It’s been almost exactly two years since I last posted here.

At the end of 2023, I wrote about that year as one of self-exploration rather than space exploration. The year was an initially unexpected pause after more than a decade of dutifully building a career with very little time devoted to rest or reflection. The impetus behind hitting the brakes didn’t stem from a realization that I needed to slow down, but slowing down did end up being one of the most important lessons I learned. At the time, I called it a “sabbatical,” but I now prefer Upasna Gautam’s term “micro-retirement.” I had to give myself permission to pause, to recognise that my worth did not need to be measured by productivity or external perceptions of my career advancement. The trauma around why I finally decided to leave my job in early 2023 also left me in a spot where space no longer brought me joy, but rather was something from which I wanted to disconnect entirely. Pausing gave me enough time to realise that I still loved space, but needed to process the trauma and find a way to reintegrate space into my life in a way that brought me joy again.

What I didn’t know then was how long that recalibration would take, or how much it would change how I think about my career and space exploration in general.

Since writing that 2023 reflection, I’ve spent a lot of time in conversations (publicly and privately) about trauma, harassment in the industry, burnout, career pivots, and what happens when the life you worked toward for as long as you can remember no longer fits the person you’ve become.

I’ve talked with academic scientists in the U.S. navigating careers amidst the assault against science in the country, space industry professionals now questioning the narratives they helped build, women and other marginalised people asking whether the behaviour to which they’re subjected in the industry is worth it to chase their dreams, and people who still deeply love the idea of space exploration but are trying to reconcile that love with concerns around issues like sustainability and human suffering here on Earth. Those conversations have helped to reshape the lens through which I see my own career, and the space sector at large.

I still love Mars. I still care about space missions and the extraordinary effort it takes to do science beyond Earth. But I care just as much about how we do that science — who gets to participate, who gets to dream our futures, what we measure as impact, what we reward and view as success, and what we sacrifice along the way. This isn’t new in terms of themes I’ve written about before, but I do want to write about them more moving forward.

For a long time, my public voice lived on Twitter amidst a vibrant community of scientists and space enthusiasts from around the world. In its heyday, it was an amazing place to be. I still value the many friendships that spurred from Space Twitter. But when that platform imploded and everyone scattered to the four winds of a variety of other apps, it forced me to think beyond simply, “where should I post now?” Combined with reflecting on how I wanted to integrate space back into my life during my micro-retirement, I asked myself, “What kind of presence do I want to have on social media at this stage?” (If any?)

I tried my hand at making a few short-form videos about space on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. While it was fun, I’m not sure it’s the format that resonates with me personally the most in terms of creating content. I also have mixed feelings about a media format that, while able to reach an incredibly broad audience, is also having severe negative impacts on our brains and attention spans. My social media consumption is dominated by long-form YouTube videos, often listened to like podcasts. There’s part of me that keeps thinking of going into the long-format video world since that’s what I like to interact with myself, but in the end, my heart always circles back to writing. It’s what calls to me the most — plus I can do it without having to put on makeup and try to look good on camera. (I’m currently writing this post from the mezzanine of a coffee shop in Waterloo, Ontario in a toque and an oversized VIA Rail hoodie and very much not looking camera-ready.)

So in 2026, I’m choosing to write. I want to write and re-emerge on the social internet to rebuild connection with people who have stayed curious alongside me, and with a version of myself that has recognised she doesn’t need to be in constant career acceleration to feel legitimate or productive. I also hope to connect with new faces: People rethinking their own careers and life trajectories, and those who still feel awe when they look up at the stars and wonder what’s out there. We can’t afford to lose our capacity for wonder, even when life on Earth feels heavy.

I’ve learned that slowing down gives the opportunity for your curiosity to deepen. You get the chance to really observe and ingest the universe around you, and through that define the things that matter to you. Writing has helped me follow my curiosity throughout my life, and through my micro-retirement it also provided a way to work through reprioritizing what mattered. I was a scientist working toward an answer without a hypothesis (yikes!), not knowing what I might find along the journey. This return to writing is a way for me to share what I’m learning as I go, in case it helps others along their way.

If you’ve been here before, thank you for finding your way back and I apprecate you! If you’re new, thank you and welcome! I hope you’ll find some useful thoughts and kindred spirits here.

I’m happy to be writing again.

We didn’t get a white Christmas here in Ottawa, where I’ve been camped out for the last two months as I plan my next destination. But this morning, the end of the year, it is -5°C, and a gentle ephemeral snow is sinking down as I walk to a nearby oatmeal café. A week ago, I scoffed at the idea of a hipster café charging $9 for a bowl of oatmeal—despite most definitely being a hipster myself, sitting here in a toque indoors and adorned with tattoos and piercings on multiple appendages. But then I saw their shelf outside, stacked full of brown paper bags containing bowls of oatmeal free for anyone in need to grab, no questions asked.

I now come here daily, to write.

Sometimes I just get their orange blossom mocha. Others, a small bowl of the $9 oatmeal. Until I have a real income again, the oatmeals shouldn’t be daily….although the more reasonable among us might argue that the daily necessity in this equation shouldn’t be the coffee.

Right before stepping out the door to come here, I listened to author John Green’s annual reposting of his review of the song Auld Lang Syne, from his book The Anthropocene Reviewed. I’ve watched this annually since he started the tradition, and every time I am invariably brought to tears by the time of the final refrain:

We’re here
Because we’re here
Because we’re here
Because we’re here.

Every year, his recounting strikes a different chord, despite the tune of the song remaining the same all these centuries. This year, it came with the recognition that only art has the power to move people to tears in such a way. Data does not. Even feeling a sense of awe from a JWST image, we are drawn to the beauty contained within it—beyond the mere pixels—a beauty architected by a universe we are striving to comprehend. In my 15-year-long (a milestone of 2023) professional career as a scientist whose specialty over that duration has been working on cameras and imagery for rovers and satellites, I have long proclaimed that “images are data!” Among scientists of other varieties, this is not always recognized. To them, data means numbers and charts and graphs, meticulously compiled through repeated experiments and analyses. Images are just pretty pictures. On top of being data, they are also “pretty pictures.” So much more than data. Images hold more power than any graph ever could, to tug at human emotion and motivation at scale.

The tear filled epiphany (well, more like a continued processing of thoughts I’ve had all year) hammered home the notion that I want to focus on the creative. I want to create and communicate in ways that truly matter and resonate with people. And for my own personal fulfillment, that communication isn’t through the pages of academic papers.

Early this year, shortly after I moved from my work-assigned Washington DC to my self-assigned former home of Seattle, I went on a “sabbatical” from space. This was driven by an ongoing traumatic and toxic situation at what had previously been my dream job. I needed time to process, to decide if the space sector was worth my time, energy, and talent anymore. Was it worth the toll on my physical and mental health to try so hard to change a sector that, at its core, doesn’t seem to actually want to change when it comes to being a toxic environment for so many people from historically excluded backgrounds? As more and more people learned why I walked away from my job, more and more reached out with their own stories. While it was heartwarming to not feel alone in my experiences, it was also enraging to see the extent at which this is happening, and the toll it is taking on people from marginalized groups at a range of career stages.

As part of the processing, I stepped away from space entirely for a few months, and largely from digital life as well. It’s part of why I haven’t posted much here on Medium this year. Instead, I reconnected with my longstanding love for film photography, and adopted a daily routine: Grab a film camera from my collection, whichever called to me that day. Wander through the nearby Pike Place Market, early enough that the vendors are there, but the tourists are still asleep. Make my way to Ghost Alley Espresso to chat with Mike, the owner, who was usually the one manning the window in the wee hours of the morning. My visits were so frequent from living only a couple of blocks away, he would give me the Market employee discount. He was observant, would notice if I changed my hair, or when I got a new tattoo. Good characteristics for someone in a customer-facing role. I started to dream of a life working at the coffee window, peeking into the lives of those who made their way down into the alley for their daily dose of caffeine.

One day, while walking down “The Arcade” of the Market on my morning mission, a vendor who had finished setting up quite early pointed at my camera as I approached. “Is that a real camera?” he asked, smiling through a grey beard. He wore a fisherman-style toque and sweater, looking like a decades-old dockworker. Extremely Seattle vibes. I replied yes and handed him the metal hunk of my Nikkormat FTn, no doubt heavy enough to knock out attempted muggers should the need ever arise. We started to talk and I asked him how long he’d been a vendor at the Market. “40 years,” he said. “In 1981, I had the honour of being the first graduate from Purdue’s engineering management program who did not get a job in the field afterward! I decided it wasn’t for me. So I called up my cousin out west here, and he asked if I wanted to come and do woodworking with him. I’ve been here ever since. Meanwhile, my brother who was at Purdue with me, he was in engineering, and went on to work for NASA.” Of course, I had to ask what his brother did for NASA. “He studied fire dynamics for the space station.” This felt like a bit of a sign from the universe, even if I don’t necessarily believe in such things. I told him that I’d recently left a job working in space and was debating leaving the field to focus on more creative endeavours.

