I like building things, making things, fixing things.
I'm big on thinking it and you will achieve it.
I have a funny little clip I call it my theme video, you know every superhero needs a theme song right?
Seeing all the different instruments and missions that I've been a part of, I've
solved huge problems it's never something that I started out to do.
here at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center I started off doing attitude control systems.
We don't say spacecraft having a bad day but really position and location in
space. So often people will call me a rocket scientist because I built and
design systems to control our spacecraft.
I then moved into instrument management. I'm really the taskmaster and helping people meet the criteria that a
scientist needs to create the cool stuff that you see around us.
I was born in Brooklyn New York, I grew up in bed-stuy, as we say bed-stuy do or die. But I like
math from the very beginning. I played team sports, I still continue to do
softball. My comic book favorite is the Caped Crusader, they used their brain and
I could too. I moved to Cambridge Massachusetts for high school I applied
to MIT and got in
But when I graduated from MIT it was the year the first shuttle disaster
and that was really hard and jobs really weren't available at NASA. I went back to
school, when I graduated from Howard University I was the first
African-American female to get a PhD in mechanical engineering
At NASA Goddard Space Flight Center we have four science disciplines Helio,
earth science, astrophysics, and planetary science. I've worked all different phases
of the mission. One of my favorite project is at Lunar Reconnaissance
Orbiter because when I was in first grade we got to see the men go to the
moon. it's a satellite that is basically using a laser, what we call a laser altimeter
to measure distances very accurately. You point the laser altimeter down to the
surface and then bounce very quickly back up into your detectors and
measuring that time in the distances.
We're able to create three-dimensional maps of the moon
so you can see the very small craters down to 3 centimeters in resolution. That
is very impactful when you begin to think about traveling in space, you need
to know where you're going and where you're going to land. The James Webb
Space Telescope is our next huge telescope and we're hoping that it will
actually take that same type of science and data that we've been collecting for
Hubble and take it to the next level. It's 28 years in the making so when they
started the concept the technology did not even exist.
When we're looking at things in space but we're looking way back in time we're
just finally getting the light, different frequencies of light give us different clues.
Infrared happens to be one of those spectral bands of light. Whether James
Webb Space Telescope will give us some insight as to how quickly Milky Way is
expanding or even how long ago the universe was born.
So for myself this new position that I am it's really being strategic about
what NASA should be doing for the future. We may use sensors that look down at the
earth right now but they may be serve a purpose for us in the Martian
environment or moon environment. As we try to figure out how to live on this
Big Blue Marble we're going to succeed by working together. Diverse ideas spark
innovation they collide and create great solutions.