 Hello, everyone, and welcome to tomorrow, episode 12.08. We're very glad to have you here today. My name is Jared. I'm going to be one of the hosts. And our other host over there, we've got Jade. And we're going to be talking to our very special guest today, who is Dr. Tanya Harrison, the director of research for the Space Technology and Science Initiative at Arizona State University. Dr. Harrison, welcome to station 204. Thanks for having me. All right, so to get things started right out of the gate, one of the things that I noticed in reading up about you was that you look at Morris Pathfinder as the catalyst for getting you interested in space in general. So tell us a little bit about what that was like watching that mission happen. I knew before Pathfinder that I really loved space, but I didn't specifically know what I wanted to do. Granted, I was also pretty young. Pathfinder landed when I was 11. And so when I saw it land and NASA released this little animated gif of sojourner driving off the lander platform and onto the surface of Mars, it blew my mind to think that we were driving a robot around on a planet hundreds of millions of miles away, or tens of millions of miles away. And I would go outside every night and just stare at Mars any time I could see it. And think about the fact that we had robots there. And it was something that was so fascinating. I knew at that moment I wanted to work on Mars missions, even at that young age. And so it's still pretty surreal to me even today, now that I've been doing this for over 10 years, that I actually get the chance to do that. And that's, oh, that is so epic. So, and I heard you mention, you said you already had a love for space by the time you heard about this mission. So what initiated your initial kind of love affair with everything in the sky? There's three main things. One was the book, The Magic Schoollist, Lost in the Solar System. I was absolutely obsessed with that book. Oh, there we go. There it is. My dad, I'm pretty sure he got really annoyed with how many times I asked him to read that book. And if you guys have ever seen the original Magic Schoollist books, they're full of dialogue boxes and conversations between the characters. And I would be very insistent that he read every single bit and every single fact that was in there about space. And he would keep trying to get me to read other books. And I'm like, no, I really want to read this one. Oh, and my parents watched a lot of Star Trek, not like huge Trekkies, but it was something that we watched regularly at home. And so that got me really interested in the idea of space travel. But the thing that really got me in, it's kind of random. It was a movie that came out in the late 80s called Big Bird in Japan, where Big Bird from Sesame Street goes to Japan and he ends up meeting the mythological moon princess, Kaguya Hame from Japanese mythology. And she comes down from the moon and for some reason ends up hanging out with Big Bird. I don't quite remember the storyline because it's been a while since I've seen it, but something about the fact that the moon was incorporated into this story and I was four or five years old. It was incredibly influential. And so I would go outside every night and stare at the moon, usually without a coat on so my mom would come out and yell at me for that. If you're going to go outside and stare at the sky, at least put on a coat. And for some reason, I'm very insistent to not do that. I'm like, no, don't inhibit me. I just want to go look at the sky. That is wonderful. So you eventually went to college and you were really focused in college in working towards Mars with that in particular. Yeah, when I started college, I was like, oh, planets are in space, so I should be an astronomer. But I didn't realize until I was almost done with my undergrad that if I wanted to study Mars specifically, I actually should have been a geologist. And I didn't really want to pay any more money to stick around another year to get another degree. So I switched to geology in grad school. So my undergraduate degrees are actually in astronomy and physics. And my original research started out on different types of star clusters and how much metal we had in them. And these cool systems called Recurring Novi where you have two stars that are orbiting each other and they go nova every so often, maybe decades apart from each other. And so we were trying to figure out why they were doing that. And I made the cool accidental discovery that the systems that would go nova more than once had more lithium in them than systems that were not Recurring Novi. And so that was pretty cool, but it wasn't cool enough to keep me in a astronomer. I was still really focused on wanting to start working on Mars. And kind of how did that work out? Because you were doing that at a time when sort of right at the beginning of the Mars Exploration Rover missions. So that's when sort of like that fresh data was just starting to come back. So what was it like kind of doing that research at that time while you've got all of this coming in from the Mars Exploration Rovers? That was really cool because you had all this new data that you could be working with. And I think it was a really exciting time for Mars Exploration because between spirit and opportunity and then a couple of years later when the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter got there in 2006, there were making, there were a lot of discoveries coming about in terms of things that we had never known about Mars before in ancient watery environments. The stuff that we were learning about had actually make technology that would survive on Mars with the Rovers. And Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in particular was showing us that Mars was a really dynamic place compared to the views that we had from Mars Global Surveyor in the late 90s early 2000s and Viking in the 70s. And so it was painting this really complex picture of Mars that we hadn't really fully understood before. And so getting into it as all these new discoveries were being made was really exciting. That's super epic. So you've had the opportunity, pun intended, to work on quite a few missions pertaining to Mars. So you must have just a huge arsenal of amazing stories. So what are maybe a couple of your favorite stories from working on any Mars