A rerun of a conversation with Kimberly Ennico Smith, project scientist for SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.

Transcript

Host (Matthew Buffington): You’re listening to NASA in Silicon Valley, a conversational podcast series from NASA’s Ames Research Center where we chat with the various scientists, researchers, engineers and all-around cool people here at NASA. As a special treat today, which is our 85th episode, we are going back in time and do a rerun from April 6, 2017 – which was also our 33rd episode of the podcast.

Our guest for this special rerun is Kimberly Ennico Smith. We discuss her previous work looking at Pluto on the New Horizons mission, and go into her current role as the project scientist for SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or as I like to refer to it, as a telescope on a plane.

This weekend, April 7-8, 2018, NASA is going to be participating in the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C. NASA scientists and engineers will be giving talks and staffing booths at this huge event, and our very own SOFIA, the airborne observatory, will be represented there, along with NASA’s other Great Observatories.

Also this weekend, if you’re in the Bay Area, we’re going be a part of the local Silicon Valley Comic Con. There’s going to be a booth and panels featuring a lot of things listeners have heard about on the podcast – we’re talking drone traffic management research, how Earth life fares out in space and how we’re searching for life out in the cosmos. And on top of that, NASA’s ongoing journey to the Moon and Mars. SOFIA’s also going to be there, presenting a special panel about black holes, featuring Sir Roger Penrose.

You can get all this information when you go to, www.nasa.gov/svcc2018 and that’s just Silicon Valley Comic Con 2018.

But for today, here is Kimberly Ennico Smith.

[Music]

Host: We always like starting it off by getting to know people a little bit. How did you join NASA? And how did you end up in Silicon Valley of all places?

Kimberly Ennico: Well, it was a bit of luck in timing, but actually it was kind of hard work too.

Host: Isn’t it always both in life – a little bit of luck and a little bit of hard work?

Kimberly Ennico: Yeah.

Host: There you go.

Kimberly Ennico: Well, how I got my job at NASA… It was a combination of just being in the right place at the right time, and just doing my job. I was a postdoc, so the position you take once you get your Ph.D. I was in Tucson, Arizona, at Steward Observatory, and I was just doing my job.

I was working on an instrument that would fly to space someday. It was the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer. Spitzer would eventual launch in 2003, but this was years before that. And we were building the instrument at the University of Arizona.

And so I was working on that, just carrying out tasks. I was also involved in designing what we might have the successor to Hubble look like. We called it the “Next Generation Space Telescope,” which now has been rebranded “James Webb.” I was working on the earlier reincarnation of Next-gen. And I liked Next-gen telescope because I’m a Star Trek fan, and our symbol for the mission was the Star Trek communicator pen, because it was all Next-gen.

Anyway, I was working on a design study for that. And doing a design study, you go through reviews. At the review, there were some NASA folks there, of course, because they’re reviewing what the University of Arizona is doing. And there would be these comments about, “Well, who created that? Who did that study? Who did this?” They said, “Oh, Kim did that. Kim did that.” “Oh, who is this Kim?”

Host: “We have to meet her!”

Kimberly Ennico: “We have to meet this person!” So I got to meet who would then become my first boss at NASA. In a sense, he basically said, “You’re a self-starter. You seem to be working on a lot of different things. You have a lot of great ideas. How would you like to work for NASA?”

Host: Oh, that’s awesome.

Kimberly Ennico: And what was a little awkward at the time is that my postdoc was ending, and I’m like, “Hmm, I’m looking for a job.” Of course, my postdoc supervisor was saying, “We could extend you another six months or a year,” and I’m like, “Hmm, NASA is offering me a job…” And then, of course, history was made.

Actually, it was just me doing my work, building instruments, playing with new concepts for new space telescopes, and it landed me a job at NASA.

Host: Were you always STEM-focused, wanted to build telescopes as a kid looking up into the sky? How did that come about?

