A conversation with Elizabeth Pane, ISS Payload Manager in the Flight Systems and Implementation Branch at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.
Transcript
Host (Matthew Buffington):Welcome to the NASA in Silicon Valley podcast, episode 28. This past weekend was an exciting one for anyone interested in space. SpaceX returned to flight in a resupply mission to the International Space Station. Not only did they launch into space, but they also stuck the landing on the way back. The Dragon capsule is still in space and on its way to dock with the International Space Station this week. In these commercial resupply missions include interesting science experiments to advance scientific knowledge in Earth, space, physical, and biological sciences. Almost every resupply mission has included a life science payload from NASA Ames. Today’s guest works directly with getting everything in order to make those payloads ready for launch. Elizabeth Pane is an ISS Payload Manager in the Flight Systems and Implementation Branch at NASA Ames. We discuss several science experiments that are already on the space station and some that will be on their way in the coming months. Without any delay, here is Elizabeth Pane.
[Music]
Host: Thank you so much for joining us, Elizabeth. Tell us a little bit about yourself, mainly how you joined NASA in the first place, how did you get to Silicon Valley, what brought you to the wonderful world of Ames?
Elizabeth Pane:So I am from San Jose, California.
Host: Awesome. A local.
Elizabeth Pane:Yep, I’m a local. So I always saw Ames as my local center. And honestly from age five, I said, “I want to work at NASA.”
Host: Did you come to the visitor’s center and stuff as a kid, driving on 101 or Space Camp or something like that?
Elizabeth Pane:I went to Space Camp.
Host: Really?
Elizabeth Pane:Yeah, I went to Space Camp in Alabama.
Host: Really? Okay.
Elizabeth Pane:Yeah. My parents really were awesome in cultivating my interests. And I’m a first generation college graduate.
Host: Wow.
Elizabeth Pane:They wanted to provide everything possible for me to follow my dreams, so grateful for that. They saved up, sent me to Space Camp. And I was actually a teenager when I went, so I was a little bit older. When I went there, I was like, “This is the place that I want to be. I want to be surrounded — “
Host: You’re like, “These are my people.”
Elizabeth Pane:Yeah, “I found my tribe. This is it.” And from then on it was like no stopping me. I got to get into NASA.
Host: And then being in this area, being near San Francisco, Silicon Valley, San Jose, it’s like you’re in the perfect place to cultivate that whole thing.
Elizabeth Pane:Absolutely. Just being around it every day and have it be a common thing to have NASA around, that was super cool. I was coming to Ames when I was in high school. I went to Presentation High School over in San Jose. And I was a part of the Young Women of NASA Advisory Council.
Host: Okay.
Elizabeth Pane:That meant that I came to Ames sometimes. I interviewed some women that worked at NASA. They sent us out to Kennedy when I was a senior to go see a shuttle launch.
Host: That’s got to be huge.
Elizabeth Pane:Amazing. We did a webcast with some of the female employees there. I was just blown away. I was blown away. I was still interested in NASA as time went on, and continued my interest through college.
Host: Yeah, I was going to say, did you end up joining as an intern or anything like that, or Pathways or something?
Elizabeth Pane:I did. I was pretty funny the way I actually came in to Ames. After graduation, I was back here in the Bay Area. I honestly did a cold call to public affairs because I was interested in international relations at the time.
Host: Okay.
Elizabeth Pane:And I said, “Hey, can I come in and shadow somebody?” So I explained that I’ve had this interest in working at NASA for the longest time. Went to Space Camp. I’m not just some random person calling you off the street. And they said, “Yeah, sure. Come on out. We’re going to be filming.”
Host: People love talking about their work.
Elizabeth Pane:Right?
Host: That’s the thing.
Elizabeth Pane:Right? And I love hearing about it, so let’s do this. So they said, “You know what, come on out. We’re going to be shooting a Mythbusters episode.”
Host: Wow.
Elizabeth Pane:I thought, “What? Okay, absolutely I get to come out.” So I came out, shadowed a public affairs officer. He told me the internship program that he came in on. That night I signed up. Three days later I had an interview. And so I came in as an intern soon after that and worked part time for about six months. At that point, I was offered a civil servant position. It’s a program that’s no longer around. But you go on probation for a couple of years and then you become permanent. You get some time to get your feet wet and see how things go, and they’ll figure out if they want to keep you or not.