mission? Oh, gosh. That's really tough. I'm trying to think of like a specific event. A lot of it was just the daily coolness factor. Like I would be excited to go to work every day if it was a day when I was on shift, as we would say. So when you're working on an orbiter or a rover, usually you're on shift for a little bit and then you'll swap out with somebody else, you know, get back up in case you get sick or hit by a blast or something like that. Cause that happens a lot. Yeah, you know, just gotta be safe. So anytime that it was my turn to be on shift, it was always really exciting and I would come in super early. Like I would go to work at five, six AM and come in and we would get the data down from either the rovers or the first mission I worked on was Mars or Constance Orbiter. I worked on the Context Camera or CTX and the Mars Color Imager or Marsy. And so I would come in to look at the data that we had gotten from the day before. And depending on how close or far away Mars is at any given point, it might be 10 images, it might be 200 images that you're going through. And so just that moment when you were coming in and looking at those pictures and realizing that in a lot of cases you were the first human on the entire planet to ever see that piece of Mars at all or that piece of Mars at that resolution was a really powerful moment. And you knew that you had this really intimate relationship with this tiny piece of Mars for the few minutes that it was there with you before you released it to the rest of the team and the rest of the world. And those moments were probably my favorite. Were there sort of any surprises that would occur during that time period? Like you maybe, like maybe when the images came down in the big context to you, in them getting something like a dust devil in that area or seeing something like that? Yeah, we would catch dust devils. Sometimes we would catch dust storms coming through. We would see new impact craters. So places where we would have one image where there was no crater and then an image that we took days, weeks, even years later where there was an impact crater. So we could figure out whatever the dates difference was between those two images was when that crater must have formed. So that was cool to see anything that was changing and dynamic on these time scales of weeks to months to years on Mars. And Lisa Stojanovski from our chat room is asking if you had to live on Mars time when you were on shift? We worked on Mars time for some of the, what we call operational readiness tests. So I actually left Curiosity before the mission landed. I went back to school to get a PhD. And so I was working on Curiosity for the company that builds its color cameras. And we did Mars time for these simulations before landing so that we could all get prepared for that. It's definitely a weird feeling, you know, you would start going to work at 9 a.m., kind of a normal time. And as the days went by, you'd eventually get to a point where you're coming to work at two in the morning. And it's almost nice to go to work at that hour of the day when you're in a place like Pasadena because there's no traffic to commute on the freeway which you guys can really do in Anaheim. Yeah, it's rough in that area. Yeah, so I didn't mind going in at two in the morning but I just, there was one moment where I went into one of our operations rooms and we were working at JPL on Mars time. And so one had left a giant teapot with like a relaxation tea next to it. And I just interpreted it as someone being like, y'all are really stressed out, you need some of this. Well, that's really, it's always really refreshing to hear about scientists, just pure passion for what they're studying and what they're researching, especially to come in and be stoked at 2 a.m. and to just be so excited. That's amazing. So thank you for sharing that. But, and I promise we won't tell Mars but Carrie Anne Higginbotham in the chat room is actually asking, was there ever a time where Tanya thought, hmm, maybe I'm done with Mars? How's Enceladus doing over there? From like a research standpoint, not really. I love lots of things in the solar system and I think that we should be exploring way more than just Mars. I do feel a little bit bad for like the outer solar system people because it takes so long to get out there and their missions are so expensive. And I think they're a little bit jealous that we get so many launch opportunities for Mars and so much funding goes toward it. But, you know, there's so much that we don't know about icy satellites of Uranus and Neptune. I would love to learn more about Enceladus, figure out what the heck is in that ocean or the oceans of Europa. So I definitely want, I want us to explore everything. It'd be great if we had an infinite budget and really, really big launch vehicles to get there. So Keshia Music 77 in our chat room is asking, what is the major science to come out of Mars? And that's something that's kind of actually evolved over the decades with that. So we weren't necessarily, you know, in the 90s doing what was happening with, let's say like Viking in the 70s. So can you talk a little bit about, sort of like the major science with that? Yeah, so I think, you know, before we ever got to Mars with Mariner and Viking, we had these ideas from folks like Percival Lowell who thought he saw these canals on Mars. And there was this idea that it was covered in lush vegetation and we were going to get there and see these civilizations. And then we flew by with Mariner 4 in the 60s and Mars just looked like the moon. It was dead and cratered. And the first few Mariner missions we sent didn't even fly past any of the water cart features. So it was almost like Mars was this giant left down. We had this amazing vision of it that didn't pan out. And so I think that probably killed a lot of interest on sort of the general public and pop culture side until we got there with Mariner 9. And Mariner 9 just completely revolutionized our view of what we thought Mars would have been like. We suddenly saw evidence for water all over the place. And that really renewed the interest and excitement. And so we started to send Viking to look specifically for life. Unfortunately, the experiments didn't work out so well. We didn't find any evidence of life that could have been a problem with the