The Marshall Star for November 1, 2023

19 Min Read

The Marshall Star for November 1, 2023

NASA, AAS Talk Present, Future of Space Exploration During 3-Day Symposium

By Jessica Barnett

Hundreds of students, scientists, and other stakeholders recently gathered for a three-day symposium featuring some of the leading minds in space exploration and packed with updates and discussions about an array of space topics.

The 2023 von Braun Space Exploration Symposium was held Oct. 25–27 at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and featured 10 panel discussions with additional keynote and luncheon speakers, networking opportunities, and award presentations. This year’s theme was “Advancing Space: From LEO to Lunar and Beyond.”

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center partnered with the American Astronautical Society to organize the event, along with the National Space Club of Huntsville and UAH. Marshall Acting Center Director Joseph Pelfrey, who helped kick off the symposium and moderated one of its panels, called it a true success.

“I want to thank everyone from Marshall, AAS, UAH, and the NSC for all their hard work planning the event,” Pelfrey said. “I enjoyed networking with our private, academic and government partners.”

Attendees could listen to the symposium live in person at UAH’s Charger Union Theater or online via Zoom. The event lineup included more than 60 speakers who shared their insights on recent space exploration achievements, future objectives, career opportunities, and more.

“It was especially motivating to see all the engaged students who represent the Artemis Generation,” Pelfrey said. “I feel confident they will continue building on the strong foundation of space exploration we have laid out for them, leading the way for generations to come.”

NASA and AAS will team up for another three-day event early next year. Learn more about the 61st annual Goddard Space Sciences Symposium, currently planned for March 20–22, 2024, in College Park, Maryland.

Barnett, a Media Fusion employee, supports the Marshall Office of Communications.

Marshall Exhibits Inspire Thousands of Youths at STEAMfest

By Celine Smith

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the Huntsville Science Festival collaborated to bring thousands to the 3rd Annual STEAMfest (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics Festival), an event created to engage students of all ages in the world of science, technology, and art.

The event was hosted in downtown Huntsville at the Von Braun Center’s East Hall on Oct. 28.

Marshall played a key role in the event by providing information and exhibits about STEAM in the space industry. Organizations such as Technology Demonstration Missions, SERVIR, the Human Landing System, SLS (Space Launch System), and the Science & Technology Forum participated in the event to inform people about their functions and importance at NASA.

Before anyone entered the East Hall, they encountered an RS-25 engine placed in the parking lot. NASA was the first booth upon entry, housing informational brochures about rockets the Chandra Observatory, the Artemis missions, and more. The NASA booth featured free stickers and interactive booklets for kids teaching how to draw the SLS, as well as inflatables for photo opportunities.

“From the very beginning NASA has been an incredible partner,” said Joe Iacuzzo, founder and director of the Huntsville Science Festival, which is associated with the SFA (Science Festival Alliance). “Without NASA’s participation and incredible generosity this event would be nowhere near what it is today,”

STEAMfest is a national event started by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s SFA (Science Festival Alliance) with the goal to provide a free event for children to learn and be inspired to pursue an education and career in the world of science.

“The first STEAMfest in Huntsville took place online in 2020, garnering 4,500 virtual attendees,” Iacuzzo said. “Last year, we had 7,300 people attend, and this year we’re anticipating the same amount if not more.”

To inform and invite the public, STEAMfest interacts with about 35,000 people in Huntsville through schools, companies, and non-profits also striving toward the goal of encouraging young people to pursue STEAM. Their mission is to encourage underserved students who have not thought of pursuing a technological degree and career.

STEAMfest featured three science stage entertainers, who demonstrated exciting science experiments such as using an artificial lightning generating device to pop hydrogen-filled balloons creating fireballs in mid-air. An art installation inspired by science and technology was there for viewing. Two professors from UAH (University of Alabama in Huntsville) performed and discussed the music made with synthesizers they built and Dr. Scott Persons, a dinosaur paleontologist, brought fossils for viewing and learning.

Several secondary schools and institutions of higher learning provided details about their STEAM-based opportunities and programs. Other federal agencies and industry members also shared information about STEAM careers. “If STEAM doesn’t reach the kids, then kids won’t reach for STEAM,” said Gayla Suddarth, who serves as a Huntsville Science Festival member and director for Tennessee Valley’s chapter of Women in Defense.

Smith, a Media Fusion employee, supports Marshall’s Office of Communications.

