 The purpose of this luncheon is to really encourage young ladies to persist in science, technology, engineering, mathematics. The fact that you're here at the championship of first tells me that you should be seriously considering a career in a STEM field. There's lots of statistics we could share with you. One of them that I find most interesting is that do men and women make the same in the same job statistically? That's right. And on average, for most occupations out there, same jobs women make about 77% of what a gentleman makes, what a man makes. But it's a little different in the STEM fields, and this is where you should feel very encouraged. Statistically speaking, U.S., women make about 92% of what a man makes in a STEM field. And for this reason, wealth brings power, power brings change. This is how we make the world a better place. So you have a unique opportunity as women entering in STEM careers to make a difference in this world. So I really encourage you to continue following the path that you've already started and look for those opportunities. Many of you at your tables or everybody should have a mentor at the table. Can our mentors just raise your hands around the room? Look at this. We've got about 50 technology professionals in the room today sharing with you different entry points into careers, answering questions that you may have. Feel free to answer or ask them any question you can think of. There's no stupid question. They're all good questions and we're here to give you some insight. By the way, I'm Jules Webb. I'm the Associate Director for the Pre-Freshman Engineering Program at the University of Texas here in San Antonio. Are there any PrEP students in the room or former PrEP students? All right. See one of those. So we're a summer program for students to want to kind of get a jump ahead and be prepared for careers in STEM. We are across the state of Texas. We are across the country. So you have questions on that. You ask me and my background is I have a bachelor's degree in chemistry and I worked as an analytical chemist for quality control in a pharmaceutical company for some years and then I moved into education which is something that a lot of women do but it's been a very rewarding career on both sides in academia and in industry. Well, without further ado, I would like to bring up someone who's helped put on the event today as well. So we'll give a big round of applause for Sharon Berg. Come on up. So Sharon and I about a month ago, Patrick Felte, our regional director for first said, there he is in the back of the room. Hey, Patrick said, hey, would you all like to coordinate the woman in technology luncheon for first? And we said, yes, absolutely. And then I realized it was happening a whole month earlier than the year before. Last year we were at the end of March, this year we're at the end of February. So I'm very pleased to say that our community stepped up and our lead sponsors, Hallmark College and Precision Group, Precision Molden Tool came in and made this possible along with 12 table sponsors and you'll see their names displayed on the tables as well as in our program. I do want to recognize and honor all of those that made it possible with their financial support. There's a few individuals in the room that made some personal donations as well. Let's just give them a big round of applause and a big thank you. With that, I'm going to turn the mic over to Sharon who will introduce our keynote speaker for the event. And to give you an idea of what will take place, we will have our keynote speaker, a couple of closing words and then you'll be back off to competition and for all you FTC, you can go back and find out what happened in those Alliance determinations. Thank you. And really we all need to thank Jules because she is a person, if you're around San Antonio, STEM related activities inevitably you will see Jules involved and she also is a mother. She's very active in her profession but she chooses to give of herself so that we can all celebrate as women develop great career paths in STEM related fields. So could we please give a hand to Jules Webb for all her hard work? Okay, show of hands. How many people have read the book Lean In by Cheryl Sandberg? Okay, so you remember in that book there was a reference to a study that was done by Harvard that showed that when men were successful their peers were happy for them. They liked them a little bit more because they were successful but that when women were successful their peers whether they were men or women didn't like them as much. Okay, so I'm going to tell you something. Maybe we're just defying the odds but look around this room. They're in a single person who is in celebrating your success whether it was a man or a woman. So the first thing you need to know is we love you. We are so excited you're here and we're so excited about what you're doing. Thank you. So I have the pleasure of introducing our keynote speaker today and I wish I could say I have this bio-memorized but I have to be honest with you I'm going to struggle with some of the words. They're pretty big. She's a very, very accomplished leader in technology. Susan Pope is the Assistant Director of the Department of Space Science at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. She has a master's in engineering management from UT Austin and she also has a bachelor's in mechanical engineering from UT Austin. If that wasn't enough she's also done many interesting things with Southwest Research and she will tell you about some but I'm going to highlight a few. She has served as a Southwest Research Institute in various roles including the lead mechanical engineer for a variety of sounding rocket science space instruments. She was part of the engineering team to work on the medium energy neutral atom MENA. How many know about that? Okay she might tell you about it later. Imager a part of the image for magnetopause to Aurora mission which is an acronym image. Now my children would love to be in the audience right now laughing at me but I'm doing the best I can. Mrs. Pope was the lead mechanical engineer for the design fabrication assembly and testing for Alice