Lorraine Jean Hopping • Hopping Fun Creations

Adriana Ocampo grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 1960s—the dawn of the Space Age—dreaming about flying to the moon. As a young girl, she used her imagination and a natural talent for building things to transform the rooftop of her townhouse into a launch pad for afterschool adventures. Odds and ends from her mother's kitchen and her father's workshop became a rocket ship and an elaborate lunar colony, complete with domed habitats, a greenhouse, an oxygen lab, and a centipede-shaped moon rover.

Argentina, which forms most of the "tail" of South America, was thousands of miles from a real space center but, at age 15, Adriana's dreams took a step closer to reality when her family moved to the United States. While still in her teens and learning a new language, English, Adriana landed a job as a technical aide at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), the NASA center that hurls robotic spacecraft all over the solar system.

In 1976, as a 21-year-old college student, she joined JPL's Viking mission to Mars. When a robotic lander beamed back our very first images of that planet's surface, Adriana became fascinated by the strange, pitted rocks and eerie desert landscape. Written in the pits and other features of those rocks was the history of another world. Adriana longed to know how to "read" that history, so she decided to switch careers. Instead of studying aerospace engineering (designing space technology), she set her heart and mind on becoming a planetary geologist.

She quickly found a passion for impact craters—the scars left behind by crashing asteroids and comets. In a satellite image of Earth, she helped pinpoint the "Crater of Doom," an impact crater named Chicxulub (cheek-shoo-loob) made by a massive space rock 65 million years ago. That sudden impact led to a global disaster that helped kill off more than half of the planet's life forms, including the dinosaurs.

Adriana was soon hot on the trail of crater ejecta, material blown out of the ground that swept all over the globe as a curtain of superheated gas. She led expeditions into Belize and southern Mexico that discovered towering walls of tortured rock up to 200 miles from the crater, blasted there in a matter of minutes by the force of impact.

While searching the Earth for ejecta and other impact craters, Adriana continued to explore the solar system through JPL's robotic spacecraft. Among other missions, she joined the Galileo team and programmed the robot to take close-up images of Europa, Jupiter's pale, ice-coated moon. Europa turned out to hold one of the the mission's biggest surprises and most intriguing mysteries. Underneath the moon's icy crust lurks a slushy ocean that, perhaps, has just the right conditions to harbor life!

Space Rocks: The Story of Planetary Geologist Adriana Ocampo is part of the Women's Adventures in Science series by Joseph Henry Press. It's available in library and paperback editions.

NSTA REVIEW OF THE SERIES:

The 10-volume Women's Adventures in Science series, co-published by National Academies Press and Scholastic Library Publishing, should be on every middle and high school librarian’s "must buy" list for 2007. The books are, first of all, beautiful. Each is filled with photographs, sidebars, glossaries, timelines, maps, and other graphics that provide key information about the field of science within which each woman has excelled. These text features are so well designed and captivating that they create excitement and interest that draws readers into the book.

Once inside, the true power of the Women’s Adventures Series is revealed as eight talented authors weave the very personal story of their journey from girl to scientist. The books begin with an overview chapter of the life and career of the scientist profiled, and then they move into a kind of flashback to her earliest years. The emphasis on adventure will appeal to a wider variety of young women than most biographies.

Fifth-grade students with whom I shared these books loved looking at the photos of the scientists as girls and young women and reading about how their early interests, successes, and setbacks affected their choices in later life. Girls also strongly connected with the emotion in the stories. When asked what the coolest thing about the book was, one student said, “It told how she felt about a lot of things"; another commented that the scientist and author “told it how it really was.” This emotional content ranges from academic and professional achievements or failures, to family joys and sadness, and it does much to help girls see these scientists as both passionate professionals and daughters, wives, and mothers. Older students will appreciate the struggles some scientists have experienced in their professional lives as they encountered discrimination due to gender, race or ethnicity, and their passion for their work as scientists. Because the books are paperbacks, they are practical for centers or a classroom library.

Late middle school and early high school students will make important connections from their own current coursework to college and career. . . . Although it is likely that this series will draw the attention of girls when displayed in school libraries and classrooms, one of the best ways to use these books will be in a “lunch bunch” or book club setting. The girls in my room buzzed about the books from the moment they chose them, and the books passed from hand-to-hand as they were finished. Next time I use these books, I plan to use a large map to flag the colleges these women attended and strengthen the link to post secondary education by connecting with some of these college websites as well.

Excellent science text and graphics, heartfelt personal stories, and captivating writing and design all serve as strong reasons to add these texts to your classroom or school library. If you need any further encouragement, let me offer these words written by an eighth-grade student. After reading four of the books, she wrote that they were “motivating and inspirational. They show that smart and successful women can be famous for their achievements in science and math, and that women are not only famous for being celebrities. These books inspire young women to work hard, go to college, and go into a career that you are passionate about.” I couldn’t have said it any better!

LIBRARY MEDIA CONNECTION REVIEW:

This well written series is beautifully illustrated with both b&w and color photographs and illustrations. . . . I started to skim through these fascinating volumes before writing my review and ended up reading them from cover to cover. What makes these biographies unique is the fact that they are written about modern-day working scientists who collaborated with the authors while the series was being written. Along with the illustrations, fact boxes and sidebars are included, which make this set very user friendly and a welcome addition to a school library's collection. Each volume contains a timeline of the subject's life and career; index; glossary; bibliography; metric conversion chart; and further resources (including Web sites). Recommended.

AMERICAN REFERENCE BOOKS ANNUAL REVIEW:

This series of 10 books from Franklin Watts focuses on the careers and achievements of 10 women scientists. The series has been assisted by the National Academy of Sciences and one woman in particular, Sara Lee Schupf. The goal of the series can be summed up in one sentence from the series preface: “The challenges of a scientific career are great but the rewards can be even greater.”

Each volume goes into the scientists' career achievements, research goals, new areas of study in the science, and background on how the scientist became interested in their study and how they motivate young scientists. Each volume concludes with a timeline of the scientist's life, a glossary, books and Websites to consult for further research, a bibliography, and an index. The books are full of color photographs, quotes, and sidebars, which will appeal to young students.

The obvious use for these books are for students doing research on either specific areas of science or for those researching one of the women featured in the series. They could also be used, however, as motivation and inspiration to young women looking to go into the scientific field. This set is recommended for middle and high school libraries.

ASSOCIATION FOR WOMEN IN SCIENCE REVIEW EXCERPTS:

The series takes a look at what is frequently perceived as the unfeminine world of science by coloring it in richly spun, completely approachable, and distinctly personal biographies. The books are written to tell how women’s careers develop from interests, are cultivated by choices made, and are shaped by the experiences encountered along the way. They tell of families, friends, relationships, and all of the other aspects of personal life that knit together to form every woman. Seldom is it possible to find a story that captures both aspects of the woman and the scientist in a single, readable way. Rare still is it to find it done in a compelling manner that would appeal to young, impressionable readers.

I believe this series would work well in library, guidance office, or in a classroom as a reference or leisurely read. It would also make an excellent addition to a literature unit on non-fiction, biographies, career education or women’s studies. . . . Each book was fresh, lively, and full of the personality of each talented scientist. The message in each book is clear. Science really can be like this.
—Terri Nostrand, Winter 2007 review