IXPE Untangles Theories Surrounding Historic Supernova Remnant

By Rick Smith

NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) telescope has captured the first polarized X-ray imagery of the supernova remnant SN 1006, expanding scientists’ understanding of the relationship between magnetic fields and the flow of high-energy particles from exploding stars.

“Magnetic fields are extremely difficult to measure, but IXPE provides an efficient way for us to probe them,” said Dr. Ping Zhou, an astrophysicist at Nanjing University in Jiangsu, China, and lead author of a new paper on the findings, published Oct. 27 in The Astrophysical Journal. “Now we can see that SN 1006’s magnetic fields are turbulent, but also present an organized direction.”

Situated some 6,500 light-years from Earth in the Lupus constellation, SN 1006 is all that remains after a titanic explosion, which occurred either when two white dwarfs merged or when a white dwarf pulled too much mass from a companion star. Initially spotted in spring of 1006 CE by observers across China, Japan, Europe, and the Middle East, its light was visible to the naked eye for at least three years. Modern astronomers still consider it the brightest stellar event in recorded history.

Since modern observation began, researchers have identified the remnant’s strange double structure, markedly different from other, rounded supernova remnants. It also has bright “limbs” or edges identifiable in the X-ray and gamma-ray bands.

“Close-proximity, X-ray-bright supernova remnants such as SN 1006 are ideally suited to IXPE measurements, given IXPE’s combination of X-ray polarization sensitivity with the capability to resolve the emission regions spatially,” said Douglas Swartz, a Universities Space Research Association researcher at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. “This integrated capability is essential to localizing cosmic-ray acceleration sites.”

Previous X-ray observations of SN 1006 offered the first evidence that supernova remnants can radically accelerate electrons, and helped identify rapidly expanding nebulae around exploded stars as a birthplace for highly energetic cosmic rays, which can travel at nearly the speed of the light.

Scientists surmised that SN 1006’s unique structure is tied to the orientation of its magnetic field. They theorized that supernova blast waves in its northeast and southwest sectors move in the direction aligned with the magnetic field, and more efficiently accelerate high-energy particles.

IXPE’s new findings helped validate and clarify those theories, said paper coauthor Dr. Yi-Jung Yang, a high-energy astrophysicist at the University of Hong Kong.

“The polarization properties obtained from our spectral-polarimetric analysis align remarkably well with outcomes from other methods and X-ray observatories,” Yang said.

For the first time, we can map the magnetic field structures of supernova remnants at higher energies with enhanced detail and accuracy – enabling us to better understand the processes driving the acceleration of these particles.

Dr. Yi-Jung Yang

High-energy astrophysicist at the University of Hong Kong

Researchers say the results demonstrate a connection between the magnetic fields and the remnant’s high-energy particle outflow. The magnetic fields in SN 1006’s shell are somewhat disorganized, per IXPE’s findings, yet still have a preferred orientation. As the shock wave from the original explosion passes through the surrounding gas, the magnetic fields become aligned with the shock wave’s motion. Charged particles are trapped by the magnetic fields around the original point of the blast, where they quickly receive bursts of acceleration. These speeding high-energy particles, in turn, transfer energy to keep the magnetic fields strong and turbulent.

IXPE has observed three supernova remnants – Cassiopeia A, Tycho, and now SN 1006 – since launching in December 2021. Its findings have helped scientists develop a more comprehensive understanding of the origin and processes of the magnetic fields surrounding these phenomena.

IXPE is a collaboration between NASA and the Italian Space Agency with partners and science collaborators in 12 countries. IXPE is led by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Spacecraft operations are jointly managed by Ball Aerospace in Broomfield, Colorado, and the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder.

Smith, a Manufacturing Technical Solutions employee, supports the Marshall Office of Communications.

NASA X-ray Telescopes Reveal the ‘Bones’ of a Ghostly Cosmic Hand

Rotating neutron stars with strong magnetic fields, or pulsars, serve as laboratories for extreme physics, offering high-energy conditions that cannot be replicated on Earth. Young pulsars can create jets of matter and antimatter moving away from the poles of the pulsar, along with an intense wind, forming a “pulsar wind nebula”.

