In 2007 Joy was appointed a
postdoctoral researchfellow at Birkbeck, where she performed mineralogical and geochemical investigations into lunar rock and used this to understand chemical information collected from remote sensing.
In 2010 Joy joined the
Johnson Space Center as a
NASA Lunar Science Institute[12]research fellow working on
lunar regolith.[13] By investigating the composition of lunar soil Joy hopes to understand the Moon's bombardment history. While in the United States Joy was a member of the Center for Lunar Science and Exploration. She moved to the
Antarctic search for meteorites (ANSMET) in 2011, where she spent three months searching for lunar meteorites in the
Miller Range in
Antarctica.[14][7] The Antarctic is well suited to the identification of meteorites; it is cold enough to preserve them but white enough for the dark meteorites to stand out.[15] She led the first UK team to recover meteorite samples from
Antarctica in collaboration with the
British Antarctic Survey (BAS); the Polar Meteorite Exploration and Research programme.[16][17] Over the course of four weeks, Joy's mission collected almost forty lunar meteorites from the ice.[18] One of the 4.3 billion year old meteorites studied by Joy contained evidence of active volcanoes on Mars, a surprising finding that indicated volcanic activity started hundreds of millions of years before it had previously been estimated.[18]
Joy has studied the 382 kg of lunar rocks that were brought back from the Apollo missions.[9] She believes that lunar rocks will hold answers to whether life exists beyond the
Solar System. Joy has called for future generation of space craft to be more careful about where they collect rocks.[19] She found fragments of ancient asteroids in the rocks brought back by the
Apollo 16 mission, which indicates that primitive asteroids regularly bombarded the Moon over 3.4 billion years ago.[18] Joy joined the
University of Manchester in 2012, where she was awarded a
Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF) to study lunar meteorites. She is a member of the
European Space Agency Package for Resource Observation and in-Situ Prospecting for Exploration, Commercial exploitation and Transportation (PROSPECT) drill – the Sample Excavation and Extraction Device.[20]
^
abJoy, Katherine H. (2008). "The petrology and geochemistry of Miller Range 05035: A new lunar gabbroic meteorite". Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. 72 (15): 3822–3844.
Bibcode:
2008GeCoA..72.3822J.
doi:
10.1016/j.gca.2008.04.032.