RocketSTEM Issue #6 - March 2014 | Page 55

Kim: I had a bunch of female role models in high school in general because I went to an all-girls high school. But they were not necessarily specifically in the sciences and engineering. I actually particularly like Queen Latifah. It sounds really funny but she is just ... She just seems like a good, strong overall female role model. She’s a rapper and an actress. I heard about Europa, which is one of the moons of Jupiter. At Washington University, Ray Arvidson was my PhD advisor. Ray works on numerous NASA Mars missions. I had a great time in graduate school. As it turns out, I really loved working on Mars. He is a fantastic scientist. He also thinks a little bit like an engineer as well which is unusual for a scientist. Q: Q: Kim: She seems really confident and very sure of herself but not in an overbearing way, if that makes sense. Kim: I worked on both. I was more heavily involved in Spirit. And especially heavily involved in the Spirit extrication effort when Spirit was stuck. I would never have guessed that. Queen Latifah. Why is that? Q: How about astronauts? any other For Ray, you worked on the Spirit and Opportunity MER missions? to communicate with earth. Then when we came out of winter, she just never woke up again. We’re not exactly sure what happened but probably something thermalrelated. Q: Now you’re working on MSL. And the team certainly has some lessons learned from that Spirit episode for how you would operate Curiosity? Kim: Yes, you can’t necessarily determine what the terrain’s going to be like, just from looking at what the surface looks like. To some extent you can. Obviously if there’s bedrock and you can see it, you know that’s going to be pretty easy Kim: I think in general astronauts as a whole were definitely there. But in particular Sally Ride is just fantastic. Valentina Tereshkova is possibly even more important than Sally Ride because I actually got to meet her when I was in high school. That was pretty amazing. Q: Met her in high school. Was that because of your dad or some other reason? Martian landscape scene with rows of striated rocks in the foreground and spectacular Mount Sharp on the horizon. NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover paused mid drive at the Junda outcrop to snap the component images for this colorized navcam camera photomosaic on Kim: My dad took me as a tagalong Sol 548 (Feb. 19, 2014) and then continued traveling southwards towards mountain base. to a conference he went to in DC. I Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken Kremer got to meet her and talk to her. She spoke English, not all that well. But I was able to communicate with her. She’s a formidable woman! Q: What motivated your interest in science and Mars? Kim: One way I got interested in it was thorough my dad. I grew up being immersed in the space program. The other way ... I’ve always been interested in science and engineering but it wasn’t actually until college that I really got interested in planetary science. I spent a summer with the NASA ast ɽ