In 2001, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory first observed the pulsar PSR B1509-58 and revealed that its pulsar wind nebula (referred to as MSH 15-52) resembles a human hand. The pulsar is located at the base of the “palm” of the nebula. Now Chandra’s data of MSH 15-52 have been combined with data from NASA’s newest X-ray telescope, IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) to unveil the magnetic field “bones” of this remarkable structure, as reported in this press release. IXPE stared at MSH 15-52 for 17 days, the longest it has looked at any single object since it launched in December 2021.

In a new composite image, Chandra data are seen in orange (low-energy X-rays), green, and blue (higher-energy X-rays), while the diffuse purple represents the IXPE observations. The pulsar is in the bright region at the base of the palm and the fingers are reaching toward low energy X-ray clouds in the surrounding remains of the supernova that formed the pulsar. The image also includes infrared data from the second data release of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2) in red and blue.

The IXPE data provides the first map of the magnetic field in the ‘hand’. It reveals information about the electric field orientation of X-rays determined by the magnetic field of the X-ray source. This is called “X-ray polarization”.

An additional X-ray image shows the magnetic field map in MSH 15-52. In this image, short straight lines represent IXPE polarization measurements, mapping the direction of the local magnetic field. Orange “bars” mark the most precise measurements, followed by cyan and blue bars with less precise measurements. The complex field lines follow the `wrist’, ‘palm’ and ‘fingers’ of the hand, and probably help define the extended finger-like structures.

The amount of polarization — indicated by bar length — is remarkably high, reaching the maximum level expected from theoretical work. To achieve that strength, the magnetic field must be very straight and uniform, meaning there is little turbulence in those regions of the pulsar wind nebula. 

One particularly interesting feature of MSH 15-52 is a bright X-ray jet directed from the pulsar to the “wrist” at the bottom of the image. The new IXPE data reveal that the polarization at the start of the jet is low, likely because this is a turbulent region with complex, tangled magnetic fields associated with the generation of high-energy particles. By the end of the jet the magnetic field lines appear to straighten and become much more uniform, causing the polarization to become much larger.

A paper describing these results by Roger Romani of Stanford University and collaborators was published in The Astrophysical Journal on Oct. 23 and is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.16067 IXPE is a collaboration between NASA and the Italian Space Agency with partners and science collaborators in 12 countries. IXPE is led by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Ball Aerospace, headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado, manages spacecraft operations together with the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder.

Marshall manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.

Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

How NASA Is Protecting Europa Clipper from Space Radiation

When NASA’s Europa Clipper begins orbiting Jupiter to investigate whether its ice-encased moon, Europa, has conditions suitable for life, the spacecraft will pass repeatedly through one of the most punishing radiation environments in our solar system.

Hardening the spacecraft against potential damage from that radiation is no easy task. But on Oct. 7, the mission put the final piece of the spacecraft’s “armor” in place when it sealed the vault, a container specially designed to shield Europa Clipper’s sophisticated electronics. The probe is being put together, piece by piece, in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ahead of its launch in October 2024.

“Closing the vault is a major milestone,” said Kendra Short, Europa Clipper’s deputy flight system manager at JPL. “It means we’ve got everything in there that we have to have in there. We’re ready to button it up.”

Just under a half-inch thick, the aluminum vault houses the electronics for the spacecraft’s suite of science instruments. The alternative of shielding each set of electronic parts individually would add cost and weight to the spacecraft.

“The vault is designed to reduce the radiation environment to acceptable levels for most of the electronics,” said JPL’s Insoo Jun, the co-chair of the Europa Clipper Radiation Focus Group and an expert on space radiation.

Jupiter’s gigantic magnetic field is 20,000 times as strong as Earth’s and spins rapidly in time with the planet’s 10-hour rotation period. This field captures and accelerates charged particles from Jupiter’s space environment to create powerful radiation belts. The radiation is a constant, physical presence – a kind of space weather – bombarding everything in its sphere of influence with damaging particles.

“Jupiter has the most intense radiation environment other than the Sun in the solar system,” Jun said. “The radiation environment is affecting every aspect of the mission.”

That’s why when the spacecraft arrives at Jupiter in 2030, Europa Clipper won’t simply park in orbit around Europa. Instead, like some previous spacecraft that studied the Jovian system, it will make a wide-ranging orbit of Jupiter itself to move away from the planet and its harsh radiation as much as possible. During those looping orbits of the planet, the spacecraft will fly past Europa nearly 50 times to gather scientific data.

The radiation is so intense that scientists believe it modifies the surface of Europa, causing visible color changes, said Tom Nordheim, a planetary scientist at JPL who specializes in icy outer moons – Europa as well as Saturn’s Enceladus.

