Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What inspired the speaker to pursue a career in space exploration?
It is a real honor to be here. I was really excited when Alain Philippe reached out, I think last year, reminding me that I was an alum of the College of Humanities and that he was here to really kind of take a new approach to how the College of Humanities operates and how it reaches out to the community and how it communicates the benefits of a humanities education.
And I hope you'll see, as we go through the presentation today, it's kind of a hodgepodge of all the things that I have been involved with, for better or for worse. And kind of just following that creative human spirit that's kind of the theme that I think runs through my career, my activities, and how I try to live my life.
So it's kind of an autobiographical presentation, but I grew up here in Arizona. None of my family members had been to college before, didn't really know what college was or what opportunities awaited for you there. But, you know, I grew up in the desert. I was kind of like a desert rat kid. I scrabbled around in the arroyos and I got to learn all the cactuses.
Was really in love with nature and exploration. And I really, really wanted to be an explorer. That was kind of, when I was a kid, I wanted to go somewhere nobody had ever been before. Set foot someplace nobody had ever been before.
And then, you know, as you start to realize that there's very few places on Earth that you can actually do that anymore, but there's lots and lots of places in outer space.
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Chapter 2: How did the speaker's educational background influence their career?
And I like this one here. I know it's not a great picture, but hopefully you recognize C-3PO and Obi-Wan Kenobi exploring the desert planet of Tatooine. So that was some early inspiration for me. I think I was seven years old when Star Wars came out, and it was the greatest experience of my life at the time. I think as many people of that era can attest to.
But I did end up at the University of Arizona, I was very fortunate, I did well in high school, and I believe there's still a program like this in place, but we didn't have any money, so going to an expensive college wasn't really an option for me, but I did well, graduated in the top ten of my high school class, and because of that, there was a regents presidential tuition scholarship that I was eligible for.
So it really allowed me to to come here and to understand what college was about. I was really clueless when I look back on that. I had become independent. My mom was raising three kids. I was the oldest one. Me and my friends did a lot of backpacking. That was kind of one of our favorite things to do. I grew up on the northern edge of Phoenix.
Chapter 3: What challenges did the speaker face while studying planetary science?
You could actually pack up your backpack and hike out of my mom's and within an hour or so be in the wild desert, which is now all housing developments. But back then it was kind of wild terrain. So I figured out how to apply to college. I got accepted here. I forgot to apply for housing.
So when it came time to go to Tucson, I packed up my backpack and I hitched a ride with a buddy who was heading down this way. And my mom was like, hey, where are you going? I said, I'm heading out to college. She's like, do you need a ride? I was like, no, I think I got it figured out. I was able to sleep on the floor of some friends' houses until I found a place to live.
So that was kind of really self-sufficient. I don't have a lot of photos from this time, but I think these three kind of capture a lot of what my college was about. So this one's one of my favorites.
Chapter 4: What is the significance of the OSIRIS-REx mission?
AP mentioned that I was an American cultural counselor to students coming from Japan to study English for a couple of months here. And that was a great job. First of all, the students were just wonderful, very warm people that we made lifelong friendships with. And my job was to show them what life was like as a U of A college student in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
So it was a pretty good time to be here at the U of A. So they made this shirt for me. Those of you who speak Japanese recognize this is kind of my name. You know, you have to bend the rule a little bit.
but that actually does say Dante, and it means warm hand, which they thought the warm kanji was particularly applicable to our relationship and to my personality at the time, so they thought that was really great. One of the other things I did was own a 72 Volkswagen bus, and showing them American cultural life.
We packed up and hit the road to go tour with the Grateful Dead during the summers, which was kind of the thing to do back then. It was a wonderful era if you were a deadhead. Some of my favorite shows come from that period of time. So we really became great friends and went on great adventures all around the American West. Did lots of camping, lots of hiking, backpacking, that kind of thing.
Chapter 5: How does the speaker describe the process of asteroid sample collection?
I was also studying math and physics. I actually started out in theoretical math. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. And at the time I was kind of exploring my own mind, human consciousness, the limits of human knowledge, you know, I dabbled with philosophy, was very quickly talked out of majoring in that just for practical reasons.
But theoretical math seemed kind of like on the boundary between you could go get a job afterwards and you could also do some really crazy exploration of how the human mind works.
