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Carol Raymond
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An interview with Carol Raymond:
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Meet Dawn's Deputy
Principal Investigator, Carol Raymond.
The following interview took place in Houston, TX
on March 13, 2004, between Dawn mission Deputy Principal
Investigator Dr. Carol Raymond (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
and Education and Public Outreach team member Jacinta
Behne (Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning—McREL. |
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JB: What is the role of the
mission Deputy Principal Investigator?
CR:The Deputy Principal Investigator assists
the Principal Investigator in leading the mission. I also
am the day-to-day interface between the science team of the
mission and the engineers and technical people who are responsible
for implementing the mission. So, I am a team member who tries
to integrate the outside science elements with the JPL and
the distributed team that is putting the mission together.
JB: How did you get interested
in planetary science in general and asteroids in particular?
CR: In my early career work as a marine geophysicist,
I studied the Earth’s magnetic field as recorded in
the volcanic rocks on the ocean floor and motions of the Earth’s
tectonic plates. After studying all of the aspects of the
Earth’s magnetic field, the tremendous discovery of
the magnetized crust on Mars was revealed. That opened up
a whole new area of research for me. I began looking at the
differences between magnetic field generation on the Earth
and on other planetary bodies, and what it reveals about how
they developed. It was then not a large leap to decide to
look at the evolution of other planetary bodies, including
the asteroids.
Now on the Dawn mission, we are no longer going to be studying
the magnetic fields of the bodies. But their internal evolution
can be revealed by other means, for instance, gravity, data,
the topographic data, and what has ended up on the surface
of the bodies as a result of their geologic evolution. So,
I have come to the Dawn mission by a fairly long and sometimes
convoluted road, but I am very happy to be part of it. It
is a very exciting mission.
JB: How has the field of planetary
science changed since you first entered it?
CR: The field of planetary science has experienced
a rapid growth since I first became interested in it. Planetary
science is moving from an era of reconnaissance missions,
in which we visited all of the planets of the solar system
except for Pluto, to one where we’re planning highly
detailed observations and investigations. This includes some
time in the future where we plan to actually grab samples
from these bodies and return them to Earth. Of course, Earth
is a planetary body, but the approach to studying the Earth
is somewhat different in that we know an awful lot about how
the Earth has evolved and we’re now trying to study
some of the processes that shape the Earth in detail. Whereas
when we approach other bodies, we know so little that we are
really trying to work out the fundamentals of how these bodies
were formed, how they evolved, and what things on the surface
tell us about processes in the interior. It is a very different
approach to studying.
So, we are on the verge an explosion of knowledge of what
makes up the other bodies of our solar system—how they
evolve and how the whole solar system has evolved over its
more than four billion years of evolution.
JB: How might you help me explain
to school children what plate tectonics is?
CR: Plate tectonics is the study of how the
Earth’s surface moves and how new material is created
from magma that erupts from the Earth’s interior, and
is destroyed as material sinks back into the interior on a
planetary conveyor belt. Basically the Earth is covered with
a series of plates, both large and small, and they all move
relative to each other. You can think of the plates on the
Earth as a thin crust that forms because of the coolness of
the surface vs the heat of the interior. So the plates are
riding on a much warmer and yielding “gooey” layer,
sometimes called substrate. They bump against each other;
they slide; they go under each other; and they also spread
apart where material comes up from the interior. The material
inside the Earth is convecting so that the warm material rises
under the mid-ocean ridges. When it gets cool, it sinks in
the broad “subduction” zones where plates collide,
mountains are built, and the weaker plate is forced back down
into the warm interior in the subduction zones. You can think
of it as the way that the Earth regulates its heat from the
interior to the surface.
It is also a very important part of why the Earth is different
than other planets. In addition to having a heat cycle, there
is also a cycle of chemistry wherein material from the surface
that’s rich in water-bearing minerals is going back
into the deep interior of the Earth. It’s bringing the
water with it and it turns this whole engine—similar
to when you put a little water in a blender with a bunch of
stuff in it—it starts to turn a lot faster. So we have
a really interesting situation on the Earth where we have
a lot of water and the water is in the atmosphere, it’s
in the oceans, and it’s also in the interior. That seems
to be one of the ingredients that makes the Earth as a planet
different from some of the other planets like Mars.
JB: Outside of your
expertise in planetary science, can you share with us any
other area or field of interest?