“Do it,” he replied, without hesitation. “If you do creative things, you will never regret a day of your life.”

Our conversation continued down roads like what the Market was like during the pandemic, and how the locals came together to try and make sure it survived multiple times over the years—COVID was just the latest of these efforts. The display of community was beautiful. I felt compelled to purchase one of his wood pieces to remember this moment and support his creative efforts. His work consisted of large wooden sculptures, which had been his entire focus pre-pandemic. But as the Market began to reopen with only locals coming through in the early days, he added some smaller items to have lower priced options as well. Jewelry, boxes, and clocks. Many of the pieces were made from exotic varieties of wood from abroad, but only one of the clocks, small enough to fit in my hand, was crafted from wood found along northern end of Vancouver Island. That clock lived on my bedside table for the rest of the 8 months I spent in Seattle. I also asked the man if I could take his portrait with my film camera. He said yes, as long as it didn’t end up on Facebook. I assured him that he would remain in analogue anonymity. (He is not the person in the photo below.)

From that interaction, I decided that I wanted to focus on humans and community in this sabbatical. I wanted to talk to people, hear their stories. This was new to me as an introvert who, outside of a space context, can be somewhat shy. I started asking baristas their names, where they lived, if they were from Seattle. The stories would flow. When I would explain my return to Seattle after a nearly 20-year hiatus, questions would ensue. Seattle has become a place that not many people are originally from anymore. Everyone wanted to know how things had changed, for better or for worse. It’s changed in both ways, making it somewhat hard to distinguish whether I loved Seattle in its current incarnation while I was there, or more the nostalgia of what it used to be that had made me fall in love as a teenager who dreamt of living in the heart of the city, in a condo where I could see the skyline and the water. I made that dream happen during the sabbatical, knowing it would only be temporary, but it at least checked off one of those nostalgic boxes. I focused on the community of my friends, some of whom I hadn’t spent any meaningful amount of time with in person in many years given how rarely I’d returned to Seattle. They in turn expanded my community by introducing me to new friends, new circles with which I hadn’t intersected before. I explored more ties to the queer community, feeling the strong desire to connect more with that part of my identity and finding more of myself in the process.

In another interaction during my break, I got to chatting with one of my Pilates instructors. She was, both physically and personality-wise, the walking embodiment of what you might imagine when you think of a Pilates and yoga instructor. We bonded one day in class when she noticed my “Canadian as Fuck” t-shirt. Turns out she was originally from British Columbia and had moved to Seattle because of her husband’s job. I ended up in her classes multiple days a week, in my efforts to rebuild my physical health after the toll the previous couple of years had taken.

During one of our conversations, she mentioned that she only sets aside time to check her email once every two weeks. In this day and age, the idea of having crafted a life where one could go without checking emails for two weeks sounded like a glorious path.

I remember at one point telling her that perhaps I should become a Pilates instructor, so that I could keep my body moving to combat the symptoms of my ankylosing spondylitis (which gets worse if you don’t move) as I age, and to be able to digitally disconnect more in my professional life. She immediately replied, “You would make a great Pilates instructor! You have a good personality for it.” However, she warned me that teaching classes alone isn’t enough to make a living from. I got the impression that she was aided by being in a dual-income household, providing more financial stability. That’s not a life I will ever lead though, for many personal reasons, so I push such notions out of my thoughts.

All of this dances around the tough question I ask myself: If I’m drawn more and more strongly toward the ideals of creativity, movement, and digitally disconnecting for my happiness, health, and personal fulfillment, why am I simultaneously crafting a new role for myself in the space sector that is the antithesis of my lessons learned during my sabbatical?

The three things I wanted to make sure I took away from that time were:

1. I want to prioritize my health by eating well and exercising daily.
2. I don’t want to live a life of days spent on Zoom.
3. I want to prioritize the people that matter to me.

#1 has completely gone out the window as I transitioned from a stable place to live to a nomadic life to save money and launch a new business. #2 is quickly vanishing in the work required to launch said business. I’ve tried to hold only #3 but it’s not been at the level that it was earlier this year. My exhaustion leads me to neglect messages from friends, sometimes for days (if you have been one of those people, I deeply apologize—it’s not you, it’s definitely me). I find myself now, three months into nomad mode, missing the routines of my time in Seattle. The routine of walking while finding creative inspiration through my camera and through written (or spoken and then transcribed) word, walking until I can barely stand. Walking to the point that the limitation is pain from inadequate footwear rather than my right hip thanks to the skilled surgeon in the summer of 2020 not just giving me back my ability to walk, but gifting me a newfound ability to walk more, farther than I ever could before. This is perhaps now why I feel compelled to wander constantly—it is a novelty, a privilege I have never had, to be so carefree in my ambulatory exploration.

In the back of my mind, I hear the voice of my grandfather, who said after remaining quite active despite a stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis, “If I keep moving, the Grim Reaper can’t catch me.” If I keep moving, I can walk further and further away from my old life, away from the parts of it that no longer serve me. I can walk into the next chapter that has yet to be written. Maybe the core of that chapter is to try and find a way to balance the scientific and the creative, in a way that feels fulfilling on both sides. Despite everything, I still feel compelled to stay in space and try to make it a better environment for those that will come after me, in whatever small way I can. It’s obvious that my heart isn’t done just yet. To keep my heart full though, creativity is also required.

Hopefully that means I will be inspired to post here more often as we enter 2024. Part of me wants to write a book about all of the experiences and life lessons I learned while taking a pause from life. If you’d be interested in reading such a thing, let me know. Even if no one is, I may go through the exercise of writing it for myself. If you’ve stuck around through this essay of a post, and patiently waited in the months while I wrote nothing only to come across this wall of text that doesn’t have much to do with space at all, thank you (and to bring a bit of levity to an emotionally rough post, comment with a spacey emoji to let me know you made it this far!). I appreciate your taking the time to read this, because even if it might not mean all that much to you, it does mean something to me. May the new year bring you peace and clarity in any areas where you might feel you need it in your life, and the strength to keep moving forward.

20 years ago today on on June 10, 2003, NASA’s Spirit rover lifted off from Cape Canaveral and began its 7-month journey to Mars. It left Earth one month before its twin, Opportunity as part of the collective “Mars Exploration Rovers” mission. At that time, only one rover had successfully operated on the surface of Mars*—the microwave-sized Sojourner, which arrived in 1997 onboard the Pathfinder lander. This landing was just months after the arrival of NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft in orbit. Beyond these two missions however, the 1990s/early 2000s weren’t kind to humanity’s attempts to get to the Red Planet.

In 1993, NASA lost contact with the Mars Observer spacecraft just three days before it was set to enter Mars orbit. A failure of the propulsion system is the presumed culprit. Mars Observer was NASA’s first attempt to return to the Red Planet since the Viking missions in the 1970s, making this failure a bit of a gut punch. Russia attempted to send an ambitious mission in 1996 carrying two landers, and two “penetrators” that would plunge into the ground. Alas as was the case for many of Russia’s martian attempts, a failed launch caused Mars 96 to crash back down to Earth. Japan’s Nozomi mission launched in July 1998, but malfunctions in the fuel system left the spacecraft without enough fuel to slow down and enter Mars orbit. Instead, Nozomi went careening past Mars and ended up orbiting the Sun. In December 1998 and January 1999, NASA launched a pair of ill-fated missions: Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander, respectively. Mars Climate Orbiter may perhaps be the most infamous NASA mission ever, lost due to the human error of a metric/imperial unit conversion issue. This led to the spacecraft either burning up in the atmosphere of Mars, or like Nozomi, blazing past Mars into the darkness of space. We’ll likely never know for sure which was the case. Mars Polar Lander is thought to have smashed into the surface due to an engine malfunction during landing. Unfortunately, this occurred as many around the world watched the landing events live. In 2003, the European Space Agency attempted its first Mars landing with Beagle 2, which never contacted Earth after it was deployed from the Mars Express orbiter. From 1990 through 2003, over half of the spacecraft sent to Mars by humans failed in some capacity.

This left a lot hinging on Spirit and Opportunity for NASA. After the failures of Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander, they did successfully get the Mars Odyssey mission into orbit. Today it’s the oldest mission at Mars that is still operating. But they hadn’t managed to make it back to the surface after Pathfinder, which ceased operations back in 1997.

For the first few minutes after Spirit’s anticipated landing time, the folks in mission operations began to worry it had suffered a similar fate as Mars Polar Lander. Engineers stared at their screens anxiously as no signal was detected from the rover. The silence from Mars was only interrupted by engineers stating, “no signal at the moment,” and “standby.”

After 15 excruciating minutes, the rover finally phoned home. It had survived the landing!

