Despite the generally hostile nature of the environments involved, chemistry does occur in space. Molecules are seen in environments that span a wide range of physical and chemical conditions that clearly were created by chemical processes, many of which differ substantially from those associated with traditional equilibrium chemistry. The wide range of environmental conditions and processes involved with chemistry in space yields complex populations of materials. For example, the elements hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen (H, C, O, and N, respectively) are among the most abundant in the universe and many of these are organic in nature.

Much of this chemistry occurs in “dense” interstellar clouds and protostellar disks surrounding forming stars because these environments have higher relative densities and more benign radiation fields than in stellar ejectae, or the diffuse interstellar medium. Because these are the environments in which new planetary systems form, some of the chemical species made in these environments are expected to be delivered to the surfaces of planets where they can potentially play key roles in the origin of life.

Read the full paper here: https://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.chemrev.9b00560

Emily Schaller received the NASA Public Service Award at the 2019 NASA Honor Awards ceremony, held at NASA Ames Research Center, September 26, 2019.  Presenting the award is (left) Mr. Clayton Turner, Deputy Director of NASA Langley Research Center, and (right) Dr. Eugene Tu, Ames Center Director.  Dr. Schaller received the Group Achievement Award on behalf of the Student Airborne Research Program (SARP), as well.

Dr. Kulawik, a researcher in the Atmospheric Science Branch within NASA Ames’ Earth Science Division, is recognized for her exceptional achievement in atmospheric remote sensing. Kulawik specializes in trace gas estimates from satellite observations, particularly in sensitivity and error characterization of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions.  This award was for the development of algorithms and code to analyze information from many different earth-observing satellites, in collaboration with other scientists at JPL.  JPL’s Deputy Director, Larry D. James, acknowledged the impact and importance of this achievement that has “enabl[ed] the development of new atmospheric composition products and algorithmic advances across the NASA mission.”

Schaller, a member of the National Suborbital Research Center (NSRC), which is an integral part of BAER, is recognized for her tireless support and guidance over the last nine years of NASA’s Student Airborne Research Program (SARP).  SARP is an eight-week summer internship program for rising senior undergraduate students to acquire hands-on research experience in all aspects of a scientific campaign using one or more NASA Airborne Science Program flying science laboratories. (NASA Aircraft used for SARP have included the DC-8, P-3B, C-23, UC-12B, and ER-2). Schaller recruits and selects senior undergraduate students from across the U.S. and is a continual presence during all phases of the 8-week internship, including arranging logistics, coordinating airborne research and laboratory facilities, and selecting program mentors.  At the end of the internship, students give presentations to NASA program managers and university faculty members. Many of these presentations are later given at prestigious conferences such as that held annually by the American Geophysical Union. A large segment of SARP’s alumni have gone on to pursue advanced degrees and careers in STEM fields. Schaller also promotes the science of many NASA airborne science missions to K-12 students and educators through the NASA Mission Tools Suite for Education. To date, she has facilitated the direct connections of over 500 classrooms and 17,000 students to airborne science missions in-flight. Schaller has shown great dedication in encouraging the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Congratulations to these outstanding employees!

Tell me a little bit about your research. 

My research involves designing distributed spacecraft and their autonomous operations. One theme focuses on distributed spacecraft autonomy, which is looking at how multiple spacecraft in orbit talk to each other and make reactive science decisions. If a spacecraft sees something of interest on the ground, it would be able to make inferences and predictions based on its observations. The spacecraft can then broadcast that knowledge to other spacecraft in the form of actionable metadata, so they can change their observation control strategies accordingly. Dynamic control based on inter-spacecraft coordination can maximize existing space assets because they can adaptively reconfigure their instrument orientations, channels, data collection rates, integration times, etc.  

Then there’s another theme that focuses on distributed operator autonomy. I used to co-lead the communication navigation group under the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) traffic management project. That project will inform how the government will manage thousands of  drones that will be flying in the skies very soon. The UAV project taught me new ideas to build an automated framework so that different entities controlling vehicles could interact with one another in a more efficient way and to share the skies safely. We are now applying that same concept to space traffic management to automate interactions between (currently disjointed) spacecraft operators and providers of services such as space situational awareness, conjunction assessment, space weather forecasts, etc.

Essentially, one half of my life is creating technology by which we can fly sensor webs of multiple satellites, and the other half is creating technology so these satellites don’t collide or radio-interfere!

