Leah Albrow: Hi, I'm Leah and I'm here on the New Zealand
Space Scholarship at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And today
I'm here with my mentor and we're going to be talking with
you a little bit about the project that I'm working on
here. And my experience so far. So would you like to introduce
yourself?
Anjali Tripathi: Sure, my name is Anjali Tripathi. I am a
scientist, an astrophysicist by training who has the title of
being NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program Science
Ambassador, which encapsulates the work that I do on exoplanets
of designing new missions, as well as spreading outreach and
joy for the subject, because there's a lot to do and as
you'll see, in our work with Leah, there's always room for
more people to get involved.
So could you maybe talk a little more about
you got here at JPL, and sort of what motivates you to work on
exoplanets?
Anjali Tripathi: I'm really excited to have Leah here as my
intern, because I actually started at JPL as an intern back
in 2004 and 2005. So back in the day, I was working on the Mars
rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, just when they were getting to
Mars, for the first time that we were doing this whole era of
rovers regularly on the surface. And I left and came back, you
know, almost 20 years later. And I don't think I expected that at
the time. So first of all, we hope you'll come back Leah. But
also, I think it speaks a lot to the value of internships and
educational opportunities because here at JPL, we really
want people to have all kinds of experiences, like we're here in
our auditorium, where we have this amazing model of the
Cassini mission, which went to Saturn and while I don't study
Saturn, I study planets outside of the solar system, Leah and
all of the other Kiwi interns here are learning all about Mars
and the other places that we explore. So I think the path to
JPL starts with an internship in a lot of cases, but also
continues through a lot of work in academic astronomy, the
various sciences and engineering. And I think it's
worth saying one other thing, which is that Leah knows, I have
sort of a weird job here at JPL. I used to help manage our
government relations office, and I used to work in the White
House. And so it's one of these things that I work a lot with
the artists who do a lot of the models. Now, that's a real
picture of Saturn. But you know, there's artists who help with
us, the business people, you know, the whole range of folks
who make going to space possible. And I think that's one
really exciting thing, that it doesn't really matter what you
study that you can be involved. But of course, studying physics,
math, computer science, all all do really help.
Leah Albrow: What makes you like really excited about work on
exoplanets now?
Anjali Tripathi: So in if you lived at any point in the past
before 1781, you knew about the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth,
Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. And that was it. In 1781, we found
Uranus. And, you know, the progression for finding Neptune,
and you know, these other worlds in the solar system, whether
they're dwarf planets like Pluto, it was sort of a slow
progression. But then in, you know, my lifetime in the 1980s,
and 90s, we've actually found planets outside of the solar
system. And so there's just this huge leap forward. And now we
know there are over 5000 exoplanets, and we're finding
more all the time that are closer and closer to what we
know about the Earth and worlds that we know as well as planets
that are very different from our own. And so it's this really
exciting sort of renaissance of studying the planets that I
think there isn't a better time to be getting involved in. And
the whole future of astronomy related to Leah's project
including is about what other planets we'll find in the future
with the habitable worlds observatory. And so the future
of astronomy is largely focused around exoplanets.
Leah Albrow: So a big part of my project while I've been here has
been looking into stars that we think could have habitable
planets around them, and sort of looking at the ways that we can
study these stars going forwards to best support science in the
future. So one thing that I've really enjoyed coming here is
seeing how, particularly with astronomy, it's such a field
that you need to be supporting the future at all times, like
the work that you're doing here might not necessarily culminate
in a result now, but we're still using results from decades ago,
we're still doing work that's going to be used for decades. So
the scope of astronomy has been a really cool thing to see done
here at JPL.