Thankfully, not only did both Spirit and Opportunity land successfully—they lasted orders of magnitude beyond their initial planned missions of 90 sols (martian days, which are 37 minutes longer than an Earth day). Opportunity tends to get the bulk of the attention thanks to being the longer-lived of the twin rovers and going out in the strongest dust storm observed on Mars to date, even getting its own feature length film. But Spirit deserves a lot of love for its major contributions to our understanding of the Red Planet in its 2210-sol lifetime on the martian surface. For the 20th anniversary of its launch from Earth, let’s take a look at 5 of those scientific milestones:

1. It’s Getting Hot in Here

A few years into Spirit’s mission, the rover’s right front wheel failed. Undeterred, the clever rover engineers here on Earth devised a solution: Drive the rover backwards. This meant Spirit could still rove, dragging its broken wheel behind it. 1150 sols into its mission, Spirit hit softer ground and the wheel left a little trench in its wake, churning up some previously buried material. Upon closer spectroscopic inspection, scientists identified this material as silica. This was evidence of a past hydrothermal system in the area, with water warmed by volcanic activity below the surface. On Earth, hydrothermal systems are typically teeming with life. Some scientists have even proposed that life began around hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean. Therefore, finding evidence of such an environment on Mars has huge implications for the search for alien life. Perhaps ancient microbes mingled in the waters here 3.5 billion years ago…

2. Neutral Waters

Both Spirit and Opportunity found multiple sites with evidence of past water along their journeys across the surface of Mars. In the case of Spirit, it found a place with signs of the least acidic waters ever found on Mars at that point in time. Using spectral data from the rover, scientists identified magnesium iron carbonate in the rocks at a site called Comanche. Carbonates have long been a mystery on Mars as they aren’t nearly as extensively observed across the surface as scientists expected given its atmospheric composition (almost entirely carbon dioxide) and presumed watery past. The rocks at Comanche contained ten times the concentration of carbonates of any other rocks previously analyzed on the surface. Carbonates form in water, but are easily dissolved by acid. You may have even seen this yourself in science class, where a teacher had you use an eyedropper of vinegar or some other diluted acid to put a few drops on a piece of limestone and watch it fizz. If you tried the same experiment with tap water, the results would be less exciting. This means that if the rocks at Comanche contain high concentrations of carbonates, the liquid water that was present there when the carbonates formed must have had a near-neutral pH—happy conditions for life to thrive. (There are microbes on Earth that thrive in extremely acidic or basic conditions, but the vast majority of life on our planet seems to prefer neutral pH.)

3. An Explosive Past

Mars is positively littered with volcanoes. The most well-known is Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the Solar System, but scattered around it and across other huge swaths of the planet are a retinue of smaller volcanoes. All of them experienced what geologists call “Hawaiian volcanism,” where the lava slowly oozes out of broad, dome-shaped volcanoes like the Hawaiian islands. The more dramatically explosive volcanic eruptions you might think of here on Earth, like Mount St. Helens, come from volcanoes that sit atop tectonic plate boundaries. Mars never had plate tectonics, and so “stratovolcanoes” like Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainier never formed there. But there is one way for Hawaiian-style volcanoes to become explosive: If their hot lava hits water. This is what made the massive Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption in 2022 so destructive. The caldera (crater) of the volcano was underwater at the time of the eruption, causing a huge pressure buildup from the steam created by the lava touching the water. You can see this on a much smaller scale where lava flows in Hawai’i hit the ocean.

These explosions can toss rocks high into the air. When they impact the ground into layers of debris like ash from the eruption, those layers will deform around the rock like dropping a marble into sand. These rocks and the corresponding deformed layers are called “bomb sags.” At a location dubbed Home Plate, Spirit snapped an image of what scientists interpreted to be a bomb sag. Not only does the explosive environment required for bomb sags to form suggest water was present at Home Plate in the past, but the rocks there also contain high amounts of chlorine, which could mean that water was extremely salty.

4. Dust in the Wind

Did you know that Mars has weather? While its atmosphere is less than 1% as thick as Earth’s, it’s enough that it still has quite dynamic weather systems. Its iconically massive dust storms are probably the most well-known, but Mars also has water-ice clouds, snow that never hits the ground, and even dust devils. If you live in a farming area or the desert, you may have seen dust devils in person. They form when the sun heats up the ground to the point that the ground then heats the air immediately above it. You probably know from science class that warm air rises. As that warm air rises, it leaves an area of low pressure that draws in the surrounding cooler air. If there is a lot of loose dust on the surface, it can get picked up by the air moving into the low pressure area, turning into a small spinning whirlwind of dust and debris. Once enough cooler air enters the tiny weather system, the whole thing falls apart and the dust devil disappears. They don’t tend to last more than a few minutes at a time before this happens. You’d think that would mean spotting them on another planet would be exceedingly rare then, right?

Cue Mars and its plethora of dust devils.

Mars has a dust devil season, just like we have seasons for things like monsoons and tornadoes on Earth. And since the martian surface is almost entirely coated with a layer of loose dust, the dust devils can happen almost anywhere—although there are certain areas where they are much more abundant than others. Sometimes from orbit all we catch are the tracks they leave behind, where they’ve cleared away the lighter-toned dust to reveal the darker surface hiding beneath. Sometimes we catch the dust devils themselves. But Spirit was the first mission to actually capture dust devils in motion on the surface, in the series of images animated above. Dust devils have proven to be an unexpected ally to our solar-powered rovers and landers, cleaning the dust off the panels from time to time and giving a power boost to keep the missions going long past their initial warranties!

5. Cracking the Crust

In May 2009, Spirit got stuck in some deep sand. Having overcome hurdles before, engineers tried multiple approaches to extricate the rover. Spirit was still functional—just stuck—so the rover essentially became a lander. Operations shifted to doing stationary science from its sandy spot dubbed “Troy.” In the months of spinning its wheels in attempts to escape, the wheels broke through an inch-thick crust of material and began to churn up what was buried underneath. Analysis of the freshly exposed material revealed it to have the highest concentrations of sulfate minerals observed on Mars at the time. This supported the evidence of a past hydrothermal system in the area, since sulfates are often found in such settings on Earth. And as we mentioned before, this warm water might’ve provided a great environment for life on early Mars.

Saying Goodbye

Unfortunately, many months of attempts by Spirit’s engineers to free the rover from the sands of Troy were unsuccessful. As the dark and frigid martian winter arrived, Spirit’s power levels dwindled with less sunlight reaching its solar panels. Contact was lost on March 22, 2010. The Mars Exploration Rovers mission team didn’t give up, hoping the rover might wake up and phone home as winter gave way to spring. After over an Earth year of silence, NASA officially declared the Spirit mission over on May 24, 2011. By the end of its mission, Spirit lasted nearly 25 times longer and drove nearly 12 times farther than originally planned, snapping over 124,000 images along its epic journey.

One of the proposed landing sites for NASA’s Perseverance rover was at Spirit’s final resting place. The idea was to continue its investigation of the past hydrothermal environment there and implications for ancient life on Mars. In the end, Jezero Crater was chosen as the better scientific target. While the Mars scientist in me fully supported Jezero as the best of the final landing sites we had to chose from, part of me couldn’t help but want to see a “seflie” from Perseverance sitting next to Spirit on Mars. What does Spirit look like now? How have the sands of Mars treated her? What science was left there, undiscovered just beyond its reach?

Maybe someday, we’ll find out.

*Cue the pedants who will argue that the USSR’s Mars 3 rover worked in 1971, long before Sojourner. The rover only transmitted a signal for about 20 seconds before failing and returned no usable data, so in my book I wouldn’t call this a “success.”

For International Women’s Day, I posted a call to action on Twitter for the space sector, since it’s the realm I inhabit:

Dr. Tanya Harrison on Twitter: "For #InternationalWomensDay, my call to action for the space sector is for companies to stop merely talking about diversity+inclusion & wanting to make better work environments for underrepresented folks and *take real action* to make those things happen. / Twitter"

For #InternationalWomensDay, my call to action for the space sector is for companies to stop merely talking about diversity+inclusion & wanting to make better work environments for underrepresented folks and *take real action* to make those things happen.

In the replies, someone asked for ideas on how companies can take actions, which was fantastic to see. Here are five suggestions that can help not only women, but anyone from underrepresented groups, thrive in the workplace:

1. Make sure your leadership teams are diverse, and that there are visible opportunities for career advancement for folks from underrepresented backgrounds. If all of your diversity is in the lower ranks, you still have a problem.
2. Get rid of toxic personalities that drive underrepresented folks out. They will cause you to hemorrhage talent. No one is so “valuable” or “brilliant” that they deserve to be placed on a pedestal and enabled to drive other employees out. Who knows what those folks that were driven out could have achieved for your company?
3. In the space sector, there are programs like the Zed Factor Fellowship, Patti Grace Smith Fellowship, and the Brooke Owens Fellowship, which work with companies to provide internship opportunities for students. Zed Factor focuses on students from any historically excluded backgrounds. Patti Grace Smith places Black students in their first aerospace internships. Brooke Owens is open to women and gender minorities. Does your industry have similar programs? If so, get involved with them. If not, maybe it’s time to get the right people together to create them!
4. If you have people from underrepresented groups within your company telling you there are issues, whatever they might be, listen to them—don’t silence them. Learn from what they’re trying to tell you to create a better environment for everyone. To help with this, companies can create (and importantly, fund) Employee Resource Groups as internal support and advocacy networks. These can be a great way for employees to discuss any hardships they might be facing, suggestions for improvement, and create and host activities that are internal and/or external-facing for educational and promotional purposes.
5. If you are someone in a leadership position, be a true advocate and ally for the employees from underrepresented backgrounds in your company. Your voice will carry weight, and can influence the company culture at large.