Host: We actually first met at one of the SpaceX launches when, science going up into the International Space Station. Talk a little bit about some of the stuff that you’re working on now.
Elizabeth Pane:So right now, I am a Project Manager for what’s collectively known as the small payloads, and that’s the European modular cultivation system, or EMCS, microbial tracking, and some micro payloads. I had been working in procurement for about seven years, and I always had an interest in being a PM and being close to the mission. So I expressed an interest in at least doing a detail opportunity in another division here at Ames. It’s a flight systems implementation branch. And my management at the time, they were gracious enough to let me go and expand my horizons. It was wonderful, and that job ended up sticking.
Some of the payloads have been going on longer than others. EMCS has been around for about 10 years. That’s in collaboration with the European Space Agency.
Host: So what do you do? What do you care about? These things are going up into space, and obviously there’s a lot of important science going onto it. So what is the project manager’s role in making sure that everything goes okay?
Elizabeth Pane:For the most part, my most important job is to take care of my people.
Host: Okay.
Elizabeth Pane:Take care of my team and protect them from all the questions that come in from management. “What’s your status? Where are things at? Are we on schedule? Are we on budget?” I work to protect my teammates from all of that.
Host: So as long as they can focus on the science, you’re doing your job.
Elizabeth Pane:Absolutely. I have engineers and scientists and logistics people that help bring everything together so that we can send science up to the Space Station, and I want them to focus on their jobs. My role is to make sure things run smoothly, answer upper management when questions come in, and just really brag about all the cool things that my teammates are doing.
Host: Now I’d imagine in order to be able to answer the questions that are coming from the top for whatever granular reason that they may want, you also have to be very well integrated into the team and understand what everybody is doing in order to have those conversations and be able to keep them at bay.
Elizabeth Pane:Yes.
Host: Until somebody is like, “Elizabeth, get out of my way. I’m going to talk to that guy.”
Elizabeth Pane:People love talking about what they do.
Host: Yes, and the opposite way.
Elizabeth Pane:I love being a sponge. I’ve gotten in there into the lab. They tell me what they’re working on. They explain things to me. My degree is not in engineering or science, so I need them to educate me on what’s going on, how long things take, what things mean, what are what these weird acronyms mean. They help me do my job, and I really appreciate them for that. They’re wonderful. They never judge on my stupid questions that I ask. They seem so simple, but they’re happy to explain things to me so that I can then explain the awesome things that they’re doing.
Host: I’m sure that also, in different respects, is that when you are absorbing all these things and talking to them, a big part is how can you help make their lives easier. So if they have something that’s bugging them, some piece of equipment or some thing that just isn’t working properly, then you’re able to be, “All right, cool. Let me pave the way, make your life easier. Buy the new thing, or fix this, or tell management we need more money for this.”
Elizabeth Pane:Absolutely. That’s a huge part of it also. I’m glad you mentioned that. Because a lot of our processes, they’ve been the same way for many years in some cases, and there’s room to improve that. I always tell my teammates, “Hey, let me know of something is stopping you, if there’s some sort of gatekeeper along the way. Let’s see if we can streamline things a little better so that you can do your job and things can be easier and you can be motivated to get the job done.”
Host: Okay, so as you’re working on these projects, you’re working with the team, you’re talking to management, you’re going to different meetings talking about budget, timelines, logistics. Now you’ve packed up your wonderful toy and you’re sending it off to Kennedy to go up into a rocket. What are you feeling at that point? Once you’re on the ground, is it just kind of like this blur of excitement, but then you’re so stressed you can’t figure it out? Tell us about what is it like in those moments.
Elizabeth Pane:When we get to the point where we’re ready to either bring our payload to the Cape or send it off to the Cape, we’re pretty darn excited. It feels like this pressure has been lifted off of our shoulders where we can take a sigh of relief and we’re done. We have hit that milestone. But really when the milestone hits is when that rocket goes up.
Host: Yeah, I was going to say.
Elizabeth Pane:That’s pretty amazing. It’s not every place you go that a milestone is made by a rocket shooting up into the sky. That’s pretty cool.