“Radiation on the surface of Europa is a major geologic modification process,” Nordheim said. “When you look at Europa – you know, the reddish-brown color – scientists have shown that this is consistent with radiation processing.”

So even as engineers work to keep radiation out of Europa Clipper, scientists like Nordheim and Jun hope to use the space probe to study it.

“With a dedicated radiation monitoring unit, and using opportunistic radiation data from its instruments, Europa Clipper will help reveal the unique and challenging radiation environment at Jupiter,” Jun said.

Nordheim zeroes in on Europa’s “chaos terrain,” areas where blocks of surface material appear to have broken apart, rotated, and moved into new positions, in many cases preserving preexisting linear fracture patterns.

Deep beneath the moon’s icy surface is a vast liquid-water ocean, scientists believe, that could offer a habitable environment for life. Some areas of Europa’s surface show evidence of material transport from the subsurface to the surface. “We need to understand the context of how radiation modified that material,” Nordheim said. “It can alter the chemical makeup of the material.”

Because Europa’s ocean is locked inside an envelope of ice, any possible life forms would not be able to rely directly on the Sun for energy, as plants do on Earth. Instead, they’d need an alternative energy source, such as heat or chemical energy. Radiation raining down on Europa’s surface could help provide such a source by creating oxidants, such as oxygen or hydrogen peroxide, as the radiation interacts with the surface ice layer.

Over time, these oxidants could be transported from the surface to the interior ocean. “The surface could be a window into the subsurface,” Nordheim said. A better understanding of such processes could provide a key to unlock more of the Jupiter system’s secrets, he added: “Radiation is one of the things that makes Europa so interesting. It’s part of the story.”

Europa Clipper’s main science goal is to determine whether there are places below Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, that could support life. The mission’s three main science objectives are to determine the thickness of the moon’s icy shell and its surface interactions with the ocean below, to investigate its composition, and to characterize its geology. The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet.

Managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California, NASA’s JPL leads the development of the Europa Clipper mission in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. APL designed the main spacecraft body in collaboration with JPL and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center executes program management of the Europa Clipper mission.

Salts and Organics Observed on Ganymede’s Surface by NASA’s Juno

NASA’s Juno mission has observed mineral salts and organic compounds on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. Data for this discovery was collected by the JIRAM (Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper) spectrometer aboard the spacecraft during a close flyby of the icy moon. The findings, which could help scientists better understand the origin of Ganymede and the composition of its deep ocean, were published on Oct. 30 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Larger than the planet Mercury, Ganymede is the biggest of Jupiter’s moons and has long been of great interest to scientists due to the vast internal ocean of water hidden beneath its icy crust. Previous spectroscopic observations by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft and Hubble Space Telescope as well as the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope hinted at the presence of salts and organics, but the spatial resolution of those observations was too low to make a determination.

On June 7, 2021, Juno flew over Ganymede at a minimum altitude of 650 miles. Shortly after the time of closest approach, the JIRAM instrument acquired infrared images and infrared spectra (essentially the chemical fingerprints of materials, based on how they reflect light) of the moon’s surface. Built by the Italian Space Agency, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, JIRAM was designed to capture the infrared light (invisible to the naked eye) that emerges from deep inside Jupiter, probing the weather layer down to 30 to 45 miles below the gas giant’s cloud tops. But the instrument has also been used to offer insights into the terrain of moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto (known collectively as the Galilean moons for their discoverer, Galileo).

The JIRAM data of Ganymede obtained during the flyby achieved an unprecedented spatial resolution for infrared spectroscopy – better than 0.62 miles per pixel. With it, Juno scientists were able to detect and analyze the unique spectral features of non-water-ice materials, including hydrated sodium chloride, ammonium chloride, sodium bicarbonate, and possibly aliphatic aldehydes.

“The presence of ammoniated salts suggests that Ganymede may have accumulated materials cold enough to condense ammonia during its formation,” said Federico Tosi, a Juno co-investigator from Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome and lead author of the paper. “The carbonate salts could be remnants of carbon dioxide-rich ices.”

Previous modeling of Ganymede’s magnetic field determined the moon’s equatorial region, up to a latitude of about 40 degrees, is shielded from the energetic electron and heavy ion bombardment created by Jupiter’s hellish magnetic field. The presence of such particle fluxes is well known to negatively impact salts and organics.

