Noemi Pinilla-Alonso

Her research interest is discovering how our Solar System formed and evolved to its present state. In particular, determining surface compositions of minor bodies and interpreting them in terms of surface alteration mechanisms and, ultimately, formation conditions. For her research she combines observational techniques with modeling efforts. For the observational effort she accesses either ground-based observatories (e.g. Gemini, GTC, IRTF) or data from spacecraft (e.g., Deep Impact and GAIA in the near future) or data from space telescopes (e.g. NASA Spitzer Space Telescope, Herschel Space Observatory). To analyze these data, she applies different techniques e.g. modeling of the scattering of light by multi-component surfaces and clustering techniques, to mine large data sets.