way the experiment was designed, unfortunately. And so we kind of took a few steps back, well, a long step back when we didn't send any missions through the 80s and a good chunk of the 90s until we had some failures with Mars Observer. But once we get into like the mid to late 90s and we had a few successful missions, the focus kind of shifted to follow the water. And so we really wanted to get an idea of what the history of water had been on Mars. And then when we got to missions like Curiosity, the goal shifted to looking for signs of habitability. So we had established there was water on Mars. We had a better idea of the history of that from Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey and Spirit and Opportunity. So Curiosity was specifically looking to see if the conditions that the water had in the past would have been able to support life as we know it. And it looks like it was a really great place for certain types of life as we know it, maybe three and a half to four billion years ago. So now we're taking the next step with the Mars 2020 rover that NASA is sending next year, kind of circling back to what we were trying to do with Viking. And that mission is specifically going to look for signs of ancient life. So we're finally like at the end of the rope again, like, are we finally going to be able to answer that question, did Mars ever have life? So I'm really excited about the Mars 2020 rover because the two, actually there's three things I'm super excited about with it. One is the cache that they're developing to drop samples into. So hopefully that will keep those samples pristine. So that way if humans land before we get those samples, those samples are still like nice and clean and they're not not ruined by what we may end up dropping and contaminating Mars with. I'm also super excited by the MOXIE experiment which unfortunately the name, the acronym explanation for that currently escapes me, but MOXIE is basically taking in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere of Mars and turning it into oxygen to see if you can actually do what's called in situ resource utilization. So basically like what we're gonna have to do if we go to Mars. And then also the helicopter as well that they're gonna put on Mars 2020 is gonna be epic. And I can't wait to see the selfies that the helicopter takes of Mars 2020 kind of driving around on the surface of Mars because it's always cool to see the images where they kind of like put like, I've seen a couple of the Mars exploration rovers like on the side of the crater, driving there and it's based on actual data, but now we're gonna get like actual real images of stuff like that. So I'm really looking forward to that. Yeah, the helicopter is gonna be really, really cool. So I hope it all works and it doesn't get, de-scoped from the mission or anything like that because I'm just imagining really epic shots of the helicopter over the rover, but also the rover imaging the helicopter. That would be so cool. Oh, that'd be so cool. So from the chat room, there's actually an interesting question from Michael Burke. And so one of the things that you had mentioned as well is looking for signs of past life on Mars, maybe even like current life underground. And Michael Burke asks, is there any technology available that we could send on a mission to Mars where the experimental result would say, there, that's life. So to definitively say that there is or was life there, you'd really need to have some kind of DNA sequencing experiment. And we do have some portable technology to do that on Earth, but it's not fully ready to send to Mars. There's a group at MIT developing an instrument called SETG, the search for extraterrestrial genomes. And the goal of that is going to be the first extraterrestrial DNA experiment. So hopefully that will be sent to Mars and maybe Europa at some point in the future, because otherwise we're gonna have sort of ambiguous results. We had that whole false alarm back in the 90s with the ALH84001 meteorite that got in Antarctica where we thought that we had possibly signs of ancient life in a Martian meteorite. But it was based on these features that looked like something life could have left behind, something that we call a biosignature when we're looking for stuff on Mars. But a lot of those things are ambiguous because they can be formed by other processes like geologic processes too. So if you have a DNA result that is only ambiguous evidence that it is not just a geologic process that's mimicking something that could be created biologically. So let's talk a little bit about what you're doing at Arizona State University right now because that's one heck of a title that you have for that there. So what exactly is space technology and science initiative at Arizona State University? What does that entail? So it's a really cool project that ASU has been doing for about four years now. I came in about three years ago. And the goal of it is to kind of change the way that universities and companies work together in terms of space. So ASU has a really long heritage in terms of success with space missions over the last 40 years or so. Almost any NASA mission that you pick someone at ASU has been involved in terms of the science or the hardware. And in the last decade or so, this industry, this new space industry, so small entrepreneurial startup type space companies, coming out of people's garages or all the way up to folks like Elon Musk are kind of changing the game with how we're accessing space and the way we build space fight hardware and the way we approach it. And so the goal with our initiative is to have the university partner with these entrepreneurial type space companies, not the ones like Boeing and Lockheed, the folks that already know how to get into space, but these newer companies that might need some help getting into space or they don't necessarily know how to cater their proposals to what NASA is looking for. But ASU is really good at that. And so I look for what people on the commercial sector are doing and what people at ASU are doing and then try to find funding opportunities that are relevant to both of those and then say, hey, you guys should talk. Here's a chance for you guys to both make money at the end of the day. And then through that, we can do technological innovations, we can do instrument