Creating supportive environments for women and any other employees from underrepresented backgrounds benefits everyone at the end of the day. But to do so requires more than hashtags and generic corporate statements about wanting to increase diversity and inclusion. Without action, they’re all just words spewed into the ether.

What can you do to influence the culture in your workplace? Do you have any great success stories to share that others can learn from? Share your thoughts in the comments.

January 2004: I was in my sophomore year of college, studying astronomy at the University of Washington. The Sojourner rover had me hooked on the Red Planet from the day it landed in the summer of 1997. The moment that rover took its first drive onto the martian surface, my entire life became focused on the goal of working on Mars missions. Since planets are in space, I figured an astronomy degree would be the right first step.

But that winter morning, I wasn’t buried in a textbook. My attention was wholly transfixed on the television, nervously waiting to see if the Spirit rover was going to successfully land on Mars. In the time since Pathfinder, NASA’s luck hadn’t been going well…they’d lost both the Mars Polar Lander and the Mars Climate Orbiter in rapid succession. If the twin Spirit and Opportunity rovers weren’t successful, it could be the death knell for Mars exploration. Thankfully, both rovers landed within days of each other, and began their planned 3-month expeditions on opposite sides of the planet.

I never would’ve guessed that four years later, I’d be working with those same rovers. And I certainly never would’ve guessed that nearly a decade after that, I would still be working on Opportunity, and even be on shift the day we lost her signal for the last time.

My initial role working with Spirit and Opportunity wasn’t on the rover team, but rather on the operations team for the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This camera monitors the weather on Mars every day to help scientists understand martian weather patterns, as well as keeping an eye out for storms that might impact rovers and landers on the surface. If a dust storm was bearing down on a rover, we had to let the rover operations team know so they could batten down the hatches — well, as much as one can on a robot tens of millions of miles away. In the very first week that I was tasked with providing weather reports for the rover team, a dust storm passed over Spirit, requiring me to issue an alert. This was my first space job straight out of getting my masters degree. It was surreal to think that I was monitoring the weather on another planet so that humans could drive a robot on another planet. The novelty of that never wore off, even after years on the job.

Fast forward to after I’d left that job to get a PhD. Miraculously, while Spirit had been lost the year before I started graduate school round two, Opportunity was still chugging along. I took a job at Arizona State University where part of the role involved getting to be a Payload Downlink Lead for Oppy’s Panchromatic Camera, or “Pancam” for short. These were basically the colour eyes of the rover, snapping photos of the landscape to understand the geologic history of this little piece of Mars to determine whether water was present and conducive for life as we know it to thrive.

Dr. Tanya Harrison on Twitter: "Day 1 of my first real shift as Payload Downlink Lead for Opportunity. The rover snapped some cool images of its wheel tracks in the martian regolith over the weekend. pic.twitter.com/Lw4nI3CMD5 / Twitter"

Day 1 of my first real shift as Payload Downlink Lead for Opportunity. The rover snapped some cool images of its wheel tracks in the martian regolith over the weekend. pic.twitter.com/Lw4nI3CMD5

As a Payload Downlink Lead, my job was to come in each morning and check all of the Pancam images Oppy had sent back from the previous day. At this stage in the mission, the rover was having “amnesia events” where it would essentially forget what you’d commanded it to do, so I’d have to do things like see if all of the images we asked the rover to take were actually taken. If not, we’d have to try again. While it’s exciting because you’re seeing new pieces of Mars every single day, often before any other human on Earth, it does become routine to a degree because the process is the same day after day.

That was until sol 5109, the 5109th martian day of what was originally planned to be a 90-sol mission.

Dr. Tanya Harrison on Twitter: "It's dusty as all heck for Opportunity on #Mars right now. In the span of the last 3 sols, we've lost view of the sun with Pancam. Right is sol 5106, left is 5109 (today). pic.twitter.com/uGXsPYHRjz / Twitter"

It's dusty as all heck for Opportunity on #Mars right now. In the span of the last 3 sols, we've lost view of the sun with Pancam. Right is sol 5106, left is 5109 (today). pic.twitter.com/uGXsPYHRjz

We knew from MARCI that a massive global dust storm had been kicking up. We’d been imaging the sun to keep an eye on how dusty the atmosphere was from the ground. But the rapid change in the span of 3 sols was unprecedented…and shortly after that, we lost contact with Oppy.

The team didn’t give up hope immediately however; they tried for months using every trick up their sleeve to coax even the faintest of signals from the rover. We thought that maybe once the dust storm settled, she’d wake up. No luck. Maybe dust devil season, which had serendipitously cleaned the solar panels year after year to allow the mission to last as long as it had, would come to the rescue again. Alas, if the dust devils did skirt by, it was either too dusty or too late. Oppy never woke up again.

I wrote previously about the night we said goodbye to Oppy so I won’t rehash all of the details here, but in short it was an incredibly emotional experience with a lot of tears all around. Some people in that room had spent literally decades of their life working on developing, building, and operating the rover. It was something we all worked on day after day, to the point where your schedule bent to accommodate this little robotic explorer. It was an extension of us, venturing where we could not.

The new documentary “Good Night Oppy” on Amazon Prime includes footage shot that night, so you can see the emotion for yourself. It also does something that I’m not sure any other space documentary I’ve seen has done so exquisitely: It highlights the human element of robotic space exploration. While it’s easy to anthropomorphize the rovers — which Spirit and Oppy’s “father” of sorts, Steve Squyres, admits in the documentary was a very intentional design choice — the stories of what robots do out in space often feel disconnected from the people working on them. The common question of “why do we waste money on space when there are things to solve here on Earth” is a prime example of this. These missions employ hundreds of people, providing a living for them and their families. They sustain entire industries in science and technology. And they inspire future generations, another aspect that is woven fantastically into the storytelling of “Good Night Oppy.” One person the documentary focuses on is Abigail Fraeman, who as a high school student was able to visit JPL for Oppy’s landing on Mars, and years later ended up becoming the Deputy Project Scientist on that very same rover. It’s a beautiful full-circle story.

While watching the documentary, I didn’t just tear up at the memories of the mission. I cried at the thought that I wasn’t working on missions like this anymore. While I love what I do in my current job in the space industry, it’s a very different path from the Mars mission operations one I was on for over a decade. It felt so strange to watch this experience as something I used to do, while simultaneously seeing many friends and former colleagues on screen who still work on these missions.

And then one of the mission engineers and friend of mine, Doug Ellison, popped on the screen with the quote to the effect of (in case I’m not remembering the exact wording), “You don’t get an adventure like this twice in a lifetime.”

That quote resonated through my entire being.

I realised that even if I did still work on Mars rovers — even if I went back to working on Mars rovers — the experience we all had with Opportunity was truly a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I’m not sure the world is capable of being as enthralled with a mission as they were with Spirit and Oppy throughout their journeys, given how divided our attention spans are now. I don’t see mainstream news coverage of today’s missions at the scale that these twin rovers managed to garner. “Good Night Oppy” even showcases a clip of Steve Squyres appearing on “The Colbert Report” to talk about the rovers. It was a high after years of lows, of NASA reclaiming its status and kicking off the next 20 years of wildly successful Mars exploration.

“Good Night Oppy” is a beautiful homage to a groundbreaking mission, and the hearts and souls of the people that poured themselves into it. Folks that go into space exploration rarely do it out of a casual interest, at least from anyone I’ve ever met. It’s born of a passion to understand our place in the universe, and, to quote a source of inspiration for many of us, to boldly go where no one has gone before. You can feel this passion come through in every interview, every historical clip, every facial expression in this documentary. At the end of the day, none of this exploration happens without the people behind it dreaming up what might be waiting out there in the universe to be known, and then figuring out how to build the things that will help us learn.

And that is truly wondrous.

1. NASA landed its latest rover on Mars—and we all got to see it!

In February, NASA landed the Perseverance rover in Jezero Crater, Mars. Percy is armed with 23 separate cameras, a suite of which were specifically designed to capture the entry, descent, and landing sequence of the rover. Now, this isn’t the first time we’ve gotten a view of a rover landing from the rover itself—Curiosity had its Mars Descent Imager (MARDI), which also sent back a landing video—but this is the first time we’ve had multiple camera angles and full motion video. The result is simply stunning.

