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