Bagenal has worked on a number of planetary science missions including the Voyager Plasma Science (PLS) experiment, Galileo, Deep Space 1, New Horizons mission to Pluto, and the Juno mission to Jupiter.[1] Usually in her work on different missions, she is a member of the science team as a plasma scientist.[2] Bagenal chaired NASA's Outer Planet Assessment Group that provides input from the scientific community on exploration of the outer Solar System.[3] She appeared in The Farthest, a 2017 documentary on the Voyager program, and in multiple television documentaries including the NOVA 2019 miniseries The Planets.[4]