Tracy Drain

So, yeah.

Somehow that particular piece did not strike me as being overly complicated.

I think the thing that's hardest when you are developing things to operate in space are all the other things that you kind of take for granted on the ground that aren't there.

Like when you put something in a vacuum, not only do you get to not worry about pressure acting on it, but regular materials like rubber and plastics will outgas.

Yes.

and they will release things off of their surface that can then land on other things like your optical instrument.

Is that what you mean?

Yeah, some types of plastic, sure.

And so you have to be very careful about what materials you use.

And they won't just outgas forever until they go away, but they might just outgas a bit, but enough to put contaminants on your optical instruments that can be a problem for the things that they're trying to measure.

So we have specialists whose whole job is about contamination control and understanding the materials that we're using and what that means about outgassing and what we have to do to keep things warm and blah, blah, blah.

So, yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

And interesting for me, the most vivid image that I have is not really even from the later ones, but it's from when I was in second or third grade and I first read the story of how the solar system was formed and knew that scientists could kind of figure out, based on what they could see today, that we must have been formed from a giant cloud of dust and gas that came together under gravity and other little forces that created the sun and all of our planets.

And just...

That whole idea of us being able to figure out where all of this came from was fantastic to me.

And even artist's conceptions drawn in the book about that are kind of seared into my brain from early childhood.

Yeah, the very first mission I got a chance to work on when I came to JPL as a baby systems engineer was the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

And its job was to get to Mars and then go around in a science orbit for many years.

It's actually still there and operating today.