Sky's Up January-February 2018 | Page 64

moments . But if she had listened to one of her high school advisers , she might have missed it all . “ One of the first places that I really came up against a feeling of gender difference was actually in high school . There was an adviser I was talking to as I was getting closer to graduating . I said ‘ I ’ m thinking that I maybe want to major in math , maybe in science ,’” she recalled . “ He just sort of looked at me and said , ‘ Well , you know those are not careers that women usually head toward . You should think more about becoming a nurse or a teacher .’ He was very serious , he really , really meant that .” This advice ran contrary to what Spilker had been raised to believe . “ My mom was very supportive . I was the oldest of four girls , and she had loved math , too , and had run into this problem where she was the only girl in her algebra class ,” she said . “ She felt the peer pressure to stop taking math after algebra , but she loved it and was really good at , so , as a consequence , we heard all along ‘ women are good at math , women can do science , you can do anything you want to do .’” After high school , Spilker headed to Cal State Fullerton where she was one of only a handful of women majoring in physics . The department ’ s sole female professor — Dorothy Woolum — quickly took Spilker and the others under her wing . Working with Woolum for a couple of summers on a meteorite study funded by a National Science Foundation grant kickstarted Spilker ’ s interest in becoming a researcher . “ She really encouraged us and supported us and was an excellent role model for us ,” Spilker said . After graduating with a bachelor ’ s degree in physics in 1977 , Spilker started at JPL where she was presented a choice between working on an extended Viking mission on Mars or a new project called Voyager . “ I asked where ’ s Voyager going , and they said Jupiter and Saturn and if

Sky ’ s Up all goes well then on to Uranus and Neptune ,” recalls Spilker . “ I remember looking at Jupiter and Saturn through my little telescope , and I said sign me up . I want to go to the outer planets .” Spilker worked with the infrared and photopolarimeter teams on Voyager and ultimately went back to school to get a masters degree in physics and a Ph . D . in geophysics and space physics . In her thesis , she used Voyager data on the rings of Saturn , Uranus and Neptune . After years of working with the Voyager team , she was offered a job on a new mission — Cassini . “ The chance to go back to Saturn — the planet with the best rings — was too good to pass up . I started working on Cassini in 1988 and have been with the mission ever since ,” she said . Throughout her long career , Spilker has witnessed a gradual positive shift in gender equality in the science community . “ Certainly compared to 40 years ago , there ’ s much more support for women in the sciences and in the technical fields ,” Spilker said . “ Now , you find many more women working toward degrees in science and engineering , and you ’ re seeing more women in the top levels of management at JPL or within NASA .” On Voyager , all of the lead scientists and almost every scientist on every instrument team were men . Spilker would often find herself the only woman at a meeting . Although she felt she was treated as an equal and taken seriously , she was aware of the disparity in gender representation . “ Sometimes if you ’ re the only woman , it ’ s tough to be heard . The evolution I ’ ve seen over the four decades I ’ ve been there is that with the growing number of women at all levels on the projects I ’ ve worked on , it ’ s just made it that much easier to feel like my voice is heard and respected . I think in some ways Cassini is unique because there are a lot of women in a variety women in astronomy

COURTESY OF Library of Congress

Born on December 11 , 1863 , Annie Jump Cannon earned her place in the annals of astronomy by developing a system for classifying stars by their spectra . In the late 1800s , Cannon joined a group of women hired by Harvard College Observatory Director Edward Pickering to pour through astronomical data and catalog the stars as part of an effort that led to the Henry Draper Catalogue . While working on the project , Cannon refined the classification systems of her predecessors to create what became known as the Harvard Classification Scheme , which is still in use today . Throughout her life , Cannon classified around 350,000 stars and discovered hundreds of variable stars . A graduate of Wellesley College , Cannon was the first female recipient of an honorary doctorate from Oxford University , the first woman elected as an officer of the American Astronomical Society and a recipient of the illustrious Henry Draper Medal from the National Academy of Sciences .

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