Quick is a planetary scientist at the NASA Goddard Space flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Her specialty is cryovolcanism, the study of cold volcanoes. The closer we’re able to look at the icy moons of the outer solar system, the more cold volcanoes we find.

“On Earth, we’re used to seeing molten rock and ash being erupted from a volcano,” Quick says. “On these icy moons, the temperatures are so low and because of their composition, they have a type of volcanism where we see this salty solution and ice crystals erupted onto the surface, and that’s cryovolcanism.”

The most similar thing on Earth may be geysers like Old Faithful at Yellowstone National Park.  “We see something very similar to that, but instead of being hot or warm water, it’s this salty water that’s erupting, essentially at zero degrees Celsius. That’s very warm for the outer solar system,” she says.

“And it’s spewing ice crystals, so we’re seeing these large, icy, watery geysers. We’ve seen that as early as 2005, the year that I completed my bachelor’s degree. We saw the geysers erupting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and there’s evidence now that there may be geysers actually erupting from Jupiter’s moon Europa.”

Europa is a special interest of Quick. She wrote her doctoral thesis about the possibility of cryovolcanic activity there.

“When I did my thesis, we thought there might be geysers on Europa, but there hadn’t been any spacecraft evidence of them. … For my thesis, I modeled the processes and dynamics of these icy magmas moving from the subsurface to erupt onto the surface. And also, if we were to see a huge geyser-like eruption on Europa, which we think the Hubble space telescope may have seen last year, what it would take for spacecraft to be able to observe these eruptions.

“It’s been exciting to see the scientific question I posed as a Ph.D. student actually happening.”

Scientists also may have seen geysers erupting on Neptune’s moon Triton in the early 1990s when Voyager 2 flew by. Ceres, the largest asteroid, may have a subsurface ocean, which suggests volcanic activity is possible. We’ll find out about Pluto in July, when the New Horizons spacecraft is scheduled to take the first photos of the dwarf planet’s surface.

Add it up, and you begin to wonder: Are these cold, remote worlds actually … alive?

“Alive and active,” Quick says. “A lot of these worlds we assumed were dead. We’re finding now that that may not be the case. … It’s an exciting time to be studying this icy volcanism because where we thought maybe it was a phenomenon that was just situated on one or two moons, we find that it’s in a lot of places where we didn’t think we’d find it.”

Quick’s academic career positioned her well for exploring the solar system. “It’s a good time to have a good background in physics to answer some of these questions. For getting to the meat of some of these more difficult questions, you have to be able use your computational resources. You need to have a good solid background in math, and that’s something that physics affords you that some other backgrounds, such as geology, wouldn’t. And also the ability to kind of think outside the box.

“We’ve learned that looking at problems in computing and scientific questions for these different worlds out here, you really have to think outside the box. And that’s a good thing that a physics background brings to the table.”

Quick may have more of an affinity for outside-the-box thinking than others because being a female African American Ph.D. physicist is a pretty out-of-the-box idea itself.

Starting in high school, she wanted to be a scientist. At Dudley High School in Greensboro, she had excellent science teachers, first in biology, then astronomy (“I was just so surprised that somebody could get paid to be an astronomer because that seemed like the coolest thing in the world”) and finally, with some hesitation, in physics and calculus.

Quick had assistance in overcoming her reluctance to take on the courses that would become the foundation of her career. One of her uncles was a guidance counselor at Dudley, and he made sure those courses appeared on her schedule.

Her family was a source of encouragement. Her parents didn’t balk at the thought of their daughter going into hard science. Her mother was a nursing professor at A&T and introduced her to the physics department while Quick was still in high school.

At A&T, she went to a meeting of the American Astronomical Society and met Dr. Beth Brown, a Goddard physicist. “It was great to see another African American woman who was doing what I was interested in doing, because at that point I hadn’t seen many women entering science, definitely hadn’t seen other African American women, and she became my mentor.”

Like her family, mentors have played a critical role in Quick’s progress through Dudley, A&T, Catholic University of America for a master’s in physics and Johns Hopkins for a master’s and her doctorate, both in planetary science.

“Throughout my journey, I’ve been fortunate that there have been other women placed in my life who were successful in what they were doing and who were doing what I wanted to do,” she says.

“And I think that’s important for young women and girls who want to go into these STEM fields, to be able to see other women who are in these fields and who are making advances and who are able to encourage them because that’s ultimately what kept me in all this time.”

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