During the June 2021 flyby, JIRAM covered a narrow range of latitudes (10 degrees north to 30 degrees north) and a broader range of longitudes (minus 35 degrees east to 40 degrees east) in the Jupiter-facing hemisphere.

“We found the greatest abundance of salts and organics in the dark and bright terrains at latitudes protected by the magnetic field,” said Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “This suggests we are seeing the remnants of a deep ocean brine that reached the surface of this frozen world.”

Ganymede is not the only Jovian world Juno has flown by. The moon Europa, thought to harbor an ocean under its icy crust, also came under Juno’s gaze, first in October 2021 and then in September 2022. Now Io is receiving the flyby treatment. The next close approach to that volcano-festooned world is scheduled for Dec. 30, when the spacecraft will come within 932 miles of Io’s surface.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, a division of Caltech, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. The Italian Space Agency funded the Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built and operates the spacecraft.

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Beth Ridgeway

Rita Owens: Keeper of NASA’s Digital Knowledge

Name: Rita Owens

Formal Job Classification: Data Systems Engineer

Organization: Data Steward, Data Stewardship and Governance

Information, Data, & Analytics Services (IDAS)

Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO)

(Detailed to IDAS/OCIO from GSFC Code 565, Engineering and Technology Directorate)

What do you do and what is most interesting about your role here at Goddard? 

As a data systems engineer, I support Data Governance and Stewardship under Data and Analytics Services with evaluation of data cataloging solutions and manage implementation of data governance, stewardship policies and data catalog. I enjoy working and gaining experience with other professionals in various information technology specialties at other NASA centers.

What is your educational background?

My favorite subjects in high school were math, science, and art. While in high school, I went to a summer camp at the Rochester Institute of Technology to learn about STEM careers. I chose engineering because women were in high demand in this male-dominated field for diversity, and it also offered plenty of job opportunities. I majored in undeclared engineering during my freshman year at RIT. I met with an advisor at RIT to discuss my major of study and he suggested electrical engineering because of the technical advances, the increasing importance of electronics, and the amount of math involved. He gave a good example of a mechanical typewriter becoming an electronic typewriter. 

I graduated from RIT with a BS degree in electrical engineering in 1993. Also, I got a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 1998 while working for NASA.

Why did you come to Goddard? 

In 1991, while a student at RIT, I participated in a summer internship program at Goddard that was sponsored by Gallaudet University. I thought it was an exciting opportunity to work for NASA near my home in Maryland. I developed and implemented several programs for an image compression project at the Flight Data Systems Branch.

The next fall and then the following summer, I participated in a co-op program and assisted with the power supply designs for spacecraft in the Space Power Applications Branch at Goddard. I was offered a permanent position at that branch early before I graduated in 1993. I was excited and accepted that offer immediately.

How does your detail to OCIO help with NASA’s digital transformation? 

Digital transformation helps NASA’s people by improving data quality, accessibility, and security. We are transforming how NASA operates by using our own digital capabilities to be smarter about storing and managing knowledge. NASA has learned a lot and built a valuable collection of information, so curating, securing, and organizing that information is an important and satisfying responsibility.

It makes everyone’s job easier and more efficient and aligns with NASA’s goals – discovering and expanding knowledge for the benefit of humanity. Since last year, I have been gaining experience and developing skills in IT and software areas such as data systems, visualization tools, and web development.

After working over 30 years at Goddard, what are some of your most memorable moments?

In my earlier career, I designed and developed power supplies for electrical power systems on a variety of spacecraft that have flown in space. Specifically, I worked with the power and switching distribution units for spacecraft instruments such as the Suzaku mission’s X-ray Spectrometer, Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS), and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.   

I also have done digital designs and technical documentation for many spacecraft missions such as space shuttle Hitchhiker payloads, the James Webb Space Telescope, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, ICESat-2, and others. 

Building hardware to help scientists reach their goals and seeing successful launches of our spacecraft into orbit and the solar system made me feel very proud.

What is some of the most important advice your mentors have given you? 

A former director of the Applied Engineering and Technology Directorate encouraged us to leave our comfort zones and learn new things to broaden our horizons and increase our skill base. He did not want us to get stuck in a rut and encouraged us to work outside our branch. I started in the Power Systems branch and then worked in several other branches doing digital electronics designs and many other projects including research and development. I am now in software development and IT. I worked in a lot of different areas that expanded my skills, showed me how things are done in different areas, and gave me a broader view.

