About the Author
Jacquelin L. Bart is a planetary scientist and science writer who studies cold, dry landscapes as stand-ins for Mars. She earned her doctorate in planetary geology, with field research in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica, the Atacama Desert of Chile, and the volcanic highlands of Iceland — environments that mimic Martian conditions closely enough to test instruments, train mission crews, and study how water, ice, and microbes shape planetary surfaces. Her peer-reviewed research has appeared in *Icarus*, the *Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets*, and *Astrobiology*, and she has collaborated with NASA- and ESA-supported research teams on polar and desert exploration campaigns.
As a communicator, her essays and feature stories have appeared in *Astronomy*, *Sky & Telescope*, and *The Planetary Report*, and she has lectured at planetariums, science festivals, and universities on three continents. She is the author of the essay collection *Field Notes from a Cold Desert* (2021), which grew out of her fieldwork diaries, and she volunteers as an educator for outreach programs that bring Antarctic and Martian field science into classrooms. *Terraforming Mars: The Planetology of Building a Second Earth* is her first full-length popular science book. She lives in the American Southwest, where she regards dust storms as a feature of the landscape rather than a problem with it.