Stewart-Mukhopadhyay is director of the Shock Compression Laboratory. At Caltech, she was the first to study shock propagation in ice under similar conditions found in the
Solar System. Her work on
shock-induced ice melting helped to show that liquid water is the most erosive fluid currently at work on the surface of Mars. One of the tools at the Shock Compression Laboratory is a 40 mm cannon. The shock lab has been located at
UC Davis since 2016. Her group also does experiments at the
Z Machine at
Sandia National Laboratory to study shock-induced vaporization. Stewart-Mukhopadhyay proposed a version of the
giant impact hypothesis in which an oblate Earth was slowed from a 2.3-hour long day, and allowed to become spherical, by an impact with the planet
Theia. In 2018 Simon J. Lock, Sarah Stewart-Mukhopadhyay, et al. hypothesized a new kind of
astronomical object – a
synestia – and proposed a new model of how the Earth and Moon were formed. == Awards and honors ==