MUSIC - I am interested in
the history of our planet when it comes
to little organisms, micro-organisms, and how they have
shaped our planet. We know that they have been around
on Earth for a very long time, but what about other planets?
My name is Jennifer Eigenbrode and I am at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
I'm working on an instrument called SAM, and it is going to go Mars
and we are going to use it to look at organic molecules in rocks.
And I think it is a fantastic instrument, but there is lots of different ways
that you can do these types of analyses, and I came up with a alternative way.
I got some funding from Goddard to explore
this idea and the experiments were working. They showed us
that, yes, this alternative technique might
actually help us get more organic information out of rock
on another planet. And that is all great and I was thinking, OK, this is something
that we could put into the next Mars mission proposal
that we put together, and low and behold, the mission
that I am working on right now got delayed two years and there was this
opportunity to include this experiment that I came up with
on the mission. So, it did not take any hardware changes
and we worked out some details and now I have
my own experiment going to Mars.
The biggest influence on my life
probably was my father. He was an electrical engineer and
I don't know too much about him.
He passed away when I was eleven, but there are
two things that I remember about him and one was he worked on some electrical
connections that were used in the Space Shuttle. So, I always thought that was kind of cool.
But there is this comment that always floats around in the back
of my head that has really stuck with me, and that is
that someday I am going to have a job and I'm going to be spending a lot
of my life doing it. So, it better be something worth doing,
something I enjoy. I am a risk taker.
This has manifested itself in a lot of adventure
sports that I do such as rock climbing, mountain biking,
and I like the white water kayak. But I take risks in my career, too.
I never would have gotten to where I am today, here at
NASA, if I was not willing to take those risks and manage
them along the way. Knowledge and experience
help you manage those risks.
I do not think that women take to risks as often
as men do and there might be something to that. Maybe it is a maternal
instinct that we have to kind of be more protective and what not,
but you know, you get some fantastic experiences
out of taking risk. It's fun and then there is adventure.
There are barriers in careers and hurdles that you have
to jump through as a person, but then some things happen
that are imposed on you. For instance,
it took me a long time to recognize that
in the eleven jobs that I have had, nine of them
I have been exposed to sexual harassment or discrimination,
and I don't think that I was aware
of it at the time for most of those cases.
That is really the critical part in getting through it is to recognizing
that it is happening, that it is wrong, and then just
saying, "No, you won't put up with it."
Since I've been at NASA, actually before NASA, I haven't
come across it and I think part of it is that once you get
rolling in your career and you are really
dedicated to what you're doing and people see the value that they have
those people stop looking at what you look like,
what your gender is, and they start paying attention to what you do.
And that's what really counts.
Music