Alessondra “Sondy” Springmann is a planetary astronomer. She’s working for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return space mission as a graduate researcher at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. She spent two years at Arecibo Observatory observing near-Earth asteroids with the megawatt planetary radar on the 305-meter William E. Gordon radio telescope in Puerto Rico, fighting off Bond villains and recreating scenes from Contact in her spare time. Sondy received her master of science from MIT in Earth & Planetary Sciences in 2011 and a bachelor of arts from Wellesley College in Astrophysics in 2007 (yellow class!). Somewhere between Wellesley and Tucson she lived in Pasadena, San Francisco, Jerusalem, Tokyo, and Accra. When she’s not on a plane or in the lab she hikes, SCUBA dives, herds cats (literally and figuratively), communicates science to the public, and races sailboats.