CR: There are other applications to the work
that I do. One other area that I have been quite interested
in is studying the interaction of planetary bodies with the
solar wind or the wind streaming off of the sun, which is
buffeting all of the bodies in the solar system. Magnetic
fields of planets basically create a shield against this stream
from the sun and that shield protects us from harmful radiation
and other effects. So, studying the magnetic field is a way
to trace some of the processes of that interaction between
the planetary bodies and the sun.
JB: How does the term “magnetosphere”
apply to solar wind study, and do Ceres and Vesta have magnetospheres?
CR: The magnetosphere is that cocoon that
the Earth lives inside of; it is the boundary between where
the solar wind streams regularly away from the sun, and the
obstacle that the Earth’s magnetic field presents to
it. You can look at it as kind of a pressure boundary between
the magnetic field of the Earth, the magnetosphere which is
protecting the Earth, and where it no longer has any effect.
We don’t think that Ceres and Vesta have magnetospheres.
But the interesting thing is that in the past, Vesta in particular
may have had a magnetosphere, because some of the meteorites
that come from Vesta have some magnetic material in them,
indicating that the protoplanet may have had a field of its
own in the past. We know that Mars had a very strong magnetic
field in the past and therefore should have had a strong magnetosphere,
and we know that Jupiter also has a very interesting magnetosphere.
So we have a lot of planets in the solar system that have
or have had magnetospheres in the past.
JB: There are so many asteroids
out there and lots of meteorites. How would you identify one
that came from Vesta?
CR: The way that we know that some of the
meteorites that have fallen on the Earth have come from Vesta
is by matching the spectra of the minerals in the meteorites
to spectra of Vesta that we have obtained with telescopes.
A spectrum is basically a signature of the minerals that are
in the rock. You obtain it by looking at the radiated energy
coming off of the rock. You get certain peaks, which correspond
to certain minerals in the rocks. This is a very unique signature.
Now when we look at Vesta with a telescope, even though we
don’t have tremendous resolution of that signature ––it’s
a little bit fuzzy ––there has been a confident
match made between the spectra from the body itself, way out
in the solar system, and the pieces that have fallen on the
Earth. This connection is now fairly well established. It
was first made in 1970 by one of our team members, Tom McCord,
who was at the University of Hawaii (where he’s spent
most of his career). He now splits his time between Hawaii
and Washington State.
JB: What is it about your work
on the Dawn mission that you find most exciting?
CR: Working on the Dawn mission is very exciting
because it presents a lot of challenges, and of course along
with great challenges come great rewards. Some of the things
that really interest and excite me are making the mission
happen. It is so wonderful to take something that you conceptualize
and then start to go through the process of turning it into
a reality. Every step along the way there are decisions to
be made. A lot of work has to be done to get all of the details
taken care of. There is a tremendous sense of accomplishment
when you actually work through each step of the mission and
see the final product take shape.
JB: You mentioned challenges
and noted that “with great challenges come great rewards.”
In your opinion, can you identify some of the great challenges
of the mission?
CR: Some of the large challenges in working
on the Dawn mission are first of all simply getting the spacecraft
with all of its instruments to the launch pad on time. There
is so much work that goes on to put it together; it’s
a daily grind. Basically, it’s a lot of work, and a
lot of people working together. Problems continually arise
and you have to solve them. You are in a constant problem-solving
mode from the beginning of spacecraft design until getting
to the launch pad.
Then, we have the job of planning how to operate that spacecraft.
Once it launches, we have to get to know it. It’s going
to have a personality. We have to figure out how to make everything
happen smoothly, how to keep the spacecraft happy, and how
we are going to get all of the science data that we want.
We want to squeeze every drop of data out of the mission.
We’re going to be constantly studying and optimizing
how to operate the spacecraft. Once we get the very rich data
set, we’ll have to work with it, getting it all analyzed
and published. It’s such a vista of opportunity for
science that it’s hard to convey how exciting it is.
JB: If you are the deputy principal
investigator located on the west coast, and Orbital, the builder
of the Dawn spacecraft, is located on the east coast, how
closely can you work together to ensure that that spacecraft
is going to be ready to perform its duties?
CR: The Dawn team is distributed all over
the globe. We have the Orbital Sciences in Virginia. We have
the team building the framing cameras in Germany, and the
team building the visible infrared spectrometer in Italy.