which is also an acronym she'll tell you about that but it's a UV spectometer. Aren't you excited that I knew how because I actually have a guy who in my in our friends we have someone who actually works in that area that is part of the Rosetta mission. Mrs. Pope was the systems engineer for the SWAP which is the solar wind around Pluto and the lead mechanical engineer for the Alice both part of the science payload on New Horizons mission. She was the mechanical systems engineer for the twins which is another acronym which stands for two wide-angle imaging neutral atom spectometers instruments. Mrs. Pope served as the mission systems engineer for the IBX mission and she has overall responsibility for the technical aspects of that mission. Mrs. Pope was recently recognized as a 40 under 40 accomplisher in San Antonio so she's involved in many aspects. I did cut her bio a little short it's much longer we'll make it available online but if any of you were questioning whether we were going to have a high quality speaker today I think you should rest assured you're going to learn something very interesting so please join me as we welcome Susan Pope to the to the podium. Thank you very much Sharon. Okay so I'm going to have to consult notes too because I'm going to talk about launch dates and I don't remember where when everything was launched so um so as Sharon mentioned my name is Susan Pope. I am um I work at Southwest Research Institute which is um about 20 minutes from here in San Antonio and I'm going to start out with just a couple of things about myself and then I'll move into the really fun stuff about rockets and instruments and things so um so about me I was um you can I need to switch the slide see let go all right we're good okay so um I'm not I'm not under 40 anymore so I just turned 40 this year so I can't claim that anymore but um but I was born in England we moved here um I grew up in Houston so we moved here when I was five and I don't have a British accent because I went to kindergarten in Houston and they didn't really like the British accent so um so my mom does though and my dad does and in 92 I graduated from Jersey Village High School I um also went to an engineering camp in between my junior and senior year at University of Houston and to me that was one of the most one of the important things for me to understand you know what did I want to do I always liked science and engineering or science and math and you know I broke the curves on the calculus test and things like that but I was like well what do I want to do and so I it really helped me sort of focus in on what kind of engineering do I want to do you know how how do I want my career to go and so I focused on mechanical engineering pretty much because again I didn't know what I wanted to do and mechanical engineering is very broad um so I graduated in 96 from UT Austin and right after that I started working at Southwest Research Institute and I fell into the job um I wasn't a space junkie I am now um some people that work there in our space science and engineering division have always loved space and I mean I've always loved space it's cool rockets are cool right but um I ended up sort of fell into the job and I love it I've done so many different things and I'm a apologize in advance I tend to talk a little fast whenever I talk about what I do because I love it so much so I try to slow down to the point where I don't think I'm talking fast at all and then it's a normal speed so just as maybe something that you might think of in the back of your head next time you give a talk um but anyway so I've worked there ever since 97 so I've been there a little over 17 years served many different roles as Sharon said and um while working there I decided that I wanted to go into management so instead of just focusing on the technical side I decided I wanted to go into management so I got a I that's when I got my um my engineering management degree from me also from UT Austin and um I have been a manager for a while I was recently promoted to assistant director and then of course the 40 under 40 and then I just recently passed my project management professional exam so I don't know if there's any other PMPs in the room but it was a very challenging exam and I'm really glad I did it um it's interesting how you can pick little snippets out of things that you that you sort of go to a trading class for and apply those snippets in the different parts of your life so so that's about me and when I'm not let's see make sure that flips they got pictures on it okay cute boys pictures so um so it's just a little about me I didn't realize this would be live streamed I didn't tell my husband that his picture is going to be live streamed but um so the picture on the left is me and triathlon so that's what I do whenever I'm not um with my family or working and I have a five year old so we just we stopped at one I was a little decided how we are he starts kindergarten I can't believe he's going to start kindergarten he's this tall um and we travel a lot so I'm very fortunate that I travel for work in sort of unfortunate unfortunate because you stay away from your family but I get a lot of frequent flyer miles so I get to fly my family to different places so Casey's already been to Colorado I think four times in Florida and since I was born in England I have family there so he's been to England and so we're very fortunate that we're able to do it and I exercise not just to stay in shape but to stay sane um when you're really busy I find that you have to find something to relieve your stress and to me exercise is what I do so some people like like to focus it down do yoga stuff like that I'd rather go out and run so um so that's what I do pretty much six days a week um and I have to force myself to fit it in because I don't I really I really do feel it um okay so now the fun stuff so this is I mentioned earlier I work at um Southwest Research and um I work with really really great scientists and engineers we are about 300 in our division and most of them are scientists and engineers although we would never be able to do our job without our technicians and our administrative staff