And then I slowly migrated over to physics because I wanted to understand, well, the fun thing about theoretical math is that you can develop logical constructs entirely contained within the human mind that have no application to the physical universe. And I thought that was just fascinating that you
But you can also, of course, create all kinds of constructs that very, very accurately describe how the universe works. And that's the language of science is mathematics. And so I always looked at my study of math as the study of a language. And if you want to describe very precisely how the universe operates, then mathematics is the language that's required to do that.
So I moved into physics and started to learn how to actually speak the language of science by applying that math degree. But I also had a requirement to take a foreign language. That was kind of the general education requirement. Four semesters with foreign language was required.
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Chapter 6: What insights does the speaker share about international collaboration in space missions?
And this was in the 80s, and we thought Japan was going to rule the world. They were buying all the real estate in Manhattan. The Japanese corporations were big, and the economy was booming. And I wanted a challenge for one thing.
I wanted to understand how another culture that's very different than my background and my knowledge and my experience, how they thought, how they communicated, how they spoke. I was really intrigued by the kanji system and how they used pictograms to build up words and concepts. I still am, although I wish I had more time to study and refresh my skills. And so I took Japanese.
I took a first semester Japanese to see what it was like. It was a five credit class. It was very intense. Really enjoyed it. Made a good friend, who I know AP has reached out to, who also studied Japanese, and we challenged each other and spoke to each other.
We were both in that counselor program, so we got a lot of experience speaking Japanese on a day-to-day basis, you know, at parties or out to dinner or just hanging out studying or whatever. And so I took my four semesters.
Chapter 7: How does the speaker engage the public in space exploration?
By the time I was done with that, I had 20 credits built up in Japanese, and then I had other credits like you had to take a non-Western civilization, so I took history of Japan. And you had to take a gender-focused study, so I took women in East Asia. And then I ended up going for a third year of Japanese. So by the time I had all of those, I was up to like 32 credits in Japanese.
I was like, geez, I only need four more credits to get a degree in this thing. So let me stick around. I took... kanji writing for three credits. And I can't remember what the last one was, but there was one more course that came in and allowed me to complete the Japanese degree along with the math and physics double major in the College of Science.
And so I graduated with that wonderful aspect of talent and skills in 1993. There's my mom. The one thing I have to say about this picture that I'll never forget this morning because my mom showed up for the graduation ceremony and we're getting ready to go. And I didn't know how to wear a necktie at the time, so I had to have help tying that around.
And then she's like, where's your cap and gown? And I went and I grabbed it, and the gown was still in the package from the bookstore.
Chapter 8: What future projects and aspirations does the speaker discuss?
And she's like, you didn't iron it? And I was like, what? She's like, it's going to be all wrinkled. And sure enough, when I look at this photo, all I see now are the wrinkles in the gown because I didn't iron it. I didn't even think about ironing my gown before the graduation ceremony. So we ran out the door because we were running late, as usual.
And then we took this picture, which is very prophetic, because right here, I had no idea what I was going to do. I decided I wanted to study planetary science. And in fact, I was going to go to Washington University to work on that spacecraft called Mars Observer, which was ultimately lost in space. But right there is an iron meteorite.
And sure enough, that would come to define my future career. I really became interested in meteorites and the study of the origin of our solar system. And this rock is four and a half billion years old, and it dates from the dawn of our planetary system. So that combination of studies really opened up a lot of amazing opportunities. So I mentioned I didn't know what I wanted to do.
I was studying things because I was passionate and curious, but I wasn't defining a career track at the time. And in 1992, my summer of love, I lived in this van for three months. and toured around the West, lived at Lake Tahoe for a couple of months and hiked and camped and got a job cooking breakfast at a local cafe there to keep some money flowing.
And so when I came back for my final year of college, 92, 93, I got a job at a local restaurant. Those of you who've been in Tucson a long time may remember Mike's Place in Main Gate Square, kind of where the Marriott is now. They knocked it down a while ago, but it was a real dive cafe, famous for nickel pints of Old Milwaukee and 25-cent pitchers.
Just to give you a sense of what their specials were.
And I was the breakfast cook.
They had a 99-cent breakfast special, two eggs, toast, and potatoes. And I worked Saturday and Sunday morning, so I had to be in at like 5 a.m., and I would cook thousands and thousands of those breakfasts to the people who were out the night before partying, which I couldn't do because I had to get up at 5 a.m. and go to work to pay for school.
And then in the fall of 1992, this job ad showed up in the Arizona Daily Wildcat. And it said, if you want to expand your universe and get paid, do we have a job for you? And that just blew my mind that there were jobs like that out there. And in fact, the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, where I now work, was the one who sponsored that program.
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