development development for future missions and we can do some science as well. So it's been a really interesting approach of walking this fine line between academia and industry and not really being fully in one side or the other. That's really interesting, especially because as we talk about the future of space exploration, the goals are getting more and more ambitious, especially with the Elon Musk's of the world who are quite literally defining the next frontier of space. So with that being said, how do you visualize the future of, not just Mars exploration, but I suppose planetary exploration in general? And what are your opinions on actual manned or womanned missions to these different planets that actually step foot and potentially someday in the future colonize? I think starting a little bit closer to home, I think that there's been a lot of discussion on NASA kind of giving low earth orbit to the commercial space companies so that they can focus on the bigger, broader things like sending humans to Mars because there's not really a commercial payoff to that anytime in the near term future. And so it's hard to get people to have, commercially want to go to Mars unless you're Elon Musk where he just has enough money to say, I want to build my own starship and send people there. And I have confidence that he will actually do that, not necessarily on the timelines that they're putting out there. Those are really optimistic, but SpaceX themselves have admitted that that's an aspirational timeline and they really want to give people something tangible to work toward. And so if it's not, oh, we're going to Mars in 2030, 2040, 2050, we're going to Mars in five years. That's a really good motivator for people because it feels so much more real. It's something that they could do in their lifetime as opposed to, oh, 20 years from now, I'm going to be retired. Like that's not something that I can work on. And I think as that road is paved, whether it be through SpaceX and Elon and or through NASA, finally sending humans toward Mars, that will open up a lot of doors in terms of what companies can do to kind of latch on to those missions because SpaceX and NASA, they can't do everything on their own. They're going to need contractors and subcontractors to work on these things. And so I'm hoping that it will spur a lot of technological innovation once that actually becomes real. It still probably sounds pie in the sky to a lot of people. Like, hey, do you want to build something for a mission for humans to Mars? They'll be like, yeah, what's the return on investment for that for my company? That's ridiculous. But once it's a real thing, they're actually sending these starships that they're building to Mars, then it's something that people might actually want to get involved with. So I'm really excited to see how that landscape is going to change over the next decade or so because I think it's going to make a totally different playing field for how we approach planetary exploration compared to what we've been doing with just NASA over the last 50 years. So what do you think are the biggest hurdles that we're still having to contend with both with robotic and crewed exploration of Mars? What are some of those really big challenges that we have to get through first before we can do that definitive mission that says, yes, life was once here on the surface of Mars or that mission where that first group of people ends up landing in their crewed vehicle on the surface of Mars? So the radiation is a big one that we're trying to figure out how to deal with. Conveniently, we've found with the radiation detector on curiosity that the levels at the surface are not as terrible as we maybe thought they would be. It's still not great if you're going to be there for the rest of your life, but curiosity was there during a particularly large solar storm, for example, and the emissions from that particular storm weren't enough to just kill you immediately. So that was a really good sign. We also really need to get a good idea of how we can do this in situ resource utilization. So that's where that moxie instrument on 2020 that you talked about is going to be really important because it takes so long to get to Mars. It's eight months each way and it's so expensive to launch things toward Mars. You can't set up a sustained human base there and then keep resupplying it from Earth. It's just not practical from a cost standpoint. So we need to figure out better how we can be self-sustaining once we're there. And then I think most of the other issues are going to be human related. What is the psychological effect of being completely separated from everyone on Earth? Even when we sent humans to the moon, you can still see the Earth. It is still a recognizable thing in your sights. You're still able to talk in almost real time to mission control to your family. There's a slight delay. But once you get to a certain point in the journey to Mars, you're no longer able to have real time communication with anybody else except the people that are with you on your ship. And that's not something I think we can even really accurately simulate here in Mars simulation bases here on Earth because even if you're trying to simulate that by putting in a time delay between you and the people outside, at some place in your subconscious mind, you know that you're safe. You know that you're actually in Hawaii or that you're actually in Houston. And if something goes wrong, there are ambulances and helicopters and people that are there to help you. But when you're suddenly in the situation where you have no lifeline, if something goes wrong, you are probably dead. That is a huge psychological shift compared to what we've been doing in space before. And I don't think we'll ever really know how people are gonna react to that until we do it. Yeah, that's fascinating insight, especially because I think people kind of underestimate the psychological impact that being on a different planet can have on a person. Because we're so used to being on this one all the time forever and for all of human history. But the few folks have asked in the chat and personally, I'm a little curious myself. All this talk about going to Mars, Tanya, would you go to Mars? Say you woke up in the morning and your director was like, hey, Tanya, via text. Like just sent you like a Mars