2. The UAE and China joined the Martian ranks!

The United Arab Emirates’ Hope orbiter and China’s Tianwen-1 orbiter with a rover named Zhurong also arrived at Mars in February, marking the first interplanetary missions* for both countries. Hope is designed to study Mars’ lower atmosphere, working in tandem with NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN), which arrived at the Red Planet in 2014 and is focused on the upper atmosphere. Tianwen-1 imaged the martian surface for a few weeks before a landing site was selected for Zhurong. The rover touched down in Utopia Planitia in May.

3. A tiny helicopter flew on Mars!

The frigid atmosphere of Mars is as thin as being at 130,000 feet in altitude here on Earth. That’s far beyond the operational range of your typical helicopter or commercial airplane. But with advances in drone technology, could humans create an aircraft capable of flying on Mars? That was the big question until April 19, 2021, when the Ingenuity helicopter conducted its first flight within Jezero Crater as Perseverance kept watch. Since then, Ingenuity has completed nearly 20 successful flights, each one increasing in complexity to put the tech through its paces. Even more impressively, the helicopter weighs in at less than 2 kg and was built using many commercial off-the-shelf parts to keep costs low. Future helicopters like these can be used to help with rover navigation, take high-resolution aerial photos for science, and give us the ability to peer into places inaccessible by the rovers.

4. Starship launched and landed successfully

It took a few explosions, but in May, SN15 became SpaceX’s first successful launch and landing of its prototype Starship in Boca Chica, Texas. This flight was high altitude, but not yet into space—that we will likely see in 2022. These tests are necessary along the path for Starship to carry cargo and crew to the Moon, Mars, and beyond in the future.

5. Juno recorded the sounds of Ganymede!

The Juno mission reached Jupiter in 2016 and has returned a treasure trove of stunning imagery and other valuable scientific data ever since. In June, Juno flew past Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. The Waves instrument onboard recorded the “sounds” as Juno moved from one region of Ganymede’s magnetosphere to another, presented here at a frequency range shifted to the human range of hearing. It sounds like something straight out of a science fiction movie!

6. The first all-civilian crew launched into space aboard Inspiration4!

September 15, 2021 marked the launch of the Inspiration4 mission from Cape Canaveral, carrying onboard the first all-civilian crew to reach Earth orbit. Shift4 founder and CEO Jared Isaacman reached into his own pocket to pay to fly into space with three others, creating a massive fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital along the way. Geologist Dr. Sian Proctor, cancer survivor and Physician’s Assistant Hayley Arceneaux, and aerospace engineer Chris Sembroski soared into the skies with Isaacman, spending 3 days in orbit aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. The Netflix docuseries “Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space” covers the crew and the mission beautifully and is worth checking out if you haven’t already.

7. Two NASA asteroid missions launched!

We’re going to learn a lot about asteroids in the next few years thanks to the Lucy and Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) missions that launched in October and November, respectively. Lucy will be the first mission ever to visit the Trojan asteroids, which hang out both ahead and behind Jupiter in its orbit around the Sun. It will visit a whopping eight different asteroids in its 12-year mission: One in the Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter, and seven Trojans, covering the gamut of the primary asteroid types in our Solar System. These asteroids are relicts from the formation of the planets, and so investigating them tells us about how the Earth and our neighbours formed.

DART meanwhile is a planetary defense mission designed to test technology to help protect Earth from asteroids or comets heading our way. It will visit a binary asteroid system called Didymos, whose course the mission team will try to change. This particular asteroid isn’t a threat to Earth, merely a testbed, but DART is an important step in learning how best to protect our planet. (If you need to know why, watch Don’t Look Up or Armageddon. Or ask why the dinosaurs aren’t around anymore.)

8. Captain Kirk flew into suborbital space!

2021 was a big year for space tourism. Blue Origin launched their first crewed New Shepard suborbital flights—one of which carried Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner. The flight was immediately and obviously impactful to him based on his stream of thoughts voiced upon landing. Virgin Galactic also carried its first fully crewed SpaceShipTwo into suborbital space, and Roscosmos launched a Russian film crew and Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa (creator of Dear Moon) to the International Space Station.

9. NASA touched the Sun!

In mid-December, the Parker Solar Probe became the first spacecraft to fly through the Sun’s corona, the wispy outermost part of its atmosphere. The mission is gathering data on the Sun’s magnetic field and composition to help us better understand its evolution, and stars in the universe at large. The Parker Solar Probe is an incredible feat of engineering, having to withstand extreme radiation and scorching temperatures that close to the Sun. In 2020 it became the fastest human-made object in history, soaring toward the Sun at an astonishing 393,044 km/hour (244,255 mi/hour). To give you a sense of just how fast that is: It’s about the distance from the Earth to the Moon, which was a 3-day journey for the Apollo astronauts.

10. JWST *finally* launched!

Christmas Day 2021 brought about something perhaps some astronomers never thought would happen: The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Dubbed the successor to the long-lived Hubble Space Telescope, JWST will peer back into the earliest days of our universe: 13.6 billion years ago. This is a huge deal, because it’s thought that the universe is only 13.8 billion years old. Imaging this far back in time, and in infrared wavelengths, gives JWST the ability to capture invaluable data on the formation of galaxies, the evolution of exoplanets, and the birth of the universe itself. But the telescope has been plagued by schedule delays and cost overruns, pushing its launch date back almost 15 years past its original date and skyrocketing the budget by a factor of ten. It’s the most complex space telescope ever built. It’s a huge sigh of relief seeing the telescope launch successfully, but the nail-biting isn’t over yet. The journey to its permanent home at Earth’s second Lagrange point (L2) will take about a month. There are also over 300 separate deployments that must take place flawlessly for the telescope to function properly. Let’s all hope that the flawless launch aboard an Ariane 5 rocket is a good sign for the rest of these steps to come.

What were some of the highlights in space that stood out for you in 2021 that didn’t make this list? Let me know in the comments!

This morning, Jeff Bezos’ rocket company Blue Origin launched four people into space, including Star Trek’s own Captain Kirk, William Shatner*. While this flight only lasted mere minutes, the impact on Shatner was abundantly clear as soon as he stepped out of the New Shepard crew capsule after touchdown. Bezos walked up to Shatner and asked how the experience was, to which he replied, “In a way, it’s indescribable.” And as he starts to try to articulate what was most unexpected to him…

…Bezos turns away, interrupting him to pop a bottle of champagne and cheer.

To me, this was such a clear proxy illustration of the disconnect between the idea of the billionaire space race, and what space means to those of us who have chosen it as our life’s passion, our careers.

Shatner waited awkwardly for Bezos and others gathered around the capsule to finish spraying champagne before continuing to describe his experience. The impact was obviously profound: He talked about realizing how thin the dividing line between the comfort of Mother Earth and death in the blackness of space really is.

“I’m so filled with emotion over what just happened,” he said through tears. His thoughts were rambling yet beautiful as he worked to voice them. “I hope I can maintain what I feel now. I don’t want to lose it. It’s…it’s so much larger than me, than life. And it hasn’t got anything to do with little green men, and the blue orb, it doesn’t have anything to do with any of that. It has to do with the enormity, and the quickness, and the suddenness of life and death[…]the vulnerability of everything. It’s so small. This air that’s keeping us alive, it’s thinner than your skin. It’s a sliver. It’s immeasurably small when you think in terms of the universe.”

These words had me and my space friends tearing up. Multiple group chat messages dinged with people expressing their awe of Shatner’s comments. It’s honestly not a reaction I was not expecting to have at this joyride flight for rich folks into space.

But Shatner’s words unintentionally reflect why so many of us working in this sector care about space. Those of us who most certainly aren’t billionaires.

We’re not in this for the money, or the prestige, or for our own personal legacy. It’s about understanding that Earth is unique and precious and we should be doing our damndest to protect it and ensure the survival of life on this planet—and potentially expanding beyond for that long-term survival. Satellites orbiting Earth help us monitor the weather, navigate the world, understand climate change, and even protect human rights. Satellites and rovers on other worlds help us put Earth into context in the universe, highlighting just how amazing our planet and the plethora of life in all forms, surviving in nearly every crevice here, truly is.

Space has also long provided inspiration for people to see a future where humanity works together as a species. When Star Trek premiered in 1966, it presented an audacious future where gender, race, and even poverty were no longer social issues. Shortly after in 1969, the Apollo 11 Moon landing had folks around the world watching humanity take its first steps on another celestial body—something many probably never imagined would happen in their lifetimes. In interviewing people from around the world who watched the Moon landing live on television, or listened to it on the radio, for my book For All Humankind, the consistent message from them all was that they felt like this was a human achievement rather than simply an American one. They didn’t care about the politics of the Space Race. With no ties to the space industry, or even America at all, folks felt like this was a moment in history of which they were a part.

