Jasmina (ja-zminuh)

Jasmina is the main character in the first novel, Antichthon.

Jasmina was born in Footscray Hospital in Melbourne. Her father was a mechanic and was always tinkering with vehicles and other tech within the family home. Her mother was a nurse at the local hospital.

The family moved to Warrnambool pretty early on, by the south coast of Australia. Here, Jasmina gained a fascination with nature and the cosmos — as she’d find herself looking up at the stars beyond the horizon of the ocean out of her bedroom window.

Growing up, she remembers studying the stars when a teacher allowed her to stay back one day and let her look through one of the telescopes. She was so fascinated that she asked her parents if she could get one during Christmas — which she did!

Her interest in sciences evolved. and after high school decided that she would move back to Melbourne in order to get to study at some of the best Universities in the country.

She was never one to socialise too much — didn’t have any boyfriends and didn’t really take a fancy in parties and night clubs. She kept to herself and focused on obtaining a PhD in Orbital Dynamics. Her thesis was on radial-velocity noise floor — she chose this study during her cataloguing of planets orbiting distant stars and figured out a way to write a program that could isolate and subtract the star’s intrinsic “stellar jitter.” By modelling the star’s activity indicators and fitting them simultaneously with a Gaussian‑process kernel, her algorithm reduced the noise floor by a factor of three. This meant that the subtle Doppler wobbles of Earth‑mass planets, previously buried in stellar noise, could now be measured with the precision required to confirm their existence and characterise their atmospheres.

This research led her to a position at RMIT as an exoplanet‑detection research associate. In this role she is paid to re‑process a 30‑year‑old archive of Doppler data—old magnetic‑tape recordings from the now‑obsolete Orbital Climate Array (ORCA). Though the project is often dismissed as relic work, Jasmina’s algorithm breathes new life into the archive: she digitises the tapes, calibrates the spectra, removes instrumental drifts, and applies her jitter‑subtraction routine. The result is a set of cleaned, high‑precision radial‑velocity curves that reveal previously hidden planet candidates and refine the orbital parameters of known worlds. In short, she turns forgotten data into a fresh catalogue of exoplanets, proving that the past can still illuminate the frontiers of the cosmos.