Dr. Diane Wooden

Lunar robotic missions must answer important questions about the Moon before humans can live at a lunar base. A future lunar base will require resources such as water, hydrogen and oxygen, and will need to consider the safety of humans including their exposure to high energy space radiation and the fine-grained lunar dust that can get into astronauts' lungs. Current and near-future lunar robotic missions to the moon are designed to learn about these important aspects of the airless moon. Slated for launch this May, the LCROSS Mission will look for water ice at the lunar poles and the Lunar Reconnoissance Orbiter (LRO) will measure the radiation environment and look for hydrogen, a component of water. In a few years, the LADEE Mission will look for dust storms or dusty fountains and obtain maps good enough to image the lunar rovers left there in the 1970s by the Apollo astronauts.

As a young girl, Diane became interested in astronomy. When she was 12, she ground her own telescope mirror and built her telescope out of baby-sitting money. In junior high and high school, she focused on math and science. She went to UCSC and studied both Math and Physics. Then she went to Stanford and studied Applied Physics. Finally, she went back to UCSC and got her Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics. Dr. Diane Wooden has worked at NASA for 25 years. She specializes in infrared spectroscopy and studies comets, the deep-freezers of what was happening when Jupiter and Saturn were forming. Dr. Wooden also studies the Moon and is a scientist working on the LCROSS Mission that will hit the Moon in 2009 and look for water ice. Dr. Wooden has an asteroid named after her called 17421 Wooden because of her work on crystals in comets.