My name is Margarita Marinova and
I'm a research scientist at Nasa Ames Research Center.
I'm mostly interested in planets.
Ah, a lot of it is Mars but I
also study Earth a lot and many of the other
planets of the solar system.
I think the biggest keys to success is being
passionate about something, and
allowing yourself to be passionate about something.
Ah, I certainly know a lot of people, who, in high school
and I told them that I wanted to be an astronaut.
And I wanted to study Mars --
sorta laugh at it and be like, "haha right, of course you want to go to space."
Nasa Ames Research Center is
one of the research centers located in California.
It does a lot of things. Uh, a lot of
it's beginnings were in aeronautics --
and it has a lot of wind tunnels.
But, it now also has a really large planetary sciences group,
and that's the group that I am currently involved with.
This whole thing is our walk in freezer,
which is kept at, ah, zero fahrenheit
so about, minus, ten minus fifteen celsius.
It's really cold in there. Um, and,
what we do is, we have our
samples frozen so we can do a biology
analysis on them, but we can also test
some of our field techniques.
I really love asking the question why
and I think that is one of my favorite things
about my job, and not just asking it
but having the time and resources to
go an answer that question why --
ah, is really exciting for me.
So with this one, it went in pretty easy,
but its surprising that actually with ice,
it doesn't work as well. so, that's something
we might have to test further
and make sure that it's ready
for when we go into the field next year.
Some work that I have done is actually looking at large
impacts on Mars, so what happens
if you take something like the Moon and throw
it at Mars, uh, does the whole planet melt? Ah,
Does it spew out a lot of material?
But I also do a lot of work on extreme environments.
For example, one of the projects that I
am heavily involved with now is
going to Antarctica and studying,
uh, extreme conditions that we find there.
Mars, is a cold and dry place --
and Antarctica and the upper
dry valleys, which is where we are --
is the coldest, driest
location that we know of
on Earth.
And Antarctica gives us a location
where we can go, and really do all of
that very careful analysis,
and we can go to Mars, take just a
few measurements and understand what's happening.
Here we have the middle of the day, the middle
of the night. It goes back and forth.
The temperature of the surface changes
But it also effects what's happening into the subsurface.
This is one of my favorite problems because
a lot of things
are coming together to do this. We've left Instruments
out in the field ..
for years at a time
so that we can really look at what the
different environmental parameters or
how does the light vary? How does the temperature vary?
So right now having
the science and the math background I have is certainly important --
but I think on the
personality side, what's really important
is being curious about
what you see. Always asking questions
and never stopping, and also self motivational
aspect. That's one aspect that is different
from a lot of other professions where you have
a lot of deadlines, you know exactly what you need to get done today.
Exploring Mars, especially the human exploration of Mars
requires everything, it requires the scientist,
it requires the engineers, the people who
come up with policy.
The people who come up with the money.
Everything that we have learned as humans over
the last number of thousands of years
has to come together
for us to really be able to do
human exploration on Mars.
Maybe thats what really captured my imagination
that it was everything coming together to go and explore this planet.