This is the attitude around space we need to reclaim: The true desire to build a better future. The desire to understand, respect, and care for our home planet. We’re all crew members on Spaceship Earth, and as such we should all be personally invested in making sure the ship is running well and its crew is happy and healthy. At its core, that’s what using space to help life on Earth is really about, and why so many of us in the space sector are here. We can’t let the vitriolic narrative around space billionaires overtake this vision. Many of the criticisms around them are valid: They should be paying their fair share of taxes, and they should be treating their employees well, for example. But we need to separate the criticisms of those people and their businesses from the larger ideal of space.

Because these few billionaires don’t represent us.

— — —

*It must be acknowledged that Shatner himself has had a record of problematic behaviour on Twitter and beyond. This post is not intended to be promotion of him personally, but merely an observation of his experience in a larger context.

We’d never sent something this size to land on Mars. We’d never used anything like the Skycrane to land on another world.

This was an audacious mission, and we all knew it.

Thankfully for all of us—and probably for the continued future of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program in general—the Skycrane system worked flawlessly, and Curiosity touched down at its permanent home in Gale Crater on August 5, 2012.

Gale Crater was chosen as the landing site for the rover based on satellite data suggesting the crater may have contained a lake around 3.5 billion years ago. While the water is long gone, its disappearance left behind a plethora of clays, sulfates, and other sedimentary rocks, all containing clues as to the martian environment when the lake was in existence. Curiosity’s mission goal was to look for signs of “habitability”—key things life as we know it would need to survive. Nine [Earth] years into its mission, it has revealed many important insights into the history of Mars. In celebration of its ninth landiversary, here are nine key discoveries from the rover so far:

1. Gale was definitely a lake!

From orbit, many signs pointed to Gale having been a lake in the ancient martian past. It has what appear to be water-carved channels running down its walls to the crater floor. At its centre is a towering mountain over 5 kilometres tall, the bottom chunk of which contains many water-bearing (“hydrated”) minerals. And…well, craters are giant holes in the ground, which is topographically conducive to making a lake. But thanks to chemical analyses by instruments aboard Curiosity such as its rock-zapping laser ChemCam and Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APSX), we have confirmation on the ground that the rocks inside Gale interacted with water. Not only that: The water was neutral to slightly alkaline pH, which is a good happy medium for life. This is in contrast to what we saw with the Opportunity rover on the other side of Mars at Meridiani Planum, where acidic groundwater flowed through the rocks. While there are microbes that thrive in acidic mine drainage on Earth, it’s not the best place for a large, diverse ecosystem.

It’s not clear whether Gale hosted one long-lived lake, or a series of slightly less long-lived lakes interspersed with dry spells, but we do know the water stuck around for quite awhile to have left behind everything it did—potentially millions of years.

Confirmation of controversial methane detections

The story of martian methane has been a tumultuous one that I’ve written about before in detail. To summarize, we had controversial detections of methane before from both Earth-based telescopes and the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft at Mars. Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument finally put these arguments to rest by making the first measurements of methane from the martian surface. The presence of methane is significant because on Earth, methane has two main sources: biological and geological. Certain types of bacteria produce methane as a waste product, so this would be huge if Mars had such bacteria hiding underground! Alas, the more likely explanation is geological—but in a way that is still important. The most common geologic process that generates methane involves rocks interacting with water via a mechanism called serpentinization. This means there may be liquid water interacting with rocks deep within Mars, belching out methane at regular intervals.

Going organic

Organic material—stuff that contains carbon—is a critical building block for us carbon-based life forms. We’ve spotted such material in asteroids, comets, and even martian meteorites, suggesting that perhaps the key ingredients for life on Earth were seeded from space. But the martian surface today isn’t a hospitable place for organic material to persist. The harsh radiation environment due to the lack of a protective magnetic field breaks down organic molecules, so Curiosity had to start drilling. In four different mudstone samples analyzed by the SAM instrument, it found organic material hiding within a mere 5 centimetres of the surface! It’s important to note that organic material does not mean this stuff was produced by or left behind by life. It does however add another check to the list of things that could have made Mars habitable in the past.

Manganese

The current martian atmosphere contains less than 1% oxygen. In the distant past however, when the atmosphere was thicker, it may have contained significantly more oxygen. Using its ChemCam laser again, Curiosity detected high concentrations of the element manganese in some of the layers of sedimentary rocks in Gale, locked up in a mineral called manganese oxide. For this mineral to form, it needs a “highly oxidizing” environment—a lot of oxygen hanging around. On Earth, manganese oxide is an important marker in the geologic history of our planet: It marks the transition from the oxygen-poor atmosphere of early Earth before plants became abundant to the oxygen-rich atmosphere that keeps us alive. So, for manganese oxide to exist on Mars, there must have been a lot more oxygen in the atmosphere at some point before declining to current levels. Most life really likes oxygen, so this discovery has important implications for Mars’ past habitability.

Boron

This is another discovery where ChemCam is stealing the show (and really, who’s surprised, it’s a freakin’ laser). In addition to manganese, ChemCam also detected boron in some of the rocks of Mount Sharp. The boron is concentrated in veins cutting through the sedimentary rock layers where water flowed through cracks. Boron is thought to play an important role in the formation of ribonucleic acid (RNA), particularly in the presence of water, so this is another big check mark for the potential for life on ancient Mars.

Radiation isn’t a necessarily a dealbreaker

Earth’s magnetic field protects us from a lot of harsh radiation from space. Mars on the other hand lacks a strong magnetic field, and so whether the surface conditions would be safe for humans in terms of radiation exposure is a major concern. Curiosity’s Radiation Detector (RAD) instrument measures radiation levels over time. RAD saw average levels of 0.64 millisieverts per day—although this level does vary during events like solar flares, which shoot out a lot of dangerous high energy particles. The total estimated radiation exposure for astronauts on the round-trip to Mars plus a 500-day stay on the surface to wait for Mars to get back to a good spot in its orbit for the return trip is ~1.01 sieverts based on RAD’s measurements. For comparison, the European Space Agency, Canadian Space Agency, and Roscosmos have a lifetime exposure limits for their astronauts of 1 sievert. NASA’s limits currently depend on the age of the astronaut, but they are evaluating setting a limit of 600 millisieverts for everyone. The European/Canadian/Russian levels correspond to a 5% increase in overall cancer risk, while the NASA levels correspond to 3%. Would you take a trip to Mars with a 5% increased risk of getting cancer? I’d say those are odds I’d take. Heck, maybe you’d have a corresponding decrease in cancer susceptibility from getting a break from being exposed to a lot of the crud here on Earth that can cause health problems, like inhaling polluted air. (Disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor.)

Secrets in the sand

Sand dunes form when wind blows loose sand around, giving it distinctive shapes depending on factors like the prevailing wind direction. They are common on Earth and Mars. Since we understand how they form on Earth and the wind conditions required for different shapes, we can make a good guess as to the past atmospheric conditions on Mars needed to form dunes based on their shape. However, the Bagnold Dunes inside Gale Crater threw a curveball: Weird, medium-sized ripples that we don’t see on Earthly dunes. These ripples are small enough that they couldn’t be spotted from orbit, even with the amazing HiRISE camera—they were revealed by images on the ground from Curiosity. When we don’t have a good “terrestrial analogue” for a feature we see on Mars, then the scientific detective work begins. Scientists investigating the ripples hypothesize that these might actually record the thinning of Mars’ atmosphere. As the atmosphere thinned, the size of the sand grains that it could blow around got smaller and smaller. These ripples may have therefore formed from the power of the wind weakening, pushing smaller loose sand atop the larger, older dunes.

Rough Terrain

One unexpected science (err, engineering?) experiment for Curiosity within Gale Crater was the test of toughness when it came to its wheels. All of the previous landing sites on Mars are relatively broad, smooth areas because we used airbag landing systems that required a lot of space to bounce around safely before coming to a stop. Thanks to the advent of the Skycrane, Curiosity was able to land in a much more ambitious location than any previous Mars rover or lander. But the rocks on the floor of Gale Crater turned out to be much harsher on the thin aluminum wheels of the rover than expected, punching multiple holes in them. The holes are mostly a cosmetic issue at this point and don’t impact the rover’s ability to drive, but the engineers monitor them regularly to keep an eye out for structural damage that could compromise wheel functionality. Luckily, the rover has six wheels, and can still function if a wheel fails. Both Spirit and Opportunity had wheel issues as they aged, with Spirit eventually being driven backwards to work around a wonky wheel. Based on the wheel experience with Curiosity, its successor Perseverance got an upgrade to its wheel system, with a beefier structure made of titanium rather than aluminum. Time will tell how well this upgrade fares over in Jezero Crater.

Ground truth data is important

A common theme across all of these is the emphasis that ground truth data is critical. While some observations we made from orbit were quickly confirmed on the ground with data from Curiosity, some things like the Bagnold Dune ripples, the maganese oxide, and boron veins just can’t be seen from orbit with our current technology. There were also places where interpretations from orbit turned out to be not quite right. A region initially dubbed “hematite ridge” (and later named Vera Rubin Ridge) based on what looked like high concentrations of hematite relative to the surrounding layers from orbit turned out on the ground to not have much higher hematite concentrations than the rock layers below it. Another area where some folks hypothesized that dark rocks were some kind of lava flow turned out on the ground to be a mudstone formed in Gale’s ancient lake.

