Helen Ling, Changemaker

Helen Ling, seen here in a photo from Feb. 16, 1973, was influential in the inclusion of women in STEM positions at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. After majoring in Mathematics at the University of Notre Dame—the only woman to do so at the time—Ling joined her brother in working at JPL. She became a supervisor for the computing group in the 1960s, a team who was responsible for performing trajectory calculations.

Ling encouraged women within the computing group to attend night school to earn degrees that would allow them more professional opportunities within JPL. A pioneer for women’s rights in the workplace, Helen Ling was so admired in the computing group that those who worked under her lovingly referred to themselves as “Helen’s girls.” Many of “Helen’s girls” went on to become computer scientists and engineers within JPL thanks to the mentorship and guidance of Helen Ling.

Throughout her time at JPL, Ling developed software for the IRAS, Magellan, TOPEX/Poseidon, and Mars Observer missions, and retired in 1994.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Monika Luabeya

Facility Systems Safety Engineer and Fall Protection Program Administrator Thu Nguyen

“I went back to school in 2016. So I had two kids that were three and five, and I was working full time, and I was doing the master’s program, taking two classes online. It took two years to get it done, and it was like a balancing act, and my kids had to watch the sacrifice in a sense. There were times when I had to take tests, and I was like, ‘OK, you’ve got to sit in the living room with your dad, or you’ve got to go to grandma’s house because I’ve got to take this test.’

“It was tough, but I had to get it done to show my kids that anything is possible. Things don’t get handed to you. You’ve got to work for them.

“And so, I made sure that when I graduated in August of 2018, we drove to the school, which is six hours away, so they could watch me walk across the stage and see, you know, the sacrifices I made so that we could be here. And so for them, it’s like – my little one, that’s what she wants to grow up to do: work for NASA and do safety like me. It’s cool.

“To them, I think it’s impactful, so they know that if you commit yourself and put the effort and work into it, you can do whatever you put your mind to. Both of my kids watched it, and they’re both in the STEM program at their school because they have a passion for math and science and want to try to make a difference in their own capacity.”

– Thu Nguyen, Facility Systems Safety Engineer and Fall Protection Program Administrator, NASA’s Johnson Space Center

Image Credit: NASA/Robert Markowitz
Interviewer: NASA/Tahira Allen

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Tahira S. Allen

Deputy Program Manager Vir Thanvi

“I had the privilege of being the very first project manager for [the] Near Space Network (NSN), and in my current role as deputy program manager for [the] Exploration and Space Communications Division, it is still in my portfolio. NSN is one of the [agency’s two] communication and navigation networks. 

“When we see the volume and the variety of NASA, other agency, and commercial missions supported by the network, and the science being achieved, and the exploration being enabled — when you leave for the day, you feel accomplished that you contributed [to the] agency’s goal. You contributed toward [the] nation’s priorities, such as cislunar [exploration], and then you helped humankind by enabling the science and exploration.

“Without communication, every satellite in this space is a black box. So, just knowing that every single day we are flowing terabytes of data through relay and direct-to-earth services directly to our [missions], enabling the exploration and achieving the science — is a great sense of accomplishment.

“… Whatever role you are in, as long as you find a way to understand what mission, what goal, what objective you are contributing to, there is no bigger motivator than that.

“As a software programmer, normally you think that your job is to come in and write some code and solve some discrepancy reports and do the testing — and then you go home.  

“But in the end, when you see that the program you are writing or fixing is something that controls the satellite that’s observing the sea levels and the sea temperatures or [controls] a capsule that is carrying astronauts, now you know you’re actually contributing to a bigger purpose, a bigger objective.

“I say that to my team, whenever I have an opportunity. I share with my team that they are enabling science and exploration for dozens of missions being supported by NSN. Initially it just seems like words, but once they start realizing [their contributions] are real, I can tell you those people don’t want to go anywhere. They just feel that sense of accomplishment.”

—Vir Thanvi, Deputy Program Manager, Exploration and Space Communications Projects Division, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Image Credit: NASA/Thalia Patrinos
Interviewer: NASA/Thalia Patrinos

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Thalia K. Patrinos

NASA Marshall Team Supports Safe Travels for Space Station Science

By Jessica Barnett 

During the International Space Station’s more than 25 years of operation, there have been more than 3,000 experiments conducted aboard the microgravity laboratory, and making sure scientific samples are kept safe through launch, spaceflight, experimentation, and the return trip to Earth takes a great deal of planning, testing, and preparation across NASA.

