Goddard Retirees & Alumni Association (GRAA)

February 11, 2025 GRAA Luncheon
American Legion Post #136
6900 Greenbelt Road
Greenbelt, MD

The speaker for the February 11, 2025 luncheon will be Dr. Melissa Trainer, a Deputy Principal Investigator for the Dragonfly mission to Saturn's moon Titan, part of the NASA Planetary Science New Frontiers Program. Dr. Trainer is also the lead for the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS), an instrument supporting the Dragonfly investigation of Titan's surface composition and characterization of potential prebiotic chemistry. Dr. Trainer is also a Co-Investigator and the Deputy Lead for the Venus Mass Spectrometer on the DAVINCI mission to Venus.

Dr. Trainer has been a Research Space Scientist in the Planetary Environments Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center since 2009. Her research interests include the composition of planetary atmospheres and the production of organic molecules and aerosols via atmospheric synthesis.

Dr. Trainer is a science team member on the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) experiment aboard the Mars Science Laboratory Mission’s Curiosity Rover, with a focus on the compositional measurements of the Mars atmosphere. She has led the campaign to conduct the first in situ multi-year study of the seasonal variations of the composition of the Mars atmosphere through surface mass spectrometry measurements.

Throughout her career, Dr. Trainer has been active in the NASA Astrobiology community, and she participates in several education and public outreach programs. Dr. Trainer has mentored several summer undergraduate students and NASA Postdoctoral Fellows.