[5] Smrekar and an international team of researchers presented the Venus Emissivity Mapper (VEM) at a conference in 2018; this device scans the planet's surface at specific wavelengths to record the mineral composition, and uses other channels to determine cloud cover, weather, interference, and volcanic activity.
[6] Smrekar remains a team member of the joint Brown – MIT NASA Lunar Science Institute.
[1] Smrekar has formed part of multiple NASA teams dedicated to exploring the Solar System.
[8] She was Deputy Project Leader for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO),[9][10][11] which, in addition to monitoring the eventual descent for multiple Martian instrument landings, used its shallow- and deep-penetration radar to uncover a pool of solid carbon dioxide at Mars' South Pole – "equivalent to Lake Superior.
She lightly referred to needing to obtain sub-surface results of Martian geography and geology as understanding "...the whole enchilada" of non-Earth planets.