We have Los Alamos Laboratory building our gamma ray neutron
spectrometer and we have team members from universities and
institutions in both the United States and Europe. So the
team is distributed across about 12 time-zones. We have to
interact with each other in a very methodical way. We have
lots of telecons, where we are getting up early in Pasadena
and everybody in Europe is getting ready to go to bed, and
then we have the East Coast in the middle. But this will work
as long as everybody’s committed to it. The other enabling
factor is, of course, the Internet, where we can exchange
our files and information effortlessly. Another important
aspect of running a mission with a distributed team is to
write it down. You have to have documents. You have to have
a very formal way of letting everybody know what is expected
of them. One of the things that I discovered working on the
Dawn mission that I didn’t fully appreciate is how important
the rigor and the methods are in success for these missions.
JB: In your opinion, what new
science understanding will the Dawn mission provide?
CR: I believe that the Dawn mission is going
to teach us a lot about how the inner solar system—the
terrestrial planets—evolved differently than the gas
giants in the outer solar system. Jupiter and Saturn have
very low densities; they are gas planets. The inner solar
system consists of rocky bodies. In the transition between
those two major types of bodies in the solar system lies the
main asteroid belt. Within the main asteroid belt, we have
identified two of the largest objects, Vesta and Ceres, where
we have the same sort of fundamental difference—Vesta
being a higher density, more rocky body and Ceres looking
like a much lower density body that has a lot of water in
it. So, we are looking at this fundamental boundary within
our own solar system—how the material changed and evolved
at the very start of our solar system. We believe that we
are going to learn something fundamental about the beginning
of the solar system by comparing and contrasting these two
bodies.
JB: How long have you been
at JPL, and what is it like to work at a space science research
laboratory?
CR: I have been at JPL for fourteen years.
It is a very unique place to work. There are about 5,500 employees,
of which about 500 are scientists. It’s an enormous
machine that is very well honed, and the Lab produces some
of the most innovative work that is going on in our country.
It is a tremendously exciting place to work. One of the aspects
that I like best is that in addition to having a lot of scientific
colleagues whom I highly value, I also get to interact with
engineers, all manner of technologists, and people who know
how to get things done. It is a very fertile, high-paced environment,
and one in which you can really innovate and achieve things
that are sometimes inconceivable. I have heard from people
outside the Lab that they just can’t believe what people
do there. It’s true, and there are lots of times that
I can’t even believe the things that people do. Having
that environment where you have all this activity going on
around you really enables you to reach a potential that is
just fantastic.
JB: What have you found to be
the most fascinating thing in your work in the Dawn mission?
CR: One of the most fascinating things for
me about working on the Dawn mission is finding out, in great
detail, about all of the different aspects of science that
we are trying to accomplish on the mission. As it turns out,
almost all scientists specialize at some point early in their
career. They focus on a few problems that they have spent
a lot of time studying. However, this mission is so comprehensive
that there is a wide range of different methods that we are
using to study these two bodies. Now I am learning a tremendous
amount about fields that I wasn’t familiar with and
I know that I will emerge having learned a tremendous amount.
To me, that is one of the huge benefits of working on a mission
like Dawn.
JB: What kind of advice would
you give to a young person who is considering a career in
the field of planetary science?
CR: Start with the basics. Math is very important,
but there are a lot of other skills that one can and should
have to be successful. Begin with a curious mind, very strong
communication and writing skills, and be able to be objective.
Then, after getting a good education, don’t be afraid
to follow your own idea from its conception to reality. Science
is one field where you can really make unique contributions,
where you can really have your own path through life. It is
a wonderful feeling to be able to conceive of an experiment,
carry it out, and feel that sense of accomplishment when it’s
done. And that aspect, plus the incredible tremendous teamwork
that goes on in carrying out a complex science experiment
or a mission, is another aspect where you really make life-long
experiences and achievements. So, my advice would be that
if you want some adventure, if you want to work hard, if you
want to do work with teams, ...if you want to see an idea
from conception through its ultimate goal, science is a wonderful
field to work in. It is highly rewarding.
JB: With your experience as
a woman in the field of space science, what kind of advice
would you offer to a young girl who aspires to enter this
field?
CR: I would advise any girl who is interested
in doing independent science research or technical work to
remember that competition is all around you and to succeed
you have to compete. One of the qualities that many successful
woman I know have is that they were very competitive in sports
or they had some other aspect of their lives that let them
build confidence and believe in themselves. I think that is
one of the important aspects of becoming successful in any
field—but particularly in science, where you really
have to depend on yourself to get your programs started and
to be successful in them.
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