I'm sure you've seen the news that our little Mars Rover friend Curiosity has, as of June 24, been roving Mars for one 687-earth-day Martian year. (Here's a terrific illustrated article about its discoveries so far, thanks to Meteor Blades' Midday Open Thread yesterday.) Curiosity's pre-defined mission, to determine whether Mars could ever have had conditions hospitable to life, was accomplished very quickly when it found an ancient dried-up lakebed, and it continues to gather information as it drives to the base of Mt. Sharp, now less than 2½ miles away. But below the squiggly Martian life-form, I'll tell you about a wonderful thing Curiosity has brought about on Earth.
In celebration of Curiosity's Mars-year anniversary, the Mars Science Laboratory Project planned a special day, Women's Curiosity Day. They arranged to have as many women as possible on duty to staff the worldwide team that does the many jobs associated with keeping the mission running. Just over 100 people were on duty for the anniversary day, and some 75% of them were women.
"I see this as a chance to illustrate to girls and young women that there's not just a place for them in technical fields, but a wide range of jobs and disciplines that are part of the team needed for a project as exciting as a rover on Mars," said Colette Lohr, an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
"There's no practical way any one person could learn all the disciplines needed for operating Curiosity," she said. "It takes a team and we rely on each other."
Disciplines range from soil science to software engineering, from chemistry to cartography, in duties ranging from assessing rover-temperature data freshly arriving from Mars to choosing where to point the rover's cameras.
The press release linked above explains a few of the jobs women fill on the mission. Most work at JPL in Pasadena; on that day, others were also working in 11 more states and four other countries. (And one was on Mars, since the team refers to Curiosity as "she" based on the tradition of ships and vessels of exploration being feminine.)
I highly recommend a visit to the Women's Curiosity Day pages for excellent photos, videos, and detailed information about the women and their jobs. (It would be a terrific source for a kid's school report.)
I must say that it's extremely cheering, after reading this week about the Handmaid's Tale ideas some Americans have about women, to see screen upon screen of women scientists working on something so toweringly cool. Look, here are some now, posing in the "Mars Yard" at JPL where rover testing goes on:
◊ For general information about the Curiosity mission (officially called "Mars Science Laboratory"), see its NASA mission pages.
◊ For information about the appalling 1967 movie Mars Needs Women, see its Wikipedia page, which I select specifically because it quotes the star as calling the film, "undoubtedly one of the stupidest motion pictures ever made."
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