they're amazing and um they the thing that I always think of whenever I'm talking about my career is how important it is to focus on the non that it switched didn't it okay good um is to focus on the non technical side you get an engineering degree and they don't teach you how to write but you got to write a lot in an engineering thing and you have to present um I never took a speech class and when you present technical it's it's easy because you know your technical stuff but um whenever you do something like this or I've been in and I was in the planetarium show that they had out at scoby and I had to stand in front of a green screen and like read what was going in front of me and it was hard it was very hard much harder than designing instruments because I did that every day so it you know and then reading you of course have to read a lot and then of course there's the math and science technical side that you got to know of course um and then the other thing I didn't put up here actually I did it's the very top one I just forgot to talk about it is interpersonal skills um being able to work with different types of people um in in the in the world out there and in school and wherever you are you'll notice that people have different personalities so you realize that in order to work with somebody you have to treat one person different than another person and that's one thing that they really hammer into you in management um but it's something that's very good from a perspective of living in the world um you can't treat everybody the same you have to approach somebody differently um as a woman um as Sharon mentioned as a woman you have to realize that some people don't necessarily like that you're ahead um but you you just have to you know deal with it and go on so okay so fun stuff I have built instruments that are orbiting Mars I don't have pictures of those orbiting the earth um orbiting and going on their way to Jupiter on their way to Pluto and on the way to a comet so um I don't know the count of the instruments that I've designed but I spent the first pretty much six years or maybe eight years of my career um specifically designing instruments so you know scientists have an idea they tell the engineer the idea the engineer goes off and designs it and tells the scientists what you can't do all of that just doesn't work you can't build it um and so so these are pictures that switch to a bunch of pictures all right so these are some of the pictures of the projects that that Sharon mentioned earlier so ibex is the interstellar boundary explorer and everybody should have stickers and um there's some hopefully they're on all the tables there's not enough for everybody I apologize but I'm also procrastinated and so I just ran around this morning at 9 30 trying to get as many stickers and giveaways as I could find so I think there's enough of ibex stickers and if you turn them on the back they have information on the mission there's a little um a paper model that you can make of the magnetospheric multi-scale um spacecraft and so those are again I think there's only five of those on the table so those are just fun things to do you can go on the web and you can print a lot of the stuff out it as it does a very good job at education and public outreach um so where things are so ibex is is one of the I worked on the mission I worked on a couple of the instruments on ibex too um twins is the two wide-angle imaging neutral spectrometer um that was launched there were two spacecraft that were launched um and that um I didn't actually didn't ride down when that was launched I think it was launched in 2002 and ibex was I was eight months pregnant when ibex launched so I won't forget that launch that was October of 2008 um and then IES and Alice and Alice is actually not an acronym so that's okay the scientist that um that was our lead scientist for out for Alice um he just liked it he's like the name he thought was pretty so next to Alice on New Horizons is an instrument called Ralph so some of you may get it some may not um but anyway so we didn't actually work on Ralph we worked on Alice um Ralph was it an in an imager and swap is solar wind around Pluto and I don't have any pictures of the spacecraft but my next slide goes through and tells you sort of where everything is which I thought as I this morning as I was looking at up I thought it was pretty cool but Mina is the first instrument I ever worked on so Mina on the bottom right is a medium energy neutral atom instrument and I started working on that in 97 when I didn't know what the magnetosphere was um now I don't really know what the magnetosphere is but I can at least say it and spell it um but um I mean I can sort of explain what it is but I think if a real magnetospheric scientist heard me explain it they would probably tell me you know what are you talking about but other people it you understand it it's the it's the um the area around the earth that protects us from the solar wind it's pretty much what it is it's how our magnetosphere magnetic magnetic fields interact with the solar wind I do have a little picture of it on the next slide so we'll go to the next slide and this tells you where some of them are so I'll start with the one so the top right picture is showing the magnetosphere so you can see the the lines that are on that picture are the earth's magnetic field and everybody's heard of the aurora I'm sure and so um on the top and bottom of that we see where the lines come together that's called the cusp and that's pretty much where the aurora is and what the aurora is is ions and electrons that are flowing down those magnetic field lines interacting with the with the atmosphere of earth and that's one of the things that we do a lot of studying um the scientists that I work with we we studied that magnetosphere and um the image mission which is the one the MENA was on that was the first one that um that there was a really groundbreaking mission it actually wrote a lot rewrote textbooks on the magnetosphere because they were able to discover a lot of a lot of things um and by the way that's the probably the most rewarding thing about doing what I do is hearing about