If they are autonomously designed, is it similar to robotic swarms?

Distributed spacecraft are multiple, free-flying satellites. The way they are arranged structurally in space determines whether it’s a constellation, a formation, or a swarm. If they are in defined orbits – globally distributed – it’s called a constellation, like GPS or Iridium. If they are only loosely connected to each other orbitally and structurally, then it’s a swarm. Many of the cubesats nowadays are deployed as a swarm from the ISS or secondary payloads, but they can spread out evenly using differential drag control. If they have precise intersatellite distances or angles, it’s a formation, like the Prisma mission. So, structural dependency is one of the aspects that determines the name. 

What I look at is: irrespective of how they are arranged, when should they communicate with each other or ground control? What should the content be and how can they reactively control their instruments to maximize the collectively retrieved geospatial data? We know some windows of opportunity and power or thermal constraints ahead of time, based on the satellite orbits and bus specs. Using those as inputs, we design algorithms that create a schedule when spacecraft should be talking to each other versus when they should be making observations, how should their attitude orientation change with time, how they should be processing these observations to decide what they should be doing next. It’s a lot like self-driving inter-connected cars, but with the very tight physics constraints and resource constraints of space.

Is it based on distance? How do they decide?

The Earth is so big, so dynamic; it rotates out of sync with satellite orbits — so there are a lot of factors! In a NASA-funded science constellation, you can only economically fly maybe a few dozen spacecraft, and that’s for small spacecraft, by the way. Even when you have a larger number, for example 24, they are thousands of kilometers away from each other.  A single orbital plane of 8 spacecraft at a 700 km altitude has the closest pair spaced at 5,000 kilometers away. At 5,000 kilometers when one spacecraft spots something, none of the others see anything yet. It’s the responsibility of the one who spotted something to make an inference based on its observations and communicate that intent on to the next spacecraft. If it’s an interesting observation, the next one can focus on the same spot when they fly over it. But if it’s nothing, they can avoid that spot and focus on another one. 

What are you doing with this type of research? Is it a type of global communications link or is it to be used for different science missions? For example, taking pictures of natural phenomena on Earth? Or is it too soon to know?

Adaptive control in spaceflight is a cool new technology. We want to show it’s possible to do these things with currently available hardware. Cubesat radios can function across huge distances and cubesat attitude control systems can re-orient the satellites from horizon-to-horizon in a few seconds. But at the same time, I don’t want it to be only a technology demonstration. I’m a scientist at heart. I like to look at questions that have not been answered because of technology roadblocks and figure out what could be a new observing strategy that could enable new measurements to answer those questions.

Problems in space science have varying spatial-temporal scales, and I try to understand how to autotomize adaptive control to better capture data. The event to be measured could be a transient storm that results in urban flooding. It could be spread of a wildfire. Or for example, soil moisture changes, whose temporal scales are much slower than wildfires or floods. The nature of communication and control depends on event transiency and scale, aside from onboard capacity and ground control availability. Also, when you have so many assets in space, it’s just not feasible to have a human kept in the loop. The question then becomes: How can you use autonomy to command these spacecraft in a more efficient way — but at the same time, add value to certain science questions that could not have been answered if there weren’t so many intelligent, coordinated assets. 

The general idea is that you’re not only conducting a technology demonstration now, but also developing it for things we don’t even know exist yet. Like when mobile phones first came out, we had no idea apps would be as big as they are now. But these are measurable results you’re looking at, correct?

Right. Which is why we want to tie it to at least 2 or 3 case studies so people will see value in the technology. I think there is so much that can open up, it is beyond our current imagination. 

How would you like to see your area of research grow? You’re looking at some pretty large-scale global issues– monitoring forest fires, loss of agriculture, transportation – but looking at relatable human problems. 

I’m trying to look at transient or evolving phenomena that would benefit from autonomy as opposed to localized time and space problems. I am hoping to adapt our autonomy algorithms by applying them to diverse measurements,  not just human problems, but also scientific ones that need to measure transient phenomena, like magnetospheric reconnection, or plasma density changes.

What different projects are you working on now?

I have a couple of R&D projects on multi-spacecraft scheduling and adaptive control. I am a systems engineer on the Distributed Spacecraft Autonomy experiment that will fly onboard the Starling mission. The goal is to control a reconfigurable swarm with minimal ground supervision.

