Zitat des Tages von Ellen Stofan:
I'm so biased to this issue of the origins of life and the limits of life.
There's a huge question of whether you really need water for life.
Instead of being able to look at smaller interesting research projects, I am trying to see the links between all the research NASA does. For me, that's extremely fun because I get to go play and learn about areas of science that I know nothing about.
As chief scientist, it's sort of my job to look at bridges between what we do and to see the connections. But when we try to understand how are planets around other stars habitable... to looking back at the Earth - how are the changes that are taking place, how are they going to affect humanity?
I live an hour from NASA's HQ in Washington, D.C., and sitting in a jam stresses me out.
You see countries like India really investing in their space program because they see it as inspirational and good for their economy.
We want to make sure we get living astronauts to the surface of Mars.
When we go to explore, we do it as a globe.
What we expect to find, certainly in our own solar system, are probably simple single or multiple-cell forms of life. To get to intelligent life takes stability of conditions over huge, long periods of time.
We actually look to the scientific community to kind of come back to NASA and tell us what the priorities should be. And then at NASA, we try to look within our budget and say, 'What can we accommodate, and what are the most important things for the nation?'
Prior to Magellan, due to the fact that we knew it was so hot on Venus, we thought that the rocks at the surface would behave more plastically, more like Silly Putty than like solid rock in the way that we think of it, like the rocks that I'm sitting on.
I grew up in this business... A lot of my life has been centered around this question about how NASA is helping us to understand our own home planet... and to understand our place in the universe.
I'm actually a NASA brat. My father was a rocket scientist. He started working at NASA before it was NASA in 1959.
With the mission to Mars, the whole world wants to get involved. So we actually have 13 different space agencies from around the world working on the global exploration road map.
One of the big things about space exploration is that it is as expensive as it is complicated, and you need all the countries of the world to help if you want to accomplish big goals.
People see space as a place where you go and cooperate.
Mars missions will require up to three years in reduced gravity, so we need to make sure astronauts can not only survive but thrive as they move outward to explore this new world.
We like to talk about pioneering Mars rather than just exploring Mars, because once we get to Mars, we will set up some sort of permanent presence.
If you think of the Apollo capsule coming into Earth with a parachute, the Mars atmosphere is just so thin, you've got to find some way of slowing yourself down really rapidly.
We're not going to get humans to Mars until at least the mid-2030s, and the world is going to change by then.
To avoid congestion, I get up at 5:10, grab a slice of raisin toast, and leave the house at 6 A.M. My husband, Tim Dunn, who works for an environmental agency, is still asleep when I slip out, and I find that rather annoying.