emoji, a U emoji. Wanna go, would you go? So in an ideal world, yes. But in a practical world, I am super claustrophobic. So I hate even getting on airplanes. So I don't think I could be in a spaceship for an eight month journey to Mars. I might have to just sit here and send rovers in my stead until I can either get over the claustrophobia or we can invent a warp drive or a transport and I can just get there in five minutes. Good answer, good answer. Yeah, so our chat room is kind of asking sort of about like, since we were talking about industry earlier and working with industry at ASU a lot of people are asking about mining projects like off earth mining projects. Do you kind of see like anything like that coming along anytime soon, either from like asteroids or the moon or Mars, kind of with the work that you've been doing at ASU? It's definitely been a popular subject because it's something that potentially has a huge payoff down the line, but it requires a huge amount of investment at this point and you have to be willing to play the long game. Now, mining companies on earth are used to that. They know that you might have to search for a really long time before you hit that super valuable ore body in a particular place. In space though, you're talking about even orders of magnitude larger dollars than trying to do mining operations here on earth. And we had this company Planetary Resources based near Seattle. That was kind of like one of the shining stars of the new space industry story. This was a space mining company. They had these aspirations for mining asteroids but they basically shuttered very recently. And so that was kind of like seen as a big blow in industry to the idea of asteroid mining. But meanwhile, Luxembourg has been doing a lot of investment in space mining companies recently because they have a huge history of mining and investment in their own country. And so they're kind of trying to get on the forefront and say, well, let's continue this Luxembourg legacy into space and we'll start investing in these space mining companies. And so I would keep an eye on them as the next couple of decades come out and see what happens there. I think the challenge is just going to be the company's coming up with a sustainable business model to fund them now so that they can continue the work to hopefully actually get to an asteroid in the future. Nice. So I have two questions. The first one is for the ladies in the chat room who can't stop talking about your earrings. And we're very curious as to where you came across those lovely beautiful rovers hanging from your ears. It's spirit and opportunity. So they're identical on each side. One of my friends actually 3D printed them for me and just gave them to me yesterday. So you can't buy them online anywhere right now, but if she ever decides to sell them, I will be sure to post on Twitter where they are. Oh my gosh. She has a bunch of other spacecraft too and I keep telling her like, you really need to sell these because they are adorable and awesome. They can get really close to the camera, I'm not sure. I know, I want some. Oh my goodness, that is amazing. They're so detailed, like I'm in love with them. They're like like monopoly pieces. Oh, that's so cool. Okay, so. We said that yesterday, we need to make a Mars rover monopoly game. Oh my gosh. And then you could like buy different plots of, okay, you know what, that's an idea. And someone's going to steal it and make a lot of money off of it. There you go. And so, you know, we've been talking a lot about like kind of the future of space exploration, but for you personally, what are you most excited to see happen? Not only with space exploration in general, but with your own, with your personal contribution to it and the line of work that you do. Oh, I feel like that's a weighty question. I mean, for space exploration in general, I really want to see humans get to Mars so that we can start answering some of those really key questions because I don't think we're actually going to definitively be able to determine whether or not life had Mars unless we send humans and we have some really great lab equipment and we can drill cores that are more substantial than just the little tiny bits that we can drill with curiosity at this point. Because if Mars did have life three and a half, four billion years ago, that's going to be really deeply buried under a younger lava flows and crater ejecta and dust that's settled out of the atmosphere. So I personally think that any evidence of life is going to be really deep underground. And so we're going to need humans to get to that. For me personally, I would love to help on this commercial side, this new space sector in terms of helping to create technology so that accessing space is cheaper. And so that the technology that we're sending up is much more capable. We're not so tied to these old heritage instruments which has kind of been the NASA model. And it's really great. It means that the instruments are super reliable but it kind of limits how much you can innovate because you have to base everything on a pre-existing instrument. Now that we have companies that are literally building things in their garages and launching them into space for a fraction of the cost that it would be traditionally. I think that we can start making new technology for space exploration that brings the cost down so much farther that we can do a lot more in terms of where we can go in the solar system and how many missions we can have instead of saying, okay, we have $2 billion and we're going to put all of it into this one mission to Mars or this one mission to Europa. We can spread it out across these smaller more agile missions and hopefully go to more places in the solar system and answer more open questions. I mean to kind of talk about, you know, going to those other places in the solar system, Sarge Enzyme in our chat room is asking if Mars would be a good launch point for missions to the outer planets. That's a good question. I'm not really sure. I guess it does have a lower gravity than the Earth. And so if you had all the infrastructure there where you could build launch platforms and launch vehicles, it would theoretically be a good place to launch the outer solar system. So as long as you got the right rocket to make it happen, it should work well with