the missions in the news turning on Discovery Channel and seeing one of the scientists that I work with talk about how the image mission which I built one of the instruments on is discovering things about our magnetosphere it's very rewarding to hear that and know that you designed that little bitty part of it I mean it may just be a little part but at least you helped with it so um the next one that was launched I think it was New Horizons let me check my checklist here no Rosetta was launched first so Rosetta is actually a european space agency mission and that's the one that Alice was on and um Alice was the first sort of my first experience with realizing that I was working designed things for space um I remember I got a call on a saturday night after Rosetta launched that the door didn't open and I'm thinking what do you want me to do about that it's out there in space um but luckily NASA and ESA requires that you do it a lot of redundancy so we tried to fire the door once and this is in order to actually get light into the instrument we had to cover it up because of the contamination and you have mirrors in there you can imagine mirrors don't like particles falling on them and that sort of messes with the optical properties a little but um so I got a call and they fired the as I was on the phone we could hear the mission you could hear the mission um operation center getting the call that um you know they had sent the command to the because they have to send the command out there to open the door which is with our second signal so our first signal didn't work first command didn't work the second command went out and then you gotta wait a few minutes because the signal's gotta go out to the spacecraft and then it's gonna come back to the mission center so I knew it came back when the big roar went up in the room that was excited because the door opened and they were able to see counts so um that was sort of my first wow that's really weird because what I built is way out there and you can tell it what to do um so the other cool thing and you see this in the rosetta um the screen here and you can't read that but I have some links to some websites that you can look at but rosetta is actually um I think it's got a gravity assist from earth mars another one from earth and so it looks like two earth gravity assist three earth gravity assists and one mars gravity assist um to help it get where it wanted to go so that's physics you know once you go out there you got nothing else pushing on you other than gravity from all the different planets and so that's how we get our rock our spacecraft to where they want to go so you can see the rosetta if you look at those numbers um I'm sure you can't read them because they're they're pretty small I just screenshotted it from the website but rosetta is currently 731 million miles away so it's launched I said in 2004 and let's see new horizons was next launched in january of 2006 and new horizons is on its way to pluto um so one of the fun things to looking at this is um I'm going to step down can I step down try not to fall is you can see I don't know does that actually work you can see so the earth's in the center here and jupiter's in there somewhere sort of really close to the earth and that's where pluto is right so the green line is actually where we've already traveled and then the the rest of it is where we are getting to pluto so pluto is two points or new horizons is 2.7 billion miles away from the earth right now and I actually worked on two of the instruments on new horizons try to fall again that's why I work out so I can step up and down on the podium um and so so new horizons was again one of the first instruments I worked on but it hasn't even completed its prime mission yet so it's actually going to get to um to pluto it's just going to fly by it's not even going to orbit pluto it's just going to sort of fly by and we're going to cross our fingers and hope that everything works the way it's supposed to they're doing a lot of tests you know trying to make sure that new horizons is actually going to work they did a fly by of jupiter a really good science there um a lot of understanding about the the area around jupiter so it's going to get there next year so a little over a little over a year from now in july I forgot to actually tell you about rosetta so rosetta was a european space agency mission the other missions that I have on here are through nasa they actually put rosetta to sleep because they didn't have the money to fund all the mission operations and I don't know how long it was asleep but it actually woke up on january 20th of this year and they literally the only thing running was just a little bit of power and they had an alarm clock that went off so I guess the alarm clock told everybody to wake up well all the computers to wake up on the end so they're and everything woke up and so everybody was very excited there and the so the instruments they'll start being what we call commissioned which is pretty much making sure they work the way they're supposed to work okay so next is let's see ibex launch next I told you I wouldn't forget that launch I was here during the launch ibex launched from a small island in the pacific called quadrillion quadrillion is about halfway between hawaii and australia it's definitely the smallest place I've ever been and the only place I've had to rent a bike because they don't have automotive they don't they have like emergency vehicles on the island so when I put my expense account in that was a little funny call from the expense account personnel why did you have to rent a bike because that's what I got from my hotel to the meeting right I mean it's only if the island is only I did ran around the island and you know I got a four mile run in so it's pretty small anyway but um but it was fun to ride the little they were like the old banana seat bikes so they were fun um so ibex launched in 2008 and in October and our prime mission was two years so in at the beginning when we won ibex which is we started working on ibex in 2005 so you're looking at about a three to four year turn on most of these spacecraft and from and that's from