Aside from this, I work on a space traffic management project. We have maybe over 2,000 operational satellites. But, if you look at all the defunct satellites and the debris, there are more than 20,000. Looking at the news from the last year, there’s going to be 20,000 new spacecraft in the next 5-10 years. These will be launched by companies who are looking to provide services, such as internet, in remote areas. We don’t have a framework in place to control all this traffic in space. We’ve started developing APIs and building a prototype software that will allow spacecraft operators and service providers to interact and even negotiate in a more automated way to make space more efficient, useable, and safe for future generations. 

Our STM lab has a large Hyperwall with workstations representing some key components, and we’re setting up the software prototype to demo automated interactions in simulated scenarios. We want to build a marketplace for services, just like the automotive industry used to be 100 years ago. But this time it’s going to be for space, to lower the barrier of entry for new providers. If you want to set up your own dish and monitor space traffic you can do that by connecting to the STM system. This project is less than a year old.  It’s been an adventure ramping up and we’re publishing articles to share the insights. (The directive comes from here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/space-policy-directive-3-national-space-traffic-management-policy/) 

Do you work with a lot with Earth Scientists?

I work primarily with Earth Scientists, and a little bit with heliophysicists and planetary scientists. 

That’s exciting. You’re a scientist at heart, but you’re an engineer as well. How did your background lead you to doing this type of work?

I did my Masters and PhD in aerospace space systems engineering from MIT. And my bachelor’s degree is in exploration geophysics, but my focus was more on applied physics. I like answering nature’s fundamental questions as well as building new things. I looked at putting that together in my career: to build new things to answer those questions. 

Have you had to overcome gender barriers? What advice would you give early career people who are looking to get into STEM but are not sure what path to take?

I grew up in an all girls’ school, and then went to an undergrad institution with 5% women. Knowledge of gender-based perceptions came to me very late in life, but hit quite intensely when I realized. While their nature is quite dependent on culture (U.S. vs India, where I grew up), gender barriers and glass ceilings do exist. It’ll take generations to fix, but luckily, more resources are available for women now than ever before in history. I think it’s a great time to pick up STEM as a career, or any career which was not traditionally held by women. 

I’ve definitely benefitted from having great mentors. My mother has been my strongest influence and pillar. Bosses I’ve worked with, colleagues or friends, even classmates, they all have been supportive, whether I reached out to them directly or not. Making yourself part of a diverse peer group helps. Being part of more than one project helps in that you can see how one part of a project is applicable to another, culturally and otherwise. Having open-minded scientists and thinkers around you helps, as well.

Was there anything that surprised you?

We are in a generation where knowing how to code is as important as any natural language. That’s not just for astronomy or spacecraft engineering; that’s true for pretty much anything. We have access to so much data! To be able to extract information from it all and provide actionable intelligence to so many machines, you just have to know how to code them. I’d say that was a crucial realization for me more than 10 years ago.

What’s a bit more recent, that surprised me at NASA, was the sparse interaction between engineers and scientists, other than for specific missions. Because NASA is primarily science driven, it’s important that the conversation happens more often than it does. It can be very siloed, and there are few avenues where knowledge exchange can actually happen. Often it is fairly qualitative – we call them cocktail napkin level discussions.  Instead, I’d like access to people’s models and get out actual numbers. How can we make APIs to connect our models? Then, I can tell you how my stuff can improve with yours and vice-versa. 

Do you feel like a bridge between both of these worlds as you have experience in both? You’re able to speak the lingo?

So that’s something I never expected to be doing, but I love that it happened [laughs]. I thought to myself, okay, I’m going to be building spaceships and all these cool things, then I thought, “Wait a minute, what’s the science problem here?” And it led me to a whole new world of translating between the two [laughs]. 

Do you feel working at NASA Ames helps with that interdisciplinary approach?

People here are open about discussing their research and contributing to yours. So, it helps, having different types of opinions. I’ve also witnessed a couple of very strong women over the course of my career at NASA, whom I’ve watched as they built their own careers. Gives us all a chance to look up to them and think, Well I want to be like that! So that helps. 

If she can see it, she can be it.

Definitely. I think overall, telling yourself that… I want to be in a positive environment that keeps me pushing through the challenges. It’s an intellectually difficult path. There’s no instant gratification in science. You just have to slog yourself through years of work and maybe something will come out of it [laughs]. Even small successes are incredibly fulfilling and worth the effort, that’s what keeps me going.  

Was there any particular moment when you thought, Hang on, I can do this as a career?