it, so. You just need all the stuff there first and that's the problem. Like how are you going to build all that stuff on Mars? That's going to take a long time to set up, set that infrastructure up unless you send them to Mars and then launch them again from Mars. But that seems like you lose your cost advantage of the lower gravity on Mars because you're launching landing and launching again. So you might as well just launch Mars. Does Mars sort of have the materials like in its regolith in that area there that could actually allow you to build stuff like that? Or is it wildly different that we would actually have to bring the materials with us? I think that's a big open question. We know that there's stuff in the regolith to generate certain types of rocket fuel because there's methane and there's water. So you have hydrogen and oxygen, you can tear that apart. But in terms of metals, I don't think we have a really great idea of what we could expect in terms of availability, to be able to make steel or more advanced metals. So that's something that we'd have to investigate when we get humans there because we're looking at such a tiny, tiny part of what's on the surface with all the missions that we have generally speaking. Nice. Cool. So I noticed that you, so obviously, you know, STEM outreach is really important and you dedicate a lot of your time to that. So can you talk a little bit about what you do? I think I saw Girl Scouts that you've worked with before you've worked with lots of really cool organizations. So can you kind of talk a little bit about that? Sure. I think the outreach is really important because if we're not communicating what we're doing as scientists, especially scientists that are funded by taxpayers, to the general public, then what's the point of us doing this in the first place? And I also have a very selfish goal of just wanting to make everybody that I meet as excited about space as I am so we can learn out about it together. And I realized as I got older that when I was younger, I didn't have any female role models and that never really seemed to bother me. You know, if people were telling me I couldn't do something because I was a girl, which did happen a few times, I was just like, well, why? I don't care. I'm still gonna do it because it's what I wanna do. But now that I go out and give talks and I go to different events and stuff, I see how being a woman in this position resonates with women of all ages. I get tons of questions from, you know, little girls and I get tons of questions from old women who come up and tell me after my talks, you know, I wish I could do what you're doing, but when I was your age, the only options available to me were, you know, secretary or a coffee girl or things like that. And so they wish that they could have gone into science or engineering. And so I realized after that happened a few times giving these talks that I wanted to put myself out there more so that, you know, girls could see that this was something that they could do. And so I've done volunteer work with the Girl Scouts, expanding your horizons, a bunch of different local community groups in the different places that I've lived. And when I was younger, I did a lot of work with the Mar Society and the National Space Society in Seattle where I grew up, because the people in the chapter there were actually really helpful to me in terms of helping me find career opportunities and job shadowing opportunities when I was a teenager. And so I've always wanted to pay that forward to other people. What would you say for scientists who are maybe interested in wanting to do outreach, but don't really know where to start? And also for enthusiasts as well, just people who really like astronomy or spaceflight and other things, like what would be some really good advice for them to kind of sort of get into making this next generation happen? I think the biggest piece of advice is just to be genuine and be enthusiastic because there's, especially on the science and engineering side, but there's this public perception that we're very dry, boring people and the media in movies and stuff kind of perpetuates this idea. But for me, I use Twitter a lot as my outreach platform and the things that engage most of people are when I'm saying things like the rover is adorable or isn't it super cool that the rover can shoot lasers at rocks? It's stuff that people can relate to as opposed to just putting out there like dry, boring facts. And I think anything can be interesting to someone else if you talk about it with enough enthusiasm. Like you could talk to me about what the composition of your toothpaste is and if you're super excited about it, I'm probably gonna leave that conversation saying, wow, toothpaste is way more interesting than I thought it was 10 minutes ago. So just have that enthusiasm and let that shine and hopefully permeate through other people so that they leave your conversation or leave the talk that you're giving, wanting to share that information with someone else and spread that enthusiasm farther. Oh, that's beautiful advice. I mean, I don't know about you but I'm super jazzed up to go talk to people about space now. Yeah, I wanna know what's in my toothpaste now. I know, right? And I mean, especially that's the entire philosophy of tomorrow is to be able to communicate the story of science and get people as jazzed about it as we are. Jazz. So kind of going back to like outreach and influencing the next generation to pursue these ambitious goals and to pursue the sciences and the STEM fields. A, what would you consider some of the biggest hurdles for people getting into STEM, and particularly females? And B, what advice would you give to a young girl who's perhaps very interested in STEM but a little intimidated by the environment? So the culture is still not great. I don't think that we encourage girls as much as boys at a young age to get into fields like this. And it's evident even just at places like, I don't wanna give any store names to call anyone out but children's clothing sections where you see boys' t-shirts will have things like dinosaurs and rockets and astronauts. And the girls' t-shirts will be things like princesses and ballerinas and dancers. And that's okay if you want to be a ballerina and a dancer, like that is really cool. But all those options should be