Kimberly Ennico: Well, not really. In fact, even the term “STEM” is actually quite new. I was at a STEM conference at Princeton last weekend talking to educators, and I was curious, “Where did this whole thing, STEM, come along?” I learned how it’s an initiative to get us realizing –

Host: An easy way…

Kimberly Ennico: Well, realizing that this country faces a shortage in scientists, and engineers, and technically-minded folks going forward. And so I’m pleased that it’s getting the attention that it deserves. At the same time, all other subjects are equally important. But I digress…

No, I mean, I was just a self-motivated student, curious about anything, wanting to learn. I wasn’t the type of person who took things apart and played with it. I do that from time-to-time. I tinker now more as an adult than I did as a kid. As a child, I was more book smart, and I was just more into reading about things and trying to understand how that works, rather than becoming an engineer.

But I wound up finding myself on a series of misadventures in engineering. It’s been a lot of fun.

Host: When you joined NASA, what was some of the early work? What are some things where we can be like, “You may know me by…”?

Kimberly Ennico: Well, one of my tasks was I got… I was playing in our detector lab, and I was basically told, “Please see when our detectors fail.” I was paid to destroy things.

Host: Oh, how nice. That’s fun.

Kimberly Ennico: These infrared detectors would eventually fly in space – again, for the James Webb Space Telescope. This is early in the development. We were trying to figure out what was the most robust to survive in the space radiation environment. We would bring our devices up to UC Davis to their particle accelerator, their cyclotron, and bombard the heck out of them with high-speed protons traveling at the speed of light.

We would evaluate at what point devices would start to no longer be operable or no longer be scientifically viable.

Host: Okay. Kind of pushing the boundaries of, “What can this do?”

Kimberly Ennico: It would lead to interesting redesigns of the actual devices themselves, to make sure the band gap energies were more robust, the separation between the FETs and the multiplexers were more space radiation hardened.

The whole point is, you’re going to fly these wonderful detectors to take these beautiful pictures of the deep universe, but if they can’t survive a few years in space due to radiation, what’s the point? And so that was a really fun project. It was one of my early projects working at NASA.

Host: I know now you’re working on SOFIA, but you’d also done some previous work on New Horizons, I think.

Kimberly Ennico: Yes, I did.

Host: Talk a little bit about that.

Kimberly Ennico: In January of this year, I started as the project scientist for SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. But prior to that, the last six years of my series of misadventures in the space agency, I was a deputy project scientist on New Horizons, the Pluto flyby mission.

I was brought on due to my self-starting nature, and the fact that I speak science and engineering. My job was to oversee the calibration of the instrument payload. It was already on its way to Pluto. The payload was launched in 2006, and I joined the project in 2011. The flyby was in 2015.

So we had about four years to evaluate and prepare the instruments so they were ready to go, because at that time in the program, to save on operations costs, but also wear and tear on the instruments, a deep space probe went through long periods of hibernation. So most of the year, everything would be sleeping, and we would wake up twice a year to do some instrument check-outs.

My work was to ensure that we made the best use of those limited times to check out that the instruments were working well – looking at stars, looking at long stares at dark patches of sky.

Host: I would imagine there’s a bit of anxiety. You’ve put these expensive instruments into space. It survived a launch; it’s on its way; it’s been hibernating. You kind of have a little bit of anxiety, “Oh, I hope this works when we turn it back on.”

Kimberly Ennico: Yes, there was a little bit of that. In fact, it was also fascinating working side-by-side with the scientists and engineers on the project, who were still learning about the instruments and the spacecraft as it flew through the solar system.

And the environment was changing too. We had one incident, an episode, where our ultraviolet spectrometer didn’t turn on, and we’re like, “Oh…” But it turns out it was because the spacecraft had actually gotten to a much lower temperature, and we needed to just up… When you have an anomaly, you file an anomaly report, and then you try to experiment with a ground-based simulator what might have happened.

So the instrument didn’t turn on. It turns out it just went into safe mode, which is what it was designed to do, and it was because the look-up table onboard needed to have some more information on what to do at low temperatures. And so we figured that out. We then carefully went through a series of tests, in which you then upload that new table. And then you would verify that the instrument turned on and worked as well.

And so just a few months later, we were able to solve that issue. But that was because, “Oh, we are now in a new realm!” And that allowed us to all take a step back, and look at the spacecraft again and go, “What other new environments is the spacecraft behaving in, or new parameters, that we need to really look at how our instruments would behave?” And so it was a wonderful lesson learned for the program, as we kept on learning about how the instruments were behaving. Of course, the calibration exercises in these years prior to the flyby were successful, because we brought you those beautiful pictures.