As a mentor, what advice do you give?

I would advise students to get work experience in different areas of their major study to find what they feel is the best fit. A co-op would be a good way to go because they can work while in college which helps them select the right field. RIT required us to do co-ops as part of our undergraduate program in engineering. So, my work experience in several different engineering fields in both the private industry and government as co-ops helped lead me to the right career field. Take advantage of internships and co-ops. 

Are you involved with any of Goddard’s Employee Resources Groups (ERGs)?

Over 10 years ago, I was the chair of the Equal Accessibility Advisory Committee (EAAC). Advisory committees are now called employee resources groups. When I was a chair of the People with Disabilities Advisory Committee, it was quite small. I proposed to change the name of the committee to equal accessibility for a more positive image as we need to focus on accessibility instead of disabilities. It did help grow our popularity at Goddard. I also proposed expanding our EAAC community for more diversity to include those with non-disability health conditions such as diabetes and bipolar depression. As a result, many more employees joined our committee, including several managers. I also arranged many events to raise disability awareness, such as the employees with disabilities panel and etiquette workshops.

I am currently the co-chair of the Equal Accessibility ERG. I would like to see all employees continue to have equal accessibility in the workplace. So, I encourage Goddard to help break down all the barriers for everyone to become more productive at work, to support NASA’s goals more effectively. I also attempt to raise awareness of employees with disabilities and health conditions and their accommodations while helping educate the Goddard community through events such as American Sign Language (ASL) Brown Bag sessions and Disability & Health Awareness presentations and workshops such as Suicide Awareness, Deaf Awareness and Etiquette, Recruiting People with Disabilities Workshop, etc. We hope to educate everyone at Goddard about how to interact effectively with and be inclusive of people with disabilities.

I recently gave a presentation to our center director about some of our accomplishments and our plans for the coming year. I mentioned some of the challenges that employees with disabilities face including barriers at the workplace.

I also serve as part of the Goddard Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Implementation Team. The team is assisting in the development of the DEIA Implementation Plan that aligns with the NASA DEIA Strategic Plan. Also, I support Workforce Recruitment Program (WRP) as a recruiter for candidates with disabilities and attend job fairs as part of the disability recruitment efforts at NASA Headquarters.

Also, I serve as an area vice president of the Goddard Engineers, Scientists, and Technicians Association (GESTA) under the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) Local 29. In that role, I advocate for STEM professionals and assist in improving our workplace.

What are some of the personal challenges you have faced?

When I started at Goddard, another deaf engineer and I brought up the need for expanded American Sign Language interpreting services for our heavily technical work. The center director at the time decided to allow me and other deaf engineers to develop our statement of work and choose the best interpreting service, since we knew exactly what we needed. We now have a much more robust interpreting services contract. That made a huge difference to our careers. 

What advice would you give to a manager of someone with disabilities?

Managers need to listen, communicate well, and be open-minded with a positive attitude toward those of us with disabilities or health conditions. Also, I encourage managers to take training in reasonable accommodations for employees with disabilities for inclusion as well as provide plenty of work opportunities to everyone equally for their career growth. 

Managers should ask employees with disabilities to find out what accommodations they need and give them equal opportunities for growth in their careers. They should give the employees plenty of work opportunities to advance their careers, too. 

What do you do for fun?

I used to love making oil paintings of landscapes and florals. I go to paint nights sometimes with friends and family. I also enjoy traveling with my family and learning new things with them in other countries. It is fun exposing my three children to different cultures. Also, I love doing outdoor adventures such as hiking and cycling. 

Also, someday I would love to go to a launch and watch it live as I have never been to one!

Is there anyone you would like to thank?

I would like to thank my mom, who was my role model. She balanced a family with a career as a physician. I was so amazed at all her successes, and she was also my best friend. She encouraged me to be independent as a career professional and cherish family values.  

What is your “six-word memoir”? A six-word memoir describes something in just six words.

Independent. Determined. Persistent. Creative. Inquisitive. Mom. 

Conversations With Goddard is a collection of Q&A profiles highlighting the breadth and depth of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s talented and diverse workforce. The Conversations have been published twice a month on average since May 2011. Read past editions on Goddard’s “Our People” webpage.

