In 1976, 21-year-old Adriana joined the imaging team for the Viking mission to Mars. She programmed the electronic cameras attached to the Viking 1 and 2 twin spacecraft. When one of the Viking landers (a self-run science lab) landed on the planet and sent images to Earth, Adriana was one of the first people in the world to see the surface of Mars.

She was fascinated by the rocks on the Martian landscape, which eerily resembled the California desert, only frozen. She decided to major in geology at California State University, Los Angeles, where she earned her B.S. degree.

A rock from space blasted out this huge hole, called Meteor Crater, in Arizona.

During her work at JPL, Adriana noticed that rocks on other planets were covered with impact craters caused by crashing asteroids, comets, and other space debris. She believed there were undiscovered impact craters on Earth, too, but where? Craters could be under water, under younger rock, or worn away by geological changes. To uncover hidden evidence, she turned to satellite technology.

In 1988 Adriana saw a satellite image showing water-filled sinkholes, called cenotes, arranged in a perfect half circle on the Yucatán Peninsula. After further investigation, she theorized that the cenotes might be evidence of an enormous buried crater. Such a crater would match up with a theory held by other scientists that an asteroid slammed into Earth 65 million years ago, causing the extinction of more than half the planet's life-forms.

By the early 1990s many scientists, including Adriana, believed Chicxulub, Mexico, was the site of the missing crater—a.k.a. the Crater of Doom. Adriana estimated the crater's outer ring at 110 miles in diameter, meaning the object that created it had to have been about 6 miles wide!

When very large space rocks collide with Earth, they vaporize (turn to gas). They also melt and "shock" Earth rocks such as quartz, leaving a crisscross pattern caused by fast-moving shockwaves. The impact sends the shocked rock flying in all directions as "ejecta." Left behind are huge holes known as impact craters.

Adriana never stops exploring and learning. In 1984 she began what became a 14-year job working on Galileo, a robotic mission to explore Jupiter. Nowadays she plans missions to look for more evidence about the Crater of Doom and she's completing her Ph.D.