[3] She was determined to one day visit Mars, although she did not always receive encouragement from her adult advisors: "In high school, my guidance counsellor gave me a big speech about how I would never get into an American university".

[9] She completed an MSc in Planetary Science at Caltech in 2006 and a PhD "Inquiries into the consequences of planetary-scale impacts and the implications of carbonates in the hyper-arid core of the Sahara" in 2010, under the supervision of Oded Aharonson.

[13] Marinova began working with NASA in 2010, where she used Earth analogs (including the Arctic, Sahara Desert, Mount Kilimanjaro and the Dry Valleys of Antarctica) to understand Mars.

[14] Here she was one of seven team members who spent three austral summers in Antarctica, testing ice-penetrating drills for a future mission to Mars.

[21][22][9] Her final project for NASA was on the Extreme Environments Mission Operations (NEEMO),[14][23] which sends groups of astronauts, engineers and scientists to live in the Aquarius underwater laboratory, the world's only undersea research station, for up to three weeks at a time in preparation for future space exploration.