Back in my undergrad years, the team working on Hubble just released its ultra-deep field images and they were beautiful, visually stunning. But aside from the aesthetics I realized that we were looking into a field full of stars that had emitted their light at varying temporal scales. What we are seeing is the capture of light that has reached us at the same time. But the light started from those stars probably billions of years apart. What we’re seeing on the screen is an illusion. For me, that idea was quite “deep” (pun intended). We’re able to look back in time – and varying degrees of time – through one image. 

I was naturally interested in the technology that made this possible. I started looking at telescopes, then satellites that made such telescopes. So, I got interested in space through the Hubble deep field.  The more I discovered about space, the more I wanted to know. And the better it got over time. 

Your research focus is aerosols and cloud interactions, can you tell me more about its importance?

As an atmospheric scientist I study how pollution affects clouds. A big unanswered question in terms of future climate is aerosols – a term for tiny atmospheric particles like smoke, dust, or sea salt. It’s an interesting area because we understand the effects carbon dioxide and other long-lived greenhouse gases have on the climate since they remain in the atmosphere for such a long time. This is partly because aerosols are relatively short-lived – a few days to weeks in the atmosphere, compared with decades to centuries for carbon dioxide – and also because their effects depend on the type of particle. For example, smoke versus dust.

An additional factor is how they affect cloud properties. For example, cloud droplet size and  lifetime – like when/whether a cloud rains or evaporates. This is important to climate since the aerosols themselves will either warm or cool the atmosphere. Clouds reflect sunlight so any changes to them can produce a warming or a cooling effect. Not to mention changes in precipitation patterns which we care about, too!

What affect do aerosols have on a global scale?

Because the effects of aerosols are localized and variable it’s difficult to know or understand what that will mean globally and what it will be in the future. For example: What is the total effect from fires in Africa, plus power plant emissions in China, plus vehicle emissions in Europe and the US when each region may have different technologies and different emission standards to achieve their air quality goals that will also be changing with time. You can imagine how complicated it is to quantify the big picture!  

Most atmospheric particles we emit last for about a week before they’re removed, usually by rain. Compare that to carbon dioxide, which lasts for about a century and has a chance to be fairly evenly distributed, globally! One of the interesting things we’re seeing in ORACLES is that the smoke from African fires seems to persist and get recirculated based on atmospheric dynamics.

What are things you are working on with your research that you enjoy? I think I remember reading you enjoy field campaigns?

I do enjoy working on field campaigns!

What was the last campaign you were part of?

I was part of ORACLES in 2017. That was in São Tomé [island off the coast of Africa].

What is it about the experience you enjoy?

With field campaigns you go out with a specific goal. There were likely years of logistic preparation to get you to that point, and (if you’re lucky) years of analysis after the fact, but in the middle of that you’re there! You’re usually going out to another place and collecting data with a limited amount of time and resources. There’s something special about being in the field when data is first being collected; also having the opportunity to interact with other researchers in the moment, being on the plane and looking out the window and being able to physically associate it with what the instruments are measuring. Maybe they’re unique measurements that haven’t been collected before, or part of a long-term dataset which allows us to better understand longer trends, or somewhere in between, but I find this kind of thing incredibly cool and exciting!

The vast majority of my research is in processing and analyzing data. Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up with Matlab (computer processing program) and you can sort of lose sight looking at the research and think, this is something we actually measured in the real world.

It’s a cool thing to do and I’m glad we were able to be part of it.

Hearing stories that you work in the field and, in a sense, the story behind the numbers you get, from point A to point B. You are doing science work. How long does it take to make sense of the data you collect?

It can be long time. I have a paper that is being reviewed now that is using data from ORACLES 2016. So, 2 years and a bit from when the data was collected to when it was submitted.

Good science takes time.

I think so. Particularly when we’re dealing with observations; we need to collect the data, calibrate instruments, apply quality controls, deal with a lot of logistics before we even start on a meaningful data analysis. And I may have fewer publications because of that but I hope that means the publications are higher in quality. One of the challenges in science is feeling that need to constantly publish, but we don’t always know all the answers right away. A lot of science happens more incrementally. But of course, we do need to publish because that’s how science gets communicated within our own field. I’m trying to get better at breaking up my research into publishable units, which probably won’t answer all the questions but hopefully will answer one piece of the puzzle we are trying to understand.

And with the last ORACLES deployment behind us we’re hopefully going to be seeing a whole lot more papers in the next few months!