By Elizabeth M. Jarrell
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

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Jessica Evans

New Patterns in Mars’s Clouds Revealed by Volunteers

The first journal article about clouds identified by participants of the Cloudspotting on Mars project has been accepted for publication and is now available online! The article, “The Cloudspotting on Mars citizen science project: Seasonal and spatial cloud distributions observed by the Mars Climate Sounder” will appear in a special issue of Icarus titled “MRO: 16 Years at Mars”. MRO is the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Mars Climate Sounder is an instrument on MRO. 

The paper shows several cloud maps, illustrating times and regions where many clouds were identified. The maps reveal several key cloud populations identified in data from the volunteers. The cloud populations include high-altitude CO2-ice clouds, clouds that form near the poles, and dusty-season water-ice clouds. The structure of the clouds follows the pattern of “thermal tides” in the atmosphere, which are global-scale oscillations in temperature. Where temperatures are lower than average, clouds are more common. 

The paper also explains the motivation for the project and describes its setup on Zooniverse. It digs into the details of how cloud identifications made by participants were turned into a cloud catalog using machine learning. “Thank you to all the Cloudspotting on Mars participants for driving this research forward!” said project PI Dr. Marek Slipski, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet propulsion Laboratory.

There’s plenty more to study in this dataset and there are more images online to analyze: the second Mars Year of data is only about 50% done. The data from the second Mars year will help reveal how changing dust conditions affect cloud formation. If you’d like to join the search for clouds in the Martian atmosphere, head to https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marek-slipski/cloudspotting-on-mars.

NASA’s Citizen Science Program:
Learn about NASA citizen science projects

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Six Rules for Surviving in a Government Organization

An interview of Dr. Paul Hertz, a senior leader in the Science Mission Directorate

By: Anna Ladd McElhannon, Summer 2022 Intern, Office of the Chief Scientist

Dr. Paul Hertz is a leader of NASA and had served as the Astrophysics Division Director since 2012 until 2022. Throughout his career, he remained a well‐respected and admired leader who accomplished things that an undergraduate physics student like me could only dream of.  

We met for the first time on a summer day full of sudden, fierce storms. On the way to a quiet meeting place (a video conference meeting, of course), the previously blue sky started pouring rain. I was surprised my laptop still worked when I finally came indoors. Paul, though, was sitting in his home office with a grin on his face, perfectly content to ignore my soaking shirt and dripping hair.  

Considering what I had been told, his easygoing kindness and immediate friendliness was no surprise.  

We started by bonding over our shared love for all things astrophysics. His passion began during the Apollo missions.  

“I remember John Glenn’s flight, and I must have been in second grade. From that point on, I was following everything that happened.” He would watch all the astronauts on TV, and he kept a scrapbook of any newspaper clippings he could find on the space program. “I remember when Armstrong walked and, my parents used to let me stay home from school whenever the astronauts were walking on the Moon.”

His passion for space did not end there. With undergraduate degrees in math and physics from MIT, he proceeded to earn his Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard. Like most students going into the sciences, he assumed he would become a professor at a university. He realized, though, that professorship wasn’t the life for him. “I made a choice early on when I had young kids and a family, that I was going to have balance, and I wasn’t going to be a world‐famous scientist.”  

As a NASA intern interviewing the Paul Hertz, one of my newfound idols, I found this comment amusing. But the sentiment still stood. “I made the choice not to be a professor but to stay as a government scientist.”

Somehow, though, he was able to become a famous scientist with a prestigious job and still feel satisfied with his personal life. Naturally, I asked him for advice on how to obtain this sort of balance without letting either side of one’s life fall onto the backburner.  

He jumped at the opportunity to teach me these life lessons with a list of six rules he titled: How to Survive in a Government Organization.

6. Train your successor

When he first told me this rule, I applied it to my life. At my university, there is a Society of Physics Students. Every few years or so, we have incredible leadership that wins awards and involves students all over campus. Then the next election rolls around, and all the hard work dissipates. Paul says, “There’s all your institutional knowledge walking out the door every year.”  

“Train your successor” immediately propelled me into planning mode: how can we incorporate a system at my school where the previous leaders sufficiently train their successors every year?

Paul was happy about this application, but it wasn’t what he originally intended by the rule.  

“What I was thinking is that when people who are highly successful at their job start talking about getting another job, their boss says, ‘Sorry, you can’t go. I need you too badly.’”

As someone who has never worked in a similar system, I was appalled. Fortunately, this has not yet happened to him.