Satellite data is essential for understanding Gale Crater at large and its context in the history of Mars. It’s what was used to determine that it was the best place to land Curiosity, and largely what is used to figure out where to send the rover on the ground for its science investigations. It paints the broad strokes. But the data on the ground from Curiosity fills in the small details to help us paint the entire picture of what happened in Gale Crater to make it what we see today.

What is your favourite thing about the Curiosity rover and its mission on the Red Planet? Let me know in the comments below!

And if you’re on the fence about whether getting a Ph.D. is right for you in the first place, check out this other article.

1. Find an advisor who is a good fit for you

In the world of research, we’re taught to dream of studying at prestigious universities under big-name professors. While that may look good on your resume at first glance, it might not necessarily be the best experience for you. There are three big things to consider when looking for the right advisor:

(A) Advising style: How a professor advises their students can play a huge role in your Ph.D. experience. If you are the kind of person who is an independent worker and doesn’t feel like they need to be checked up on much, then an advisor who leans toward a more hands-off style is probably less likely to annoy or frustrate you. Conversely, if you want to meet with your advisor on a regular basis and get a lot of help and mentorship from them along the way, then you’ll want someone with a more hands-on advising style. Some professors—especially big-name folks running large lab groups—can be so busy or have so many students that they just simply don’t have a lot of time to devote individual attention to them all. A good way to learn what style a certain advisor has is to reach out to their current or former students and ask. It’s also a good idea to reach out to current/former students to learn about their experience with the professor in general to see if they would or would not recommend them. They can also tell you about any red flags, like if the professor has a history of harassment or treats gender minorities, people of colour, women, etc., poorly, which are all signs to look elsewhere for an advisor.

(B) Research focus: Find a professor that is working on projects that are well-aligned with your long-term career goals. A great way to go about this is to scour the literature of the fields that interest you. See whose names pop up as authors on papers on topics that you find intriguing. Want to work on space missions? Look into who the principal investigators, co-investigators, and/or collaborators on instruments aboard the space missions that interest you. Getting involved with missions early in the game can give you an opportunity to become an established figure on that mission and the celestial body on which the mission focuses down the line. This is extremely beneficial if you plan to stay on the academic track and want to apply for roles like a Participating Scientist on missions, or propose your own instrument/mission someday.

Once you find people you’re interested in working with, reach out to those folks and see if they’re taking on students (see C below). If they are, don’t be afraid to ask for a Zoom coffee chat—now that we’re all used to that sort of thing these days—to see if you seem like a good match in terms of both research and personality (going back to A above). In a Ph.D. student/advisor relationship, you’re committing to working very closely together for years, so it’s worth the legwork up front to make sure it’s a good match as much as you can.

(C) Funding: This is an important one. A professor could think you’re the best student in the world, but if they don’t have funding to take on students in the semester you’re looking to start graduate school, then there might be nothing they can do. So sometimes it’s not you, it’s them. If it’s someone that you are truly set on working with, see if there are teaching assistantship options available in their department. Alternatively, you might plan your graduate school entrance timeline around their funding situation if they’ll have grant funding flowing in at some point in the near future. If you choose that option however, make sure the funding has been secured on the professor’s side. The last thing you want is to plan around a hopeful grant that has been submitted, only to find out later that it was not successfully funded and the professor can’t take you on as a student after all.

2. Create a support network

Pursuing a Ph.D. will have stressful times even with the best of advisors. Balancing coursework, research, and teaching (if that is part of your duties) can be a struggle. You’ll have late nights. You might cry from time to time. You’ll want to vent. This is where creating a network with other graduate students will be critical. You can help each other through the tough times when you become disillusioned with some aspect of your research, frustrated with your advisor, or feeling like you can’t cut it. But it’s hopefully not all terrible and you can also share in the glow of the good times like when you pass your comprehensive exam, or get a paper published, or rock your first conference talk! Some of these students will also later become your professional colleagues, so forging these relationships can have long-term career benefits as well from a networking sense. I still talk to many of the folks from my former Ph.D. lab group, and have co-authored papers, scientific proposals, and even a book, with some of them! They are truly friends and colleagues to this day, even years later.

Social media has also become a great place to connect with other graduate students and share experiences. #AcademicTwitter is a hashtag worth following on Twitter if you need a space to vent, or need to ping a large community for a sanity check on whether something you’re going through is typical/appropriate/etc. or not—and what you can do if it’s not.

3. TAKE YOUR TIME

This was a piece of advice I received from a professional mentor that, looking back, I wish I had heeded myself. It can be easy to want to just hurry up and graduate so you can move on with your career (and get a real salary so you’re not so broke anymore!). But your Ph.D. is likely the last time in your entire life that you will get to pursue pure knowledge. The time you get to spend entirely on research after graduating drops rapidly even if you’re on the academic track, with many professors having to spend huge amounts of their time on teaching, grant writing, and administrative/management responsibilities. I was shocked at how quickly even in my post-doc, my only time for “research” was through the students I was advising—I had very little time to delve into research myself anymore, and that was a little heartbreaking. If you go into industry, the chances at doing pure research in your job are even smaller.

Graduate school also tends to provide schedule flexibility in a way that you’re unlikely to ever see again in your life. Sure, sometimes that “flexibility” may mean toiling away in a lab until late at night getting some precious time on the microprobe, or pounding coffee and energy drinks to write your thesis in the wee hours of the morning. But I can unequivocally say I have far less free time to pursue the things I loved outside of my research now that I have a full-time job than I did when I was a graduate student. I certainly saw friends more often, socialized more, and had some pretty fantastic adventures along the way with things like planetary science field school, analogue missions, and conference trips.

This flexibility leads to a related tip: Allow yourself to take breaks. You don’t have to work on your thesis 24/7. It is okay to give yourself weekends, and to have hobbies and activities beyond your work. Rather than working yourself to the bone, try to figure out what time management skills and productivity tricks work for you. Giving yourself time to relax and recharge will ultimately make you more productive in the long run because you’re not constantly running on fumes.

Many students have asked me about whether they should take a gap semester, or a gap year, to take an internship opportunity as undergraduates. If your university allows this option, then I say 100% yes, seize that opportunity! At the end of the day, delaying your graduation by a semester or a year won’t cause anyone to bat an eye. Having that internship on your resume will also bolster your CV compared to students with no real world, hands-on experience in their desired field. It could also help you hone in on what you might want to focus on for your thesis research, and give you some great networking opportunities.

So take your time and enjoy the ride. This is a time in your life that will never come again. You don’t need to be in a hurry to launch your career to the Moon—because the journey there will still be pretty damn special.

The small wooden bookshelf in Matias’ room housed a collection of science fiction classics, including Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein. Contained within their pages were the blueprints for a child’s dreams of space travel. For most of human history, this was the only way space travel happened, in the imaginations of writers and on the page.

But dreams of humans travelling into space didn’t stay on the pages of fiction. For Matias in particular, they became a reality within just eleven years of his time on Earth.

In the 1960s, Matias watched the events of the Space Race closely. He followed along with the accomplishments of NASA’s Mercury and Gemini programs. Reading about imaginary astronauts was replaced with the real deal. He felt a connection, as if these astronauts were going to space for him — and for everyone else on Earth. It felt as if they went up so that the rest of us down below could join them vicariously. Through the astronaut’s descriptions of what it felt like to be in space, and the footage on the nightly news, everyone got to go along on the journey.

Matias was much more aware of the happenings in space than most children his age, and indeed perhaps more than many adults in the small village of Santa Cecilia Tepetlapa, a town of about 1000 people on the southern outskirts of Mexico City. From here, much of what he managed to glean about the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union came through the radio. More tangibly, updates on the latest missions and which country had beaten which in each milestone were regularly splashed across the front pages of the local newspapers.

Mexicans like Matias felt strong ties to U.S. space efforts. Their neighbors were no different from them except that the Americans lived north of the Río Bravo (known as the Rio Grande in the U.S.) and Mexicans lived to the south. To Mattias, they lived similar lives, ones that were relatable to each other. The Soviet Union on the other hand seemed vastly different. Living under an authoritarian regime, Russia was portrayed in the western media as an enemy that had to be defeated for the sake of democracy and freedom. Aided by American news media, that image permeated into Mexico.

At the same time, while reading science fiction novels and browsing the newspapers however, Matias paid little attention to where any of the satellites or space explorers were from. Ideological and national identity were far from his mind. All of the incremental achievements in spaceflight were human achievements, neither “American” nor “Russian.” And as events escalated toward humans landing on the Moon, the excitement took over. Regardless of who made it to the Moon first, it would be a key moment in human history.