Host: One of the funny things that I’ve learned from being at one of those rocket launches was the rocket launch itself is so quintessential NASA. It’s like, “We’re sending things into space.” You have this International Space Station circling around the earth. But at the same time, it’s like the reason it’s all up there is so that you can do science up there. Without these payloads, without the stuff, this interesting science going up, then what’s the point of having it there? We don’t want a Space Station just for the sake of having it. You want to learn what could you not learn here on the ground.
Elizabeth Pane:Absolutely. We send up this science to make everyone’s life on earth better, to advance ourselves here on earth, and it’s about all humans, not just the United States. The International Space Station’s motto is “Off the Earth, for the Earth.” It’s not “Off the earth, for America,” it’s for the Earth and it’s for the betterment of all of society. So I’m grateful to be a part of that.
Host: And a lot of that even plays to how a lot of the stuff that NASA is working on is not just kept in its own little silo. And this is also I think for just science in general that you can learn more when you open those datasets and what you learn to the broader scientific community to our international partners. And when you open that up and share it, they may come up with things that we didn’t even think of. And by having more minds working on it, it will help progress go faster.
Elizabeth Pane:Absolutely, absolutely. We love to share all of our data and our information.
Host: So after this launch happens, we have the science. You breathe that huge sigh of relief. Of course, that payload is up there. It survived launch, so you’re feeling really good about yourself. But still these science projects, are still up there and they’re being continually working on. Could you talk a little bit about something that’s still up in the Space Station that you’re still getting data about or maybe working with the astronauts to understand?
Elizabeth Pane:Sure. We hit that milestone of the rocket launch, but then starts a whole other set of schedules and milestones. That means that our experiment has made it to the station. The next step is for the astronaut to actually do that experiment, finish it up, get the samples ready to come home and send them back on a Dragon capsule. So right now we have an experiment up from the European Modular Cultivation System. It’s called PRR, or Plant RNA Regulation. That was sent up on SpaceX-9. The experiment has been done on station and we’re waiting for the samples to come home. But what essentially happens is we send up seedlings from hardware that we have built here at Ames. We send them up dry, so to speak. And the crewmember, once they’re unpacked out of Dragon, they’re put into the European Modular Cultivation System facility on station, which is a European Space Agency facility.
Host: Okay.
Elizabeth Pane:So on board the EMCS facility is actually two rotors. It sort of just looks like a small refrigerator if you were just to look at it. So two little doors, one on top of the other. There’s a rotor located within each one of those doors, and this allows you to put our experiment containers into those rotors. There’s four experiment containers on each rotor so they’re nice and balanced. So one rotor you can run at 1 g, just like on earth, which is really cool because then that allows you to run your control on the Space Station.
Host: So it has all the same environmental —
Elizabeth Pane:Exactly.
Host: Is it just spinning?
Elizabeth Pane:It’s spinning, yeah.
Host: It’s spinning to stimulate 1 g.
Elizabeth Pane:1 g. So the other rotor where we put the other four experiment containers with the seedlings in them, they’re just at zero g.
Host: Cool.
Elizabeth Pane:And so if we can do that at the same time so that, like you said, the seedlings are exposed to the same environment, pretty cool. Once they’re set up in the rotor by the crewmember, we then from the ground or the Norwegian User Support Operation Center, or the N-USOC. It’s located in Trondheim, Norway.
Host: Okay.
Elizabeth Pane:They send a command to their EMCS facility, “Hey, time to water the plants. We’re going to start up the experiment.” So they water the plants. We also have software that allows us to turn on and off lights within our experiment containers. So we need to simulate some sunlight so these plants can grow towards that sunlight. Over time, we usually run these experiments for about six days. So we start to see the seedlings start growing around four days or so, and then they kind of grow. They’re still really, really tiny. But it allows us to see how they’re growing, how they’re responding to the light that we send them. We can make sure that they’ve actually been watered, that we sent the command and they’ve actually been hydrated. We just can see how they’re reacting to zero g to 1 g. So when plants grow in space, they experience a lot of different changes in their gene expression. Gene expression is the process of converting a gene’s information into a useful product like a protein or an RNA. And plant RNA regulation, our experiment that’s waiting to come home, studies the first steps of gene expression involved in the development of the roots and the shoots of the plant.
Host: Okay. Do you see those differences even in the control that’s in just 1 g that’s spinning around?
Elizabeth Pane:We do see some differences.
Host: Okay.
Elizabeth Pane:It’s a little bit hard to say right now just because it’s still on station.
