Dr. Britney Schmidt and her team develop robotic tools and instruments as well as use spacecraft to study planets. Exploring Earth’s ice shelves and glaciers and the oceans beneath them, Schmidt’s interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers helps to capture the impacts of changing climate on the Earth, while understanding processes that might be ongoing on Ocean Worlds like Jupiter’s moon Europa. Schmidt’s long history of NASA spacecraft involvement includes the Europa Clipper mission, which launched in 2024, and the Dawn mission, which orbited the protoplanet Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. She has also been involved with studies of missions to land on Europa and Enceladus, and the LUVOIR Space Telescope (now Habitable Worlds Observer).

She has conducted nine field seasons in Antarctica and three in the Arctic, leading large science and technology programs. Her team’s most recent projects have deployed the Icefin vehicle, built in her lab, to explore underneath the McMurdo and Ross Ice Shelves (NASA project RISE UP) and Thwaites Glacier, one of the fastest changing glaciers in Antarctica (NERC-NSF ITGC), published in Nature in February, 2023. Starting in March 2025 through 2027, Icefin will conduct three seasons exploring and testing technology in Wostenholme Fjord, Greenland through NASA project SSHOW UP and a Heising Simons grant. She is an Associate Professor in the Earth & Atmospheric Sciences and Astronomy Departments and a field member in AE.