Would it be fair to say that in your work a large part of it is looking at Earth climate models and how to make them better? Would you say that’s accurate?

In climate science, you have experimentalists, modelers, and lab people, which all have different roles in understanding the Earth system. I’m on the observational side of things, which deals mostly with what does the real world look like. The modelers use their computer simulations to hopefully tell us why the real world looks what it does.

Lab scientists can take this theory and perform more controlled tests than we’re able to do out in situ. If the model results don’t match what’s observed in the field or in the lab that probably means some mechanism or some process (or combination of processes) are not fully captured or missing from the model. The motivation that comes up a lot is that we need observations to make our models more accurate. The representation of aerosol properties and processes in the models is something that has historically been difficult to fully capture.

For example, the ORACLES aerosol paper that we have in ACPD [Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics] right now is looking at aerosol properties that we measured from many different instruments and this SSA property (single scattering albedo) is often assumed to be a certain value in models or in satellite retrievals. If we have a better idea of what the observed values are, we can improve the calculations which assume a particular SSA value.

I’m curious about people’s life journey on the path towards science. What sparked your love for science?

As an undergrad I majored in physics with specialization in astrophysics. I did a summer program called REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates, an NSF program) and found that research was something I enjoyed and started thinking graduate school was something I might want to pursue.

In my 4^th year of undergraduate work, I took an elective class on the physical climate system cross-listed between physics and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography which mostly focused on the Earth’s radiative balance. In physics, there’s a concept called a black body, which is an object that absorbs all energy that hits it (i.e. black) and re-radiates it away as heat; the amount of energy it has to equal the amount of energy out. Radiative balance in climate science is basically applying this model to the Earth: the amount of sunlight coming in has to equal the amount of infrared radiation that’s radiated away from the top of Earth’s atmosphere.

But, of course, this is a significant simplification. The Earth has an atmosphere made up of various gases, and ocean, land, clouds, ice, which are absorbing, reemitting, reflecting, scattering both the sunlight and the infrared (heat) energy; but at a fundamental level, this is basically just physics that’s applied to the Earth’s system. And I thought, Okay, this is really cool! I want to pursue this more in graduate school! I was accepted to Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. The professor who taught that course ended up on my dissertation committee.

It has been a cumulative process I think. There wasn’t one defining moment that led me to where I am. I majored in physics because I had a really good AP Physics instructor in high school, found it to be an enjoyable subject, and wanted to pursue it further. So, if I hadn’t had that particular instructor it’s entirely possible I may not have made that choice. A professor I worked with during a summer program at UCLA during my 3^rd year of undergrad, was an astrophysics professor; yet he was the first one to show me the Keeling Curve which is a graph of a long-term data set showing the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere from 1958 to present day. And that summer program opened my eyes to the possibility of graduate school and research as a career.  

I’ve been fortunate enough that I was able to pursue what I wanted to study in school and I was fortunate to get into a grad school where I was able to thrive. It was more a set of cumulative nudges in one direction that, conversely, one sees how easy it can be to nudge potential scientists out of science. I like to do outreach programs, like Skype a Scientist, and I hope that adds a few more nudges in the direction of science.

How important is it to have mentors? Or, who would you say inspires you?

Having great mentors is crucial. Part of the reason I was successful in my PhD program was in large part the interactions I had with postdocs, being part of a great lab, as well as my advisors. Having that exposure, support, and guidance made a big difference going through my PhD. I had a good collaborative and supporting community. This is how I approach my work in general. I enjoy a collaborative work space. Some people can do it alone, but I find my work usually benefits from having more eyes and more input, having the opportunity to bounce ideas off people.

Beyond my own particular research niche, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe is a climate scientist and is involved in science communication. She also happens to be an evangelical Christian, so she’s able to talk science to a particular group of people who are not usually brought into the conversation about science or climate science. I respect her ability to communicate science and scientific knowledge to different segments of the population.

I have all the respect in the world for people like Dr. Hayhoe or Dr. Michael E. Mann who are able to do both, especially on an open platform like Twitter, as that can bring out trolls against women scientists.

Speaking of communicating, how important do you feel science communication is?