Host: It’s in process.
Elizabeth Pane:Yeah, we’re still waiting for the samples to come home. We do get images and videos, but we don’t like to comment too far.
Host: Because you don’t know.
Elizabeth Pane:Yeah.
Host: I think after the astronauts run that experiment, they put it back in the capsule or something that’s going to come back to earth, you get your samples and I’m sure they ship them back to you guys.
Elizabeth Pane:Right.
Host: Then is there a whole other round of just deciphering what you guys learn from that experiment, I suppose.
Elizabeth Pane:Absolutely. So we bring the hardware back to Ames, and the little tiny seedlings go back to the PI’s laboratory for her to analyze.
Host: So it is the actual seedlings, and those seedlings have gone through some growth while up in the station, and so you’re sending that back?
Elizabeth Pane:Absolutely. Yeah, back into the lab so we can actually study those roots and shoots. And that will give us insight into growing plants for food and oxygen supplies on long duration missions, that’s what it’ll give us insight into.
Host:So what are your next steps or what are the things that you’re looking at? I imagine you have another launch coming up in the next year.
Elizabeth Pane:We do. We’re going to have another EMCS experiment with seedlings going up on SpaceX-11. So we’re currently preparing for that right now.
Host: And then are there any other small payloads that you’re working on that are in various stages of the process?
Elizabeth Pane:There are. So we’re also preparing microbial tracking 2.
Host: Okay.
Elizabeth Pane:That’s the beginning of a second series payload. We had microbial tracking 1 last year, but we’re preparing microbial tracking 2 to fly on SpaceX-11 as well.
Host: So you’re sending them both up at the same time?
Elizabeth Pane:Yeah, it’s a busy time.
Host: Both of your precious little children are going up together.
Elizabeth Pane:Yeah, it’s a really busy time right now, but it’s exciting. Microbial tracking 2 is going to be monitoring the microbes that are present on the station.
Host: Okay.
Elizabeth Pane:It’s actually a very simple experiment if you just step back and look at it from a laymen’s standpoint. We’re sending up some polyester wipes so that the crewmembers can wipe different surfaces of the ISS inside and see what microbes are present. So they just wipe the surface, put it in a Ziploc bag, and we’ll freeze it and send it home.
Host: Send it back.
Elizabeth Pane:Yeah, take a look and see what’s in there. We’ll do that various times over the course of a year just to track and see what’s existing now and what the patterns look like to see if any microbes have grown more, there’s more existing in the station or not.
Host: That’d be interesting, because even as the crews change in and change out, I would imagine that kind of stuff would pull, even change along with it, but you don’t really know until you actually get those samples and send it back.
Elizabeth Pane:Yep, not sure. It’s pretty interesting. We also sample the air.
Host: Okay.
Elizabeth Pane:So we have an air sampler that stays on station, and we just send up air filters. So if you think about a Dustbuster.
Host: Totally.
Elizabeth Pane:You put on a filter in front of that, it’s at the front of the air sampling device, switch that on for about 15 minutes and it gently sucks in the air that’s inside of the cabin, and then we send the filter back home.
Host: Excellent. So for anybody who wants to know the latest and greatest of what Elizabeth is doing, of these payloads, when they’re going to come up, what’s the best way to figure some of that stuff out?
Elizabeth Pane:The best way is on our NASA website. We have mission pages for each of these missions.
Host: Okay, so at NASA.gov/Ames, or even just going to NASA.gov and searching microbial tracking.
Elizabeth Pane:Yes, absolutely. Yeah, EMCS is a good one. Yeah, you can just search that and that’ll pop up, EMCS NASA Ames.
Host: Of course. And whenever these launches come up, also if anybody signs up for alerts or follows us on Twitter or even on Facebook, whenever the launches are coming up with NASA payloads, we’re always putting out press releases or just stories and stuff getting a little bit more into the weeds of what we’re learning from those.
Elizabeth Pane:Yes, those are wonderful. The payloads are listed there.
Host: Excellent. Also for anybody in the short term, if you have questions for Elizabeth, we’re using the hashtag #NASASiliconValley and on Twitter we are @NASAAmes. Thank you so much for coming.
Elizabeth Pane:Thank you, Matt. It’s a pleasure.
Host: Hey, this is fun.
[End]