HEEDING A PLANETARY CALL

0 Comments | Register-Guard (Eugene, OR), April, 2003

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

Tahirih Motazedian wears little stars clipped into her jet black hair, but the stars in her eyes shine brighter.

She sees her future in those pinpoint lights. Not in the clouds of fusing hydrogen themselves, but in the planets whirling around them, and in one small, red planet in particular.

Motazedian, a University of Oregon junior, has set her sights on Mars. She has been drawn into its orbit so firmly it has altered the course of her life, pulling her away from a career as a pianist and sending her spinning into the world of planetary geophysics.

And already, at age 23 and without even a bachelor's degree, she has developed a new theory supporting the presence of water near the planet's surface. The...