work at JPL, joining the Voyager Imaging Team as assistant experiment representative. Her task was to design the camera image acquisition sequences for every satellite flyby that occurred during Voyagers' encounters with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The Voyager encounters provided milestones marking many events in her life. From 1981 to 1984, the long cruise period between the Saturn and Uranus encounters, she worked at the German Space Operations Center in Oberpfaffenhofen. She worked on the Ion Release Module, the German portion of the Active Magnetospheric Particle Tracer Explorer, a multinational Earth orbiting mission designed to study the Earth's magnetosphere. After Voyager’s Uranus flyby she returned to graduate school at UCLA in 1987. In 1989, in the midst of preparing for the Neptune encounter, she finished her Master of Science in planetary physics and in 1994 completed her doctorate in Earth and Space Science, also at UCLA. Her dissertation included a thermal model of Triton's nitrogen frost and atmosphere, based on data acquired by Voyager during the 1989 Neptune encounter. She has also applied the thermal model to Pluto and other Kuiper Belt Objects. In 1990 Dr. Hansen began working on the Cassini mission to Saturn with the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) investigation team, and was responsible for planning and analyzing UVIS icy satellite data. She was a UVIS Co-Investigator until the demise of the spacecraft in 2017. She led several papers analyzing UVIS data of Enceladus’ water vapor plume. Dr. Hansen was the Deputy Principal Investigator on the Mars Polar Lander (MPL) payload from 1994 to 1999 when the spacecraft was lost. Dr. Hansen is currently the Deputy Principal Investigator for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched in 2005. Her area of interest is studying the seasonal CO2 polar cap of Mars. She also pursues that interest as a Co-Investigator on the High resolution Stereo and Color Imager (HiSCI) flying on the Mars Trace Gas Orbiter orbiting Mars since 2018. Dr. Hansen is a Co-Investigator on the Juno mission to Jupiter, launched in 2011, in orbit around Jupiter since 2016. Dr. Hansen is responsible for the development and operation of the JunoCam outreach camera designed to engage the public in planning images of Jupiter. The camera returns excellent quality images that have also been used for scientific studies. Dr. Hansen continues her tenure at Jupiter as a Co-Investigator on the Europa Imaging System (EIS) on the Europa Clipper mission due to launch in October 2024. Dr. Hansen retired from JPL in 2010 but continues in all her endeavors under the auspices of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson. She has also been Chair of the NASA Outer Planets Assessment Group and Chair of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society.