In February, team members at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, handled the de-integration of zinc selenide-based crystals grown on the space station as part of an experiment to study how a lack of gravity might affect the crystals’ growth and structure. The experiment was conducted using six sample cartridge assemblies heated up to 1,200 degrees Celsius (2,192 degrees Fahrenheit) inside the Materials Science Laboratory of the Materials Science Research Rack on the space station.

John Luke Bili, lead systems test engineer for the sample cartridge assemblies within Marshall’s Instrument Development, Integration, and Test Branch, begins the process by working with engineers, scientists, project personnel, and the experiment’s principal investigator to create an ampoule, or sealed glass vial, to use as a sample container.

“We’ll take the ampoule and do some ground testing, like a normal flight integration,” Bili said. “We’ll assemble it with the hardware we have, then we are responsible for completing different mitigation efforts to prepare for sealing the ampoule up and processing it at the required high temperatures.”

The team exposes the test article to extreme heat and pressure using a duplicate of the furnace on the space station, allowing them to also test the experiment’s software.

We have people in our branch that will write the code to run it on the space station automatically. We develop that code, then we work with Marshall’s Quality Department to test it.

John Luke Bili

Lead Systems Test Engineer

The zinc selenide-based crystal experiment required six sample cartridge assemblies. After a month of preparation from Marshall’s team, the assemblies traveled to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for a final round of packing before arriving at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for launch.

The assemblies launched on NASA’s SpaceX 24th commercial resupply services mission in December 2021 and NASA’s Northrop Grumman 19th commercial resupply services mission in August 2023. Each sample took about a week to process through the space station’s lab furnace. The samples were then brought back to Earth, with three of the six arriving at Marshall on Feb. 9, 2024.

While unpacking the crystal samples, team members took photos and notes of the tubes throughout the de-integration process in Marshall’s Space Systems Integration & Test Facility. The team includes technicians with 20 to 30 years of experience, ensuring samples safely travel to and from the station and helping expand access for researchers to explore microgravity, space exposure, and future missions in low Earth orbit.

“It’s really nice having that kind of experience when we’re working on the hardware that’s going in space,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of people that are very skilled machinists that are able to help us in a moment’s notice, we have people with a really good understanding of technical tolerances and stuff like that, and we have people with a lot of varying experience doing flight hardware integration and tests.”

For more than two decades, humans have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge and making research breakthroughs that are not possible on Earth. The station is a critical testbed for NASA to understand and overcome the challenges of long-duration spaceflight and to expand commercial opportunities in low Earth orbit.

Learn more about the space station at:

https://nasa.gov/international-space-station/

Joel Wallace

Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.

256-544-0034

joel.w.wallace@nasa.gov

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Marshall Teams Combine to Make Space Station Science Reality

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Beth Ridgeway

Hubble Captures a Bright Spiral in the Queen’s Hair

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the jewel-bright spiral galaxy NGC 4689, which lies 54 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Coma Berenices. This constellation has the distinction of being the only one of the 88 constellations officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) as one named after the historical figure, Queen Berenice II of Egypt. The Latin word ‘coma’ references her hair, which means that NGC 4689 lies in the hair of a queen. Some people of Berenice’s time would have meant this quite literally, as the story goes that her court astronomer thought that a missing lock of Berenice’s hair had been catasterised (a word meaning ‘placed amongst the stars’) by the gods: hence the name of the constellation, Coma Berenices.

NGC 4689 holds an interesting — albeit less royal — place in modern astronomy. The universe is so incredibly vast that at a distance of 54 million light-years NGC 4689 is relatively nearby for a galaxy. This image includes data from two sets of observations, one made in 2019, the other in 2024 , and both are part of programs that observed multiple ‘nearby’ galaxies. The 2024 observing program is an interesting example of how Hubble — an extraordinarily productive telescope for more than three decades — and the James Webb Space Telescope complement each other. Observations collected by Webb stand to transform our understanding of how galaxies change and evolve over time, by providing infrared data at an unprecedented level of detail and clarity. However, ultraviolet and visible light observations from Hubble — such as those used to create this image — complement Webb’s observations. In this case, the Hubble data offer a more accurate assessment of the stellar populations of nearby galaxies, which is crucial to understanding their evolution. Hubble and Webb observations play an important role in developing our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve, and observations of NGC 4689 are a valuable part of that quest for knowledge. In fact, Hubble featured an image of the galaxy before, in 2020.

Text Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)

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Media Contact:

Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov

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