Planetary scholar awarded grant

Just like the celestial objects he studies, James Wray '06 is on his way to becoming a star in his field. As one of 15 people chosen for the prestigious Hertz Foundation graduate fellowship, Wray will receive up to $240,000 to pursue five years of graduate study toward a doctorate in the physical sciences.

"I was very surprised," Wray said, noting that Hertz Fellowships are rarely given to astrophysics concentrators. He credits his success to his certificate in engineering physics and his comprehensive background in applied sciences.

The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship is awarded based on academic leadership and creativity in the physical sciences. Applicants complete a rigorous application process: 25 percent of applicants are interviewed, and only 10 percent of those interviewed receive the award.

Wray plans to use the fellowship to research life on other planets under Cornell University's Steve Squyres, the principal investigator of the NASA Mars Exploration Rover Mission.

By examining images from a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Wray hopes to find geographic features like gullies or canyons that may indicate the existence of water — and perhaps life — billions of years ago.

"Answering the [life] question would revolutionize many of [the] sciences," Wray said.

It would "give biologists a whole new world to study, change our ideas of chemistry ... throughout the galaxy. It would bear on so many fields, not the least of which [are] theology and philosophy."

Astrobiology has long been a passion of Wray's. As an astrophysics major, he compiled "an unusually ambitious and elaborate senior thesis," Wray's advisor Edwin Turner said.

"[Wray] had a very clear idea of what scientific issues interest him," Turner noted. This, he says, allowed Wray to get on a "definite trajectory" to become a leader in his field.

For his thesis, Wray stayed underground in Peyton Hall for whole nights at a time, studying astronomical data obtained from a telescope in New Mexico.

Wray used this telescopic information to study the possibility of life on moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Some cloudy nights, he says, the telescope's aperture was never opened and he sat there for hours, hoping that the clouds would clear.

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"We were using a ... new way to observe these icy moons and hoping we would find something exciting by doing it," Wray said.

Previously, all comparable data was obtained by relatively infrequent and expensive satellite methods. Wray's thesis, conducted on the ground, was much cheaper and gathered information more frequently.

This thesis was the basis for Wray's postgraduate summer internship at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

There, he and a team developed a plan to launch a mission to Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons Wray studied in his thesis.

After presenting the project at a planetary sciences conference, several of the team's members were flown to a NASA committee meeting to plan future missions.

"Hopefully," Wray said, "some of our ideas will feed into their process of mission design and selection."