nothing to having a spacecraft so just ideas in people's heads sometimes the ideas are more formed than other other times but um generally that's what you're think you're here you think of whenever you think of the um how long it takes but ibex launched into a an orbit and ibex orbits the earth and it launched in October 2008 the prime mission was done in um about two and a half years from there and now we're in what's called extended mission so one of the things they did and again this is cool physics is they fired their thrusters they knew exactly how much delta v to fire their thrusters to put them in an orbit that was not as impacted by the moon's gravitational pull so the initial orbit for ibex was um if you notice did i switch that by the way okay yeah still good um so the blue is the orbit for ibex and so you can see that where the moon is in relationship to the earth we're trying to stay away from the moon because if you get close to the moon we're so we're five six of the way out to the moon so we're at 50 re and it the moon literally pushes our orbit and um it works to get the science we want but then you have to re you have to use fuel to move your orbit around and get it back to where you want it to go and so the orbit dynamics folks who are working on ibex figured out a way to change the orbit so we um rotated like the way it's shown there on the screen where where you avoid the moon um and they did that during extended mission so that way they don't have to use as much fuel so they can last longer so they can get more data um ibex is actually looking at the um the the solar system's helio heliosphere and so the magnetosphere is our sort of protection from the sun our heliosphere is our solar system's protection from interstellar space so it protects us from radiation not of course all radiation because radiation still gets through um but and so ibex actually looks out i consider it like a fish in a bowl so ibex orbits the earth but there's two really big sensors one on either side and it and it is a spinner and so it spins around and it literally looks at a bowl at at at our at our bowl and looks at um neutral atoms that are coming in from the from outer you know past our solar system um again i'm an engineer not a scientist so but i think that is what actually they do um i don't just don't know exactly how they get that data that's i don't know if you guys have ever seen science data before it's like all a lot of times when you see a plotted it's like this rainbow plot and you're like oh that's pretty but to a scientist it actually means something um and so so that's what the scientists that i do that i work for so i put on here distance away from the earth which i thought was really cool the other thing i did for juno's um velocity is so juno is currently moving at 15 miles per second so pretty fast and i think new horizons is moving faster but i couldn't find that very quickly and you can see the juno spacecraft has also had a gravity assist it actually flew by the earth to get to juno um but new horizons if we didn't launch the year that we launched i think if we would have waited six months it would have taken us two more years to get there just because of the way the gravity assists work because new horizons used a lot of gravity assist from the different they when they passed by jupiter they were actually getting it in its grab gravitational field so it would push it around faster so they could get more so that is where they are so now these are just some pretty pictures so this is the magnetospheric multi-scale spacecraft that i um you have that's what the little paper is this is the i started working on mms in 2008 and that's when we started doing our preliminary design for the for the mission and the paper you have there is it's just a little paper model of mms and so you can take the little side part off i can see somebody's already done it um you take the side part off and you have a bookmark and then you can unclick everything that's you need to sort of fold everything back and forth and then you can make a little model all you need is tape i bring it to whenever i talk sometimes at elementary school i've brought it to there and they have fun time putting it together um and on the back of it there's information on you know what is what are the instruments on the spacecraft um and so what you see here did i switch it nope there we go there's the pretty picture it's it is on my screen though because i had to have this screen so what you see here is in the background that's a thermal vacuum chamber so what we have to do with our spacecraft is because we can't go fix it we have to test it as much as we can on the ground so in a sense you sort of want it to fail so you can fix it but you don't want it to fail because then it fails and you got to fix it so but you'd rather it fail here when you're on the earth when you can fix it then up at the up in space so that's why we do a lot of testing and one of the tests we do is make sure that it's going to survive um and so this is mms in the thermal back chamber and then mms there's actually two of them so there's total of four and i'm afraid i'm not going to be able to show my videos you want to see a solid rocket motor launch and you want to see a rocket launch rocket motor fire really loud rocket launch okay we're gonna we're gonna see the solid rocket motor fire so that is solid rocket motor firing that's actually a test that we do so we we didn't do it this was actually done by atk so there's the firing of the solid rocket motor and then i'm just going to switch this is the um and i'm just going to let this this video run while i'm finishing up so this is the websites so the best way to find out about um missions is to go at least on the web so if you're interested in any of these missions you can look on the back of those stickers or you can um look and look here and just do a search for nasa new horizons or nasa juno or um and and then you'll find more informations about the missions and so that's all i had to say sorry i ran a little long so so i don't know about you but i think i have to find a way to use gravity assist somewhere in the next 24 hours