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(loud footsteps)
- You spend 10 years of your life doing
Something and then it doesn't work.
And like, what then?
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I thought about all the other people
who have built anything and the difficulties
and disasters that they've had to go through.
But that really the, the important thing is to keep going.
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My name is Erika Hamden.
I'm a professor of astrophysics
at the university of Arizona.
Usually when people think of professors, they're like,
Oh you teach and you sit in your office
and think about things.
But my real passions are in creating something.
A lot of astronomy, you can't run experiments
and you can't really go to the places
that you would like to observe.
So a lot of times you're dealing with just data
and like pixels on a screen,
but there has to be someone who actually builds
the telescope to collect all that data.
And so that's what I do.
(soft music)
In general if you can avoid building a new telescope
you should do that (laughs)
because it's really complicated and difficult and expensive.
So there are a lot of like fantastic telescopes.
There's all the telescopes that are outside
of Tucson on Kitt Peak, and those are great
but sometimes people have like a science question
and there's no way to answer it with existing telescopes.
And so basically that is the only reason
that you should ever build a telescope,
is because there is no other way to get
the data that you need.
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So for me the subject that I'm most interested in
is these very, very, very giant
and very faint clouds of hydrogen that are outside of,
we think most galaxies.
And the "we think" is the important part because
we don't really know, but we know that all this hydrogen
was formed in the big bang.
And then it starts to condense and collapse
and in places where it collapses, that's where it
forms galaxies.
But we also know that if that were the end of it
the galaxy forms, then it makes stars,
there wouldn't really be any stars left
'cause that process would have been over.
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And so we know that there has to be more hydrogen coming
into all of these galaxies
to just keep them alive.
So FIREBall, the telescope that I helped build,
is designed specifically to just look at that hydrogen.
Okay so, FIREBall stands for the Faint Intergalactic
Medium Redshifted Emission Balloon
(laughs)
which is a lot
although I think FIREBall is a really good name
but the acronym is like pretty tortured.
(laughs)
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It flies on a high altitude balloon out of New Mexico.
The balloon is because the wavelength that we're looking
at is totally blocked by the earth atmosphere.
And so you either have to put your telescope
in space in orbit
or put it on a balloon
where it's above most of the atmosphere.
So we get pretty good transmission if we're
up at like 130,000 feet, which is where the balloons go to.
But then because it's on a balloon,
it's not, it only stays up for one day.
And so we do one night of observing and then it comes down.
(soft music)
I've been into space as like a general thing
basically my whole life when I was a little kid
I was in like second grade
and my mom told me that there was a contest
on television that scientists wanted people to come
up with a new name for the big bang.
And I looked at her and I was like,
well I don't know what the big bang is
'cause I was in second grade
and she was in the middle of making dinner
so she was like, "Oh, go look it up."
And I went upstairs to our encyclopedia
and I looked up what the big bang was
and I was like, "Oh my God, this is so cool."
And I had never thought about the universe
or space or anything and I remember reading it.
And then in the back of the encyclopedia
on the last volume, there was an Atlas.
And at the back of the Atlas, there was
like a map of the solar system and then a map
of the galaxy and a map of the known universe.
And I remember looking at the page of the known universe
and being like, "Oh my God, this is crazy."
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I really liked school and I like learning
and I was like a pretty nerdy kid
as you might (laughs) not be surprised to learn.
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I want it to be an astronaut.
And so when I was applying for college, I wanted to go
to MIT because like lots of astronauts go to MIT.
MIT has felt like this place
of all sorts of discoveries and science
and I got there and I had a really terrible time.
And it was like pretty heartbreaking in a lot of ways.
MIT at the time was a lot more of like a pressure cooker.
I started getting these like panic attacks and anxiety
which I'd never experienced before.
The day after Thanksgiving, I called my parents
say I was like, "I don't want to be here."
Then I spent the rest of that year kind of like rebuilding
my sense of self 'cause I felt like, Oh, I've really failed.
But I went back to college the following year.
And I made it the number one priority to like be happy
and to do make decisions that were focused on like
what did I want and what did I care about
and not really what everybody else thought
I should be doing.
I was a postdoc at Caltech for four years.
And the professor that I worked
with there actually came up with the idea for FIREBall.
By the time we got out to the field
to do the flight campaign I was running the entire project.
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We all got to the airport where we do
the launches at like 11:00 PM
and then we worked all night to get it ready
and then you just wait.
Around like 10:30 in the morning,
They started inflating the balloon
which is sort of the point of no return.
At that point I remember feeling like, "Oh my God,
this is really happening."
Like it had been so long and so much effort,
but you work on something and you kind of feel like
it's never going to go anywhere.
(somber music)
And then I remember like,
standing there watching the balloon fill up
with helium and then they released it.
And then the telescope flew into the air.
It takes a couple of hours to go up to the altitude.
So the balloon is illuminated during the day
and it gets pretty hot from just the light of the sun.
And then at night it will cool off
and as it cools off, it shrinks a little bit
'cause the gas inside also cools off
and then it typically it loses altitude.
But normally like 10,000 feet of altitude.
Sunset happens and it's dropping
and then we're starting to take data
and I would check every so often
and read out what the altitude was.
(somber music)
And it kept going down
and I was like, "This seems kind of weird."
But I don't know,
I have too many other things to think about.
And then around nine o'clock the balloon people,
so there's a whole separate group of NASA people who just
do the balloon launches,
so I call them the balloon people,
the main guy came down from where
they were doing their work
and he was like, "We think that there's something wrong
but we're not sure."
And then about an hour later, they came back and they said
we think there's a hole in the balloon.
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And I remember them when they told us and I just felt like,
Oh, I do not have the emotional range to run this
and deal with this news at the same time
and so I didn't really feel bad about it
until the next day after we all went home and then I woke up
and I was like, "I cannot believe that this happened."
That was like the best day and the worst day of my life
(laughs) I think.
(somber music)
There's some very experienced scientists who
have done other flights, other balloon flights,
and one of them, the next day he said to me,
"So when are we going again?"
And he was ready the next day.
And it took me a little longer to get there.
(soft music)
What keeps me going is making sure
that I'm happy in the stuff that I'm doing every day.
It's very easy to push through kind of a bad experience
if you're like, "Well, way in the future
or sometime in the future, there's going to be a payoff."
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I think I've learned just from like even really early days
of working on things that that payoff is not promised.
And so if you're waiting for it, that's a bad idea.
What you have to do is like
be happy with how things are each day.
So that even if the payoff never comes
you can still keep going
or you still feel like it will have been worth it.
(soft music)
I have a very serious yoga practice.
So I do yoga every day for about an hour.
And that makes me feel really good.
I'm trying to be able to do a handstand
like a freestanding handstand
in the middle of the room, which is very hard.
But one day I'll get there.
In an ideal world failure will be present in everything.
I think that there's a lot more latitude
for failure in science
because it's such a huge part of the scientific method
and like the philosophy of science.
Ultimately failure is trying something new
and then it not working out
and just because it doesn't work out, doesn't mean
that trying something new, wasn't a good way to go
or that you shouldn't keep trying new things.
And I think that kind of philosophy
of exploration and discovery is really,
could be really valuable in all sorts of aspects of life.
(breaths in deeply)
Even talking about it as failure
like is sort of an, a misnomer
I think for what you're actually doing.
You can like phrase it in a positive way
and not necessarily that it didn't work out.
It only doesn't work out if you stop.
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