Faculty Expert Profile

MacKenzie's research focuses on identifying and classifying sediments on the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, using data from three Cassini instruments: RADAR, ISS, and VIMS.

She is interested in scattering processes at work in Titan's atmosphere and the use of radiative transfer modeling to understand how they interfere with remote sensing data, and also the potentially habitable and inhabited environments of the icy satellites, particularly Titan and Enceladus.

Using data from the Earth satellite SMAP, she investigates the feasibility of using microwave radiometers as volcanic event detectors at other bodies in the solar system (e.g. Venus, Titan, Pluto).