Yeah, I feel this is incredibly important. A lot of our research (NASA, NOAA, NSF, DoE projects) is funded by taxpayer money. In this context, the public deserves to know the research we are working on. However, it can be difficult, depending on the audience, since it is also a full-time job to be able to communicate effectively. There’s a balance that has to happen between doing research but also communicating your research beyond writing scientific papers. How the scientific or academic community communicates within itself is not how nonscientists communicate. Much of it has to do with framing and forming a strong narrative about your research, something that we, as scientists, are not necessarily trained to do. But I think it is important for someone to do it!

Have you found anything about climate science that has surprised you?

In terms of the mechanics of “science” it’s definitely coding. And also, statistics! Nobody told me that I should know how to code until my third year of undergrad study; so I feel like I’ve been playing catch-up ever since. I use MATLAB and I’m trying to learn more Python as it has some other advantages (including being open-source). But our instrument processing code uses MATLAB, or for the foreseeable future, MATLAB will be involved.

In terms of climate science, it’s probably how complex these aerosol-cloud interactions can be.  There are many aspects of the climate that we understand fairly well (for example, the impacts of long-lived carbon dioxide emissions). But for aerosols the answer to, “What is the effect” is often basically “It depends.” It depends on the meteorology, the cloud type, the aerosol type, and aerosol age. But if we had all the answers right away then there wouldn’t be anything left to research!

Dr. Hedges works mostly with python computer programming, and develop toolkits and pipelines for the reduction of datasets in the Kepler/K2 Guest Observer (GO) Office. In her previous work at University of Cambridge, she worked on a reduction toolkit for HST spatial scan mode data and machine learning. Now, she works directly with Kepler data to discover new exoplanet candidates, searches for disks around young stars, and investigates sound waves in stars, called asteroseismology, an exciting field that informs astronomers about the internal structure of a star.

Can you explain a little bit about your research and your role in the K2/GO (Guest Observer) Office?

About 80% of my time is supporting the science community. That can encompass a lot of things: such as developing software for the community, to directly using Kepler/K2 data. I’m a core developer for our in-house packages (ex: lightkurve) that different audiences can use — from professional astronomers to amateur astronomers — to easily access and work with data.

I also document and write tutorials, then deliver workshops on how to use this software. Another side is helping the community directly. For example, someone may ask about a funny signal they’ve observed over Kepler/K2 data, or perhaps an individual working on a paper needs help to detrend K2 data. I get to work with the greater community and help out.

Will this be the standard going forward? Kepler has now passed the torch to TESS [Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite]. Will it continue that anyone in the community, not just professional astronomers, can access the data?

Yes, TESS will continue this trend. Kepler/K2 has been great for citizen science. We have things like Planet Hunters, where citizens examine and identify planets in a dataset. Kepler was a pioneer in creating this type of bridge for people to access exoplanetary science. In the Guest Observer office, we are keen on ensuring all tools are accessible. Part of that means we work on improving the API, (aka the user interface), making sure it’s easy to use and remain conscious of what the consumer wants!

Is this a form of outreach, working with the science community? Or is it more about creating better products for future research analysis?

It’s more about creating a better product. There are a lot of scientists that need really easy-to-use tools, so they can focus on extracting their science. From students to professors. Python might not be their first “language” so it’s important to keep it accessible. Also, you want to leave these tools in a state that can be accessed by anyone 10 years from now.

As a young person going into astronomy, would you tell her to take classes in computer science?

Absolutely. I tell my interns that is one area to help improve your career trajectory. Take python, learn how to code, learn best practices. It’ll make it much easier for you to build your own tools, and use other people’s tools if you’re good at debugging and using API.

How did you get involved in astronomy and astrophysics? How did you decide that you wanted to do this as a career?

I had a strange moment in high school where I had two pathways to choose from: do I pursue art or do pursue physics? I loved art and painting. One of my teachers encouraged me to try for physics, as I could always continue doing art and painting as a hobby. As I was attending my physics program I decided to take physics with astronomy, I’ve always had an interest in astronomy and wanted to push myself in the astronomy field.

You and Ann Marie (Dr. Cody, also in the K2 GO office) both have, what sounds like, a creative background or at least a strong interest in the arts. From an interdisciplinary standpoint, does that help you see things a bit differently in your field?

It’s very worthwhile being creative in astronomy. Even from a standpoint of creating a visualization, how best to explain things to an audience, to creative problem solving. It can be immensely useful to think outside the box.

Have you had to overcome gender barriers over the course of your career? Can you give any advice?

