Moon Child

This Boulder ballerina took a whack at the Big Whack theory -- and one of science's biggest mysteries.

A A A Comments By Harrison Fletcher Thursday, Apr 25 2002

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"We're not contradicting the earlier results," she says. "And that's the place you want to be."

James Bludworth

When Robin Canup wasn't pursuing her love of ballet, modeling the Big Whack theory kept her on her toes.

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Today Canup toils away in her Boulder office beside a chalkboard crammed with calculations on the satellites of Jupiter, her current obsession. Although she's still studying the origins of the moon, she hopes her models might help scientists solve other riddles, including why Uranus rotates as if it were tipped on its side, why Mercury has so much iron and so little mantle, and how Pluto's moon got so large. Someday her work might even help scientists discover the chain of events that sparked life on earth.

"They're all big-picture things," she says.

On the little-picture front, Canup recently hung up her ballet slippers. On her nightstand, the earth-formation textbook has been replaced by Atlas Shrugged. And while she missed her deadline of reaching Mars by the age of 32, these days she'd prefer to devote her free time to solving a conundrum closer to home: how to work with her husband on a bathroom remodeling.

"Don't say that," she jokes. "He'll kill me."

Canup is now a principal investigator with NASA's Origins of the Solar Systems program and the National Science Foundation's Planetary Astronomy program. The girl who never thought she'd make a living studying space is a young woman trying to answer some of science's greatest questions.

But even after a day filled with calculations and simulations and skeptics, at night she still regards the heavens with "appreciation and wonder," she says. And then, just as she did so many years ago, she falls asleep under the light of a mysterious moon.