She joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California as a National Research Council Resident Research Associate in 1989 and, after two years, became a member of the Galileo spacecraft project.[1] She worked on the Near Infra-red Mapping Spectrometer (NIMS) team planning and analyzing observations of Jupiter's volcanic moon Io from 1996 to 2001.[9] She discovered 71 volcanoes on Io that had never before been detected as active.[3][4]