Raissa Estrela

Raissa is a NASA Post-doctoral Fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory working with the characterization of exoplanets atmospheres using space and ground-based observations. She also does research on the effects of stellar activity in the atmospheric evolution of exoplanets. She is a member of the NESSI team, a new multi-object spectrograph at Palomar Observatory build specifically to examine the atmospheres of exoplanets.

Raissa started her scientific career studying Ecology and Physics in Natal, Brazil, close to the Equator and surrounded by beautiful beaches and sand dunes. There, she studied stellar properties (rotation, activity and pulsation) using the space satellites CoRoT and Kepler. Then, she moved to Sao Paulo to study stellar activity during her master. She used 4-years data observed by the Kepler telescope to characterize short magnetic cycles in active stars. Similarly to the Sun in which sunspots are used to determine the 11 years solar cycle, she used the number of spots found in planetary transits to determine the cycle duration in other solar-type stars. In 2017, she started a PhD in the same institution and during the first year she focused on the impact of stellar activity (i.e flares) on the habitability of exoplanets. For the following PhD years she had the opportunity to continue it abroad at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she performed observational atmospheric characterization of exoplanets with a focus on the role of aerosols and investigated the evolution of the atmospheric envelope of super-Earths and sub-Neptunes. She received her PhD in Sciences and Geospace Applications from the Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie (Sao Paulo, Brazil) in 2020.