Yes, be picky about your mentor! It can be so easy to fall into this trap of thinking, “oh lucky me, so-and-so wants to choose me!” rather than thinking, “hmm, do I want to study under this person?” It does come back to having a degree of confidence in yourself. But really scrutinize who you’re going to give your time, attention, and respect to – make sure you’re in a nurturing environment. Ask yourself: Is this the group I want to be in? Is this department for me? All the while taking in that confidence, care, and respect for yourself. It can be quite destructive being part of a negative environment.  

How important do you feel is science communications is in your role?

Some of my work as a support scientist is science communication, but more to scientists. Creating presentations, workshops, tutorials, and YouTube explainer videos. It is in a way outreach – it is accessible for anyone – but the main audience for what I do is aimed at people who are already in astronomy, other experts. That being said, I’m always happy to do engagement and outreach, especially with members of the public. I don’t think I have as much of an opportunity to do outreach for the public currently.

Do you have mentors you look up to?

Yes, absolutely. Jessie [Dr. Dotson, Project Scientist for Kepler/K2] is one of my heroes. Jessie has so much experience and she’s an excellent leader. Scientifically I look up to her, we just wrote a proposal together! She’s methodical, caring, and professional. Also, my mentor at Cambridge; I definitely look up to him.

Interestingly when I arrived here [at the K2/Go office] I noticed we have a female project manager, a female project scientist, a female mission scientist, and Ann Marie in all these really bad ass roles that I look up and can see myself in. It’s a different experience when you see it and think, hey, I can do that! All these badass ladies. Three key leadership roles here are all taken up by women. And although that wasn’t always the case at Kepler, it’s pretty amazing now!

Who would you say was a big influence in your life, who helped guide you in this direction?

There were so many teachers along the way. In each career stage, I’ve had one or two people always pulling for me which has been great, like 1-2 teachers who encouraged me to pursue math or encouraged me to pursue graduate school. There have been a few mentors along the way. But, at the same time it’s not an easy thing to do. It required a lot of self-motivation. Pushing yourself in that direction.

I think anyone would be very lucky to be interning with you, as you’d probably push them in a good way.

I hope so. In a good way! [laughs] It all comes from caring. Pushing students to get the best effort out of them. I’m very grateful for all my mentors along the way.

What are your next steps? Any upcoming geek out moments?

I just finished resubmitting a Hubble time form. We are going to try and measure the atmosphere of a planet. This is done all the time in the field, but this is a very, very small planet. If we can find water signatures on it that’s going to be very exciting. There’s also another team that is taking different measurements in the system so we’re going to intercompare data, which is pretty new. Also, the chance to use Hubble is wicked cool!

In terms of working on things like this, is it a fairly big collaborative effort?

I’m the PI for a proposal I submitted, I’m focusing on the data analysis side. So, looking at the observation, taking the data, and calibrating it. We’ll be going from raw observations to our best estimates of the actual spectrum of the atmosphere. Then, I have other team members who will be fitting atmospheric models to that spectrum. Other team members will use another data set, again from Hubble, where we are going to be comparing them. This is all a little way down the line, but it should be pretty great!

As part of Kepler/K2 project, I’m so use to having open source data now. This has dramatically helped my development skills 10-fold. Now I’m going back and dusting off all my reduction routines and trying to package them up into a new pipeline, using some of these incredible new skills I’ve gained in statistical packages and statistical analysis since I’ve been working here.

Many thanks to BAERI’s Kassie Perlongo, Science Communication Specialist affiliated with the Science Directorate at NASA Ames Research Center, for developing this series.  Look for future interviews in the coming months.

Cody’s other titles include:

• Fastest 10K pushing a Triple Pram (Female);
• World record holder for the Triple Pram Marathon; and
• One-time Half-Marathon world record holder.

Cody’s scientific interests include research into young stars and the formation of planets.  Her research involves high-precision optical and infrared photometry and spectroscopy. She is responsible for managing Kepler’s public data products and creating cartoons depicting the observatory’s astronomical targets.  

* The event was a feature in the April 2, 2019 edition of The Morgan Hill Times.

BASALT’s objective is achieving “analog mission fidelity.”  Many of the challenges facing the team was traversing hostile terrain in extraterrestrial vehicles (EVAs), reducing telecommunication latency that would occur across great distances, landing heavy payloads, sustaining surface power, developing regenerative life support, and landing heavy payloads safely.  Follow the link to read more about the many results the team has achieved and what’s to come.

https://www.liebertpub.com/toc/ast/19/3