open to everybody. We should have dancer shirts for the boys and we should have astronaut and rocket shirts for the girls and let them know that they can be whatever they want to be. And we need to make it a more welcoming environment for anybody that wants to come into STEM. I think we need to get rid of sort of the elitist attitude that some people have. It's not something that is just for people that are super smart. It actually feels weird when people say like, oh, you worked for NASA or you're a PhD, you must be really smart. My answer is usually, no, that doesn't mean I'm like a super genius or anything. It means that I worked really hard to study one very particular thing. So I'm really good at Mars but there are plenty of other things that I don't know very much about. I don't know anything about toothpaste. And then when we look at older segments, so once you're actually in university or in your career as a woman trying to stay in science, that atmosphere is still not great either. There are a lot of barriers in terms of the attitude toward having children, sexual harassment, implicit bias and things like that. And a lot of that ends up driving women away at some point. So even if you've got them into the point where they get a degree, they end up leaving at some point. I had a position once before in this field where I was harassed so badly, I started applying for jobs at Starbucks because I was so disenchanted and I was ready to leave the field. And I'm so glad that I didn't because I love it so much that I was like, I'm not gonna let somebody else who can't control their behavior ruin this for me because this has been my dream for so long. But not everybody can push through that kind of stuff. And I'm not saying that that's, I'm not trying to say it's a bad thing for anybody. If you go through something horrible, I'm not saying just push through it. But we need to make it so that that kind of stuff doesn't happen in the first place. You shouldn't have to put up with that stuff to fulfill your dreams and do what you want to do if you want a career in STEM. Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you so much for sharing your story because I think it's really important to shed light on this because as much progress as we're making with representation in STEM, there's still so much work to be done. And I'm very sorry that you had to go through that, but I'm also really happy that you persisted because you're awesome and you're doing so much great work and influencing so many people around you. But what would you say then? I mean, not just, I guess, in the STEM field, but in any general setting, if we see this type of thing going on in the workplace or beyond, what would be your best advice to help be an ally to a person who might be going through something similar to what you went through? I would say, it sounds stereotypical, but if you see something, say something. I didn't have anybody at my old workplace that really stood up for me, even though they knew what was going on. Everyone was just so scared for their own positions that they didn't want to come out and say anything. And that was really hard to see because I felt like nobody was willing to help and it was a really isolating feeling. And that made me stand up for people a lot more in future places where I was at. I didn't stand for anybody being treated badly and sometimes that made things more difficult for me because I was very vocal about calling things out when I saw them, but I couldn't just sit by and watch people be treated inappropriately. We need to not be scared and I can understand why it's scary to try and stand up against that kind of behavior, especially if the person that's perpetrating it is someone very senior in your company or your institution. But we need to be supporting people so that we can stand up against them because if nobody does, then that behavior will never stop. Yeah, and see something say something that's really the best way. You couldn't have said it any better than that to really change the culture. Maybe not just a place, but maybe an entire industry as well working with that. So you never know what the catalyst is gonna be that ends up revolutionizing and kind of bringing in the right people in order to change things with that. So that's a fantastic way of going about it. So thank you for that. No problem. Yeah, and I kinda wanna ask a little bit about sort of like future projects that you're gonna be working on. Sort of what are some of the things in your future that you're going to be excited about? What are some of the things on the horizon that you can talk about with us that you really wanna share with the world? I'm really excited for the Mars 2020 rover. So I'm a science team collaborator for the Mascam Z cameras, which is short for Mascam Zoom. And these are gonna be the color eyes of the rover where we can zoom each camera on each side of the rover to take different pictures and we'll get stereo coverage in 3D and in color. So that's gonna be really cool. I'm also doing a lot of work sort of on the commercial space side in terms of earth observing. So coming back a little bit closer to home using data from a company called Planet. And they are super cool. It's a company that started in basically someone's garage, three NASA employees that used to work on earth observing type things decided that they could change the way that they built satellites. And so now they have about 200 satellites in orbit that are huggable size. They're like, you could hold them in your hands. So the actual satellite is this big. And they have so many of them in orbit that they can image the entire earth every single day at a pretty high resolution. And so their goal is to be able to see changes on a short time scale so that people can use that in decision making for anything from growing crops to trying to mitigate the effects of climate change. And it's such a powerful data set in terms of what you can do with it because we've never had data like this before and it's really revolutionizing what you can do. And so I'm trying to think of ways that we can use things like machine learning to ingest this gigantic data set and give us some new insights on things. For me personally, mostly related to landslides. I want to see what this can tell us about landslide hazards around the world. Yeah. And