***

Television access was limited in Santa Cecilia Tepetlapa in 1969. There was only one television in the entire village — coincidentally, in Matias’ household. But the television schedule was restricted, with shows only airing between 6PM and 10PM. If you were to turn on the TV at any other point in the day or night, you’d be greeted with the sight of static.

In the days leading up to the landing, feelings of both nervousness and anticipation began to pulse through the village. The perception that this would be a momentous not just for the Americans, but for humanity in general, was widespread.

On the evening of July 21, 1969, watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin taking their first steps on the surface of the Moon on television, it never occured to Matias that he wasn’t watching it in real time. The restricted television schedule meant his experience was delayed by hours. But this didn’t lessen the impact in any way. In his mind, he was on the Moon with Neil and Buzz, surrounded by the magnificent desolation described upon Aldrin’s first view of the Lunar landscape. It wasn’t just the two astronauts that had made it to the Moon to take it all in at that moment — Matias, and everyone else back on Earth, was joining them.

As well as one big communal adventure, it also felt to Matias like the marker of an epoch of accomplishment. Even at his young age, he recognized that this was a moment that would divide history books of the future between before and after. For humanity, 1969 would always be the point distinguishing pre-lunar and post-lunar landing.

The Moon had suddenly become within reach, a part of our horizon. The Solar System itself now felt a bit smaller. Human ingenuity had conquered the distance between Earth and the Moon — nearly 400,000 kilometers worth of science and engineering at work. From there, we could continue onward to wherever we put our minds.

Excitement and enthusiasm for Apollo 11 and the Moon did not wane quickly in Santa Cecilia Tepetlapa. Adults spoke of the event, filled with happiness, for years. Matias was able to relieve the mission over and over again through the photographs printed in newspapers. Children built toy rockets out of anything they could find. While more privileged children had access to fancy packaged models, the lack of toy stores in Santa Cecilia Tepetlapa meant Matias and his friends used milk cartons and pieces of wood hastily painted white to match the Saturn V. Their analogue for the Moon on which to land their rockets? Small rocks on the street — because large boulders would be too simple a task in their eyes!

Class projects in school also revolved around Apollo and the Moon for quite awhile after the landing, spanning lunar geography to the history of missions humans had sent there so far. Many newspapers with articles and photos covering Apollo 11 were sacrificed to create posters and dioramas. The municipal government even teamed up with a Mexican colored pencil manufacturer to host an art competition for kids. Matias won first place with his drawing of the Eagle lander on the surface of the Moon with the Columbia module overhead. The prize: A huge set of colored pencils so Matias could keep illustrating his dreams. His love of spaceflight was firmly entrenched, and before he knew it, Apollo would find its way into his life.

Despite being self-trained and self-educated, Matias’ father worked with the Mexican Space Agency developing solid rocket fuels. It was an amazing time of innovation and opportunity. As the Apollo program continued, Matias’ father secured a job at the Guaymas-Empalme ground station, operated by the Mexican Space Agency, in support of the later Apollo missions. This ground station, along with others in the U.S., Nigeria, Kiribati, Bermuda, Australia, and the Canary Islands, were used during the Mercury and Gemini programs, reflecting the truly global effort behind Apollo. Through this, Mexico played its own key role in the Space Race, and connected millions of Mexicans, like Matias, personally to the Moon.

***

Walking along the Camino de Santiago — a Catholic ritual built upon an even older Pagan ritual dating back centuries — might seem like the farthest thing from humans walking on the Moon. The pilgrimage across southwestern Europe consists of a number of different routes, all leading to Compostela, or the “Field of the Star.” In Catholic tradition, the nearly 1,000-year-old Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela is the burial site of Saint Santiago. In English, he is known as Saint James, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ and the patron saint of Spain. The cathedral spires tower over the surrounding buildings of the city, a dramatic amalgam of architectural styles spanning hundreds of years of construction and additions. Undoubtedly it is a stunning sight for pilgrims to set their eyes on at the end of their long trek to this sacred place.

As an adult, Matias decided it was time to make his journey. He chose to travel along the Camino del Norte route, one of the lesser travelled paths to Compostela. It stretches over 800 kilometers from the border of France and Spain along the Bay of Biscay toward the coast at the Atlantic Ocean. Pathways transition from dirt to stone, weaving among rolling hills, pastoral fields, and villages dating back hundreds of years. Churches and albergues (hostels) await the pilgrims along their journey, acting as waypoints along the path.

But for a space enthusiast like Matias, perhaps the most striking feature of this particular path for the pilgrimage is its alignment. At night, in the darkness away from heavily populated areas, the Milky Way streams along the sky immediately over the trail, leading travellers to their destination. The pilgrims on the Camino del Norte are quite literally guided by the galaxy to the Field of the Star.

This was something Matias’ adventure shared with the Apollo program. As advanced as the guidance computer onboard Apollo was in the 1960s, the mission still relied on star charts for navigation. These charts are essentially maps of the sky. Since the stars don’t change position over the course of a short mission, they can be used as guidance, just as sailors on Earth had done for thousands of years. Seemingly, wherever humans venture, the stars are there to help guide our way. Appropriately, Matias set out on his journey with a backpack adorned with a patch of the NASA logo and an Apollo 11 mission patch. He too was following the stars.

The pilgrimage was nothing short of epic. Walking over 800 kilometers over the span of a month to reach his destination, he accomplished a goal of which he had dreamt for years. Requiring 5 hours or more of walking per day every day is no small task on the human body, especially given the unpredictable conditions of the Galician coast. Morning fog could part to reveal the sun, or thicken to result in torrential downpours. To Matias, these were all just part of the experience.

This was, in some ways, Matias’ own Moonshot. Some aspects of the journey were tests of endurance, others rewards for embarking upon such an effort in the first place. More than an accomplishment, the pilgrimage was its own reward, providing a spiritual retreat from modern life and allowing for reflection, meditation, and mental serenity. For Matias, this was all encapsulated in one deeply humbling feeling: Walking beneath the glow of the Milky Way, along the path so many had done before him for so many centuries. From here he couldn’t help but feel anything other than that he was just one small piece of an expansive universe.

***

NASA had made the Moon landing look so flawless, so simple, that Matias expected humanity’s steps beyond the Moon to happen quickly. Sadly, there was a feeling of stagnation after the Apollo program ended in 1972. Infrastructure supporting the Apollo missions at the Guaymas-Empalme ground station where his father had worked were decommissioned after Apollo 13. When the entire program came to an end after Apollo 17, he, like many, was left wondering when humans would return to the Moon. The years went by and while humans continued to send robotic emissaries to the Moon and Mars, no human set foot on another celestial body after Astronaut Eugene Cernan on December 15, 1972 left humanity’s final bootprints on the Moon.

Matias followed in the footsteps of his father, and who eventually became an economist. With the expertise of his own profession, he understands as well as anyone just how much of a challenge space travel is, whether it be engineering or, in the case of Apollo, economic. However, despite the slow down in human exploration, he never lost his love for the space program. Matias’ own enthusiasm for aerospace was passed along to his son, who is now an airline pilot with a deep love of space.

Sitting in his living room in Mexico City, reminiscing upon the Moon landing with his pilot son Saúl at his side, Matias thinks back on that era of bravado and accomplishment. “How adventurous we all are,” he says, in Spanish, with a smile. The Moon landing was a singular moment in history that managed to bring the entire world together in a moment of hope, of camaraderie, of dreams for the future. This feeling is reflected in many of the goodwill messages etched into the disc left on the Moon by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

It can be heartbreaking to think that this feeling didn’t last for much of Earth’s population. Matias sometimes wonders: What catalyst will be required to spur that feeling again, in a way that is sustained? What lesson should we learn fifty years after Apollo? “I hope that society will act more reasonably, and that we’ll be able to better use our limited resources here on Earth.”

This reflection was a common one in the aftermath of Apollo. Two of the most famous images of the entire program are not even of the Moon, but of Earth. Taken during Apollo 8, “Earthrise,” with the Earth juxtaposed to the barren Moon in the foreground, was a wake-up call to humanity. Our planet was a paradise we needed to protect. A few missions later, Apollo 17’s “Blue Marble” photograph of Earth would become an icon of the growing environmental movement in America and around the world. Alone in the photograph, against the darkness of space, Earth was a blue and green spaceship. It was another wake-up call. If humans want to survive, we had better get our ship in order. If the desolate photographs of the surface of the Moon taught us anything, it is how precious Earth is, and how lucky we are to have this hospitable place to call home.

All emotions considered, Matias always recalls the influence of Apollo with laughter and smiles, sharing it with his son, who reciprocated his father’s smiles and laughter. Like many of the Apollo generation, Matias feels gratitude at being able to share his memories of these great adventures with the world, and with his son. “In Spanish, we have a saying — Recordar es vivir. To remember is to live. Thank you for letting me relive this.”

Did you watch or listen to the Apollo 11 Moon landing live as it happened? If so, share your story in the comments below!