“I have been very successful in every job. I’ve had people around me say, ‘What are we going to do without you?… Nobody can replace you.’ I hate hearing that nobody can replace you because it’s patently untrue.”

Sometimes it turns out that the answer to your research is uninteresting. You realize, oh my‐ there was no ‘there’ there.

5. Delegate

“A lot of us competent people think that we can do it better than anybody else. And so we want to hold on to it and do it ourselves because we know it’ll be done best… I used to do everything myself, and I was bad at teaming. You’ll kill yourself that way.”

As the Director of Astrophysics at NASA, I assumed he would have to be the best of the best. Regardless, as he said before, there is always someone who could replace him. While this sounds a little sad, it can come as a relief to someone trying to find peace in their work life.

“People like that want to do the part of their job that they could easily hand off. They are overworked and overwhelmed because they want to do it all themselves. They think they can probably do it better— but that’s not the point.”

As Paul says, the point is to do your job efficiently and not perfectly.  

4.  Don’t Make Work

“A lot of times you get choices.” He began, “We could do it this way or that way, and this way is a lot more work.”  

Most bosses strive for perfection, but Paul understands how to balance perfection with importance. Asking, “How do I do it perfectly?” can cause problems and lead to employees feeling overworked.

[They say] ‘I’m just drowning.’  

[I say] ‘You only have three assignments. You’re making too much work, you’re not delegating, and it’s taking twice as long. Don’t do it this way.’

Paul believes that if you can make your project better by a small amount, but it takes twice the time, the extra mile just isn’t worth it.  “If it increased my chance of surviving surgery, then I would take that extra 10%.”  

If you’re level of perfection is plateauing over time, as it inevitably will, just accept it.

“If you insist on perfection… that’s making work.”

3. Don’t break it

“Don’t break it” was one of the first rules he came up with. It simply means “don’t make it worse.”

It goes hand in hand with “Don’t make work.” Sometimes people can be perfectionists to the point where it impacts their personal life, and sometimes it can impact their professional career as well. That is the secret to finding balance.

“People feel overwhelmed because they’re not practicing these rules… You keep them in mind and then you use them to help prioritize. You must have a feel for what’s the most important thing and then for what’s the most important thing to do very, very well.”

2. Don’t Take It Personally

“You should accept 90% of your projects are going to work.” He asserts, “You should not expect it to always go right. And you should keep it in context when failure happens.”  

That raises the question: what context?

It is difficult to imagine someone as successful as Paul to go through failure. But he has had his fair share of rough times in his own research. “Sometimes it turns out that the answer to your research is uninteresting. You realize, oh my ‐there was no ‘there’ there.”

Even when projects are cancelled, or someone else publishes their results before you can, your time isn’t waisted. There is a certain magic that comes with conducting scientific research, and it makes even failed projects worth the time and effort. “To me, the excitement is the hunt. It’s doing the research. It’s collecting the data and analyzing it. It’s looking for the signal that no one has ever seen before.”

…if something goes wrong, I’m going to hear about it. I want to hear about it from them—I want to hear their view on it and I want us to solve it together.

1. Don’t Surprise the Boss

“Somebody probably told me this rule when I showed up at NASA. You can Google it and find out that it was a rule back in the Roman Empire—or something like that.”

When asked how long he has considered himself a leader, he began at high school. “Every club that I joined, I ended up being president… I ended up being added to the yearbook. When I went to college, I was president of clubs. When I was a researcher, I put together collaborations to do research… I wasn’t a supervisor or boss, but I was a leader; that’s been true at all stops along my career.”

As for the importance of the number one rule, Paul says it’s important to be transparent so that issues can be solved quickly and efficiently. “I don’t want my team to sugarcoat things. I want them to tell me. If something goes wrong, I’m going to hear about it from someone. But, I want to hear about it from them—I want to hear their view on it, and I want us to solve it together.”

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Nighttime on the East Coast

While aboard the International Space Station on Oct. 26, NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli captured the city lights of the northeastern United States and major urban areas including Long Island, New York; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Washington, D.C. At the time of this photograph, the orbital lab was 262 miles above Maine. In 24 hours, the space station makes 16 orbits of Earth, traveling through 16 sunrises and sunsets. To find out where the ISS is and when you can see it in your area, check out the Spot the Station site.

Image Credit: NASA/Jasmin Moghbeli

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Monika Luabeya