that's a lot of data to go through too. An entire planet's worth of data in a single day. So but like you said, that's a pretty powerful set of tools to work with as well. Yeah, I think their data collection rate at this point is 150 terabytes a day. It's absolutely incredible. Yeah. And you said those satellites are huggable so they're like maybe a little bit bigger than CubeSats kind of with them there. So it's a 3U CubeSat. So they're pretty small. Yeah. Changing the way it works. So they do these satellites. So it was super cool. Anything else you want to tell us about? Cause I mean, you had like a really cool career and you worked on the Mars exploration rovers and opportunity just recently, you know, was declared end of mission. So was there kind of like a feeling from you about that? And maybe meeting up with colleagues about that as well. Yeah, that was rough. I mean, I remember watching opportunity land in 2004 when I was in college. And at that point, you know, I knew I wanted to work on Mars rovers, but I had no idea I would be working on that Mars rover. There was no thought that it would still be around by the time I was working on these missions. And so that was a really cool full circle kind of thing to actually be working on OPI. And I had been on the mission for about three years when we lost contact with her. And it was really sad because I was on shift for Pancam, the color cameras on opportunity, the week that the giant dust storm hit. And every few days or so, we take a picture of the sun with the Pancam cameras to see how much cred is in the air, basically. And the week that we lost contact, we took a picture of the sun on Wednesday of that week in June of last year. And you can see the sun looked fine. But then three days later, we took a picture of the sun or we tried to take a picture of the sun and it just looked like snow on a TV screen. And I got some frantic emails from people saying, is there something wrong with the camera? You know, what's going on? Are we not pointed at the sun? And I had to say, no, the camera is working fine. We just can't see the sun. And then the next day we lost contact. Yeah, I mean, it's funny because we were kind of conflicted here on set because it's like, yes, it's always sad to say goodbye to a mission, especially one that gave us such amazing data for so long and just really went above and beyond what we expected it to do. But at the same time, it really kind of was dragging on towards the end there. And it was one of those things that's like, okay, all right, is it goodbye now? Okay, maybe. It's like one of those awkward kind of drawn out goodbyes when you're still walking to like the same place but you're just kind of, all right, bye. Yeah, and I mean, the missions was so wildly successful that you can't necessarily be sad about the end of the mission because it did much more than we expected it to. And it was still an absolutely amazing rover. But it's still sad in terms of, this is something that had been part of some people's lives for 15 or 20 years. And then suddenly to have that gone is a big adjustment. There are other missions people go to work on. People are being shuffled around onto new missions and whatnot. But it's still kind of sad. It's like saying goodbye to your dog or something. Yeah, or a friend you've spent a really long time with. With it there, yeah. So, yeah, now that I'm feeling awful. With that. Not to end on a sad note or anything. Yeah, unfortunately, with it there. But Dr. Harrison is here. If anybody wants to know more about you, how can they find out? I guess the easiest way is to follow me on Twitter at Tanya of Mars, Tanya with an A. And yeah, I'm happy to answer anybody's questions about Mars or being a woman in STEM or careers in the commercial space industry. Just find me on Twitter. Yeah, and Tanya, thank you. You'll be a very worthy earrings. Yeah, well, we definitely do know when the earrings, the rover earrings are for sale publicly. And those are dropping. Yeah, that will, those will go away very quickly. So thank you so much for coming on today. We were kind of joking before the show that we wanted your tag below to be like a great ruler of Mars with the amount of experience and amazing stuff that you've done with all of the missions to Mars. So thank you so much for coming out on the show and talking with us today. Thank you for having me. This was great. And before we go, I do wanna thank all of our patrons of tomorrow, of course. We have our escape velocity citizens. These folks give us $10 or more per episode and they get a whole lot of goodies with that. And also, we also have our orbital citizens. These folks give us $5 or more per episode. And they also get some goodies too. I mean, everybody, if you're a patron of tomorrow, you get some goodies with that because we also have our suborbital citizens. Can you believe it? Oh my gosh. These folks give us $2.50 or more per episode. And I just realized, you know, if you go on a virgin or a new shepherd flight, it's what is it, $250,000? Exactly. So that makes sense why our suborbital would be $2.50 with that there. Very good. And then of course we have our ground support citizens. These folks give us a dollar or more per episode. That's all you have to give, you know? And every little bit helps us out here because we really can't do this show without you folks contributing to us and helping us make this happen. You know, we don't have our studio. We don't have our equipment. We don't have Ben worrying before the show starts about things that we're thinking of. We don't have Dutta with his nice hats with that here. So, you know, so really this show is powered by all of you who watch us. It's not, you don't necessarily have to contribute to us. I mean, if you want to, you can go to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O to do so. But also subscribing to us, hitting the notification bell, wherever it is on the screen here and you know, following us, getting the word out about us and just basically telling everybody about why space is awesome and helping us do that. That is really what helps make this show possible. So that's it for the show. Speaking of possible, I think it's possible to wrap up the show now because it's technically the end of it. So thank you all for tuning in to 12.08 and we will see you next time. Have a good one.