Host: Yes, I was going to say… It’s like the big crescendo. And then when you take the picture, and you know it happened, great, but now you’re waiting for all that data to come back. But I imagine just seeing those first images just have to blow your mind.

Kimberly Ennico: Yeah. They were. They were just phenomenal, and met and exceeded any sort of expectations, and was mystifying. On approach to Pluto – I mean, the spacecraft is traveling 36,000 miles per hour, covering a million kilometers a day – Pluto started to come into focus, and Charon, and you got a glimpse of what you might see, but not when the high-res images came down. That was just phenomenal.

Host: An interesting connection between SOFIA – it’s a plane with a hole in the side for a telescope – and what you’re working on now, and then also New Horizons… I believe that SOFIA, the plane, actually took some observations of Pluto even before New Horizons got there…?

Kimberly Ennico: Yeah. It was a wonderful timing coincidence. Pluto has been and now will have returned to being an astronomical object – that distant point in the sky, that distant point of light. It moves with respect to the fixed stars, which are very, very much further away, and from our perspective, they say they’re fixed. And Pluto moves with respect to that.

There was a timing two weeks prior to the Pluto flyby. June 29th of 2015, Pluto was going to pass in front of a very bright star – it’s called an occultation – basically looking at Pluto passing in front of the star. The star’s light would dip, and then reemerge as Pluto moved away from the star. So you would have this light curve.

And then from using that information, you can study about the size of the object and potentially its atmosphere. In fact, Pluto has an atmosphere, and it had been detected by this exact same technique back in the 1980s, this occultation measurement.

Bodies in our solar system do pass in front of the background stars, and they’re called occultations. Two weeks prior to the July 14th flyby in 2015, we had an occultation, and SOFIA played a critical role in it. It’s a mobile observatory. It’s an airplane. So it’s a Hubble-sized telescope, 2.5-meter, in the belly of a 747 aircraft, this hole in the side of the plane. But being a plane, it can fly –

Host: Where you want it to go.

Kimberly Ennico: Where you want it to go… And in late June – June 29th, 2015 – Pluto’s shadow would fall on the Earth in the South Pacific, near Australia and New Zealand. And since SOFIA was mobilized to move there, and then fly over the ocean and chase the shadow of Pluto – because the occultation is happening, but the shadow is also moving on the Earth in what’s a challenging observation.

But the fact that you can actually position your telescope to be in the exact place on the Earth’s surface or in the Earth’s sky at a particular time, it allowed the observatory to fly through the center of the projected shadow. This maximizes the effect of the measurement to get the atmosphere. It’s sort of a lensing effect as the star goes through the planet’s atmosphere, through Pluto’s atmosphere, and creates an increase in signal, which is known as a “central flash.”

And SOFIA detected that, along with some other ground-based observatories nearby. But SOFIA flew through the center, measured also Pluto’s atmosphere in red, blue and the near-infrared, and from that, you can work out properties of the atmosphere. This was an interesting measurement, because this type of technique has been used for decades to measure changes in Pluto’s atmosphere, and Pluto’s atmosphere had doubled between the 1990s and the early 2000s.

Host: Oh, really?

Kimberly Ennico: It’s because Pluto is coming out of its winter.

Host: Oh, that’s right.

Kimberly Ennico: It’s a seasonal effect.

Host: And their seasons are much longer than ours, considering the orbit.

Kimberly Ennico: Its trip around the sun is about 248 Earth years. It was discovered in 1930. It actually hasn’t made a complete orbit around the sun since its discovery, so we don’t really know the whole Pluto year of what’s happening. But we do know that the atmosphere is changing.

Host: It’s interesting you talk about the occultations. That’s not really a new concept. I mean, when it’s the moon and us, we call it an “eclipse.” But similarly, Kepler and some of these other space telescopes that are looking for exoplanets, for planets around other stars, it’s like the transit method of when those planets pass in front of them. It’s just an interesting twist on it, where it’s like it’s our solar system’s planets, but then using other stars as that backdrop.

Kimberly Ennico: That’s right. And the stars are the flashlight, the light source that we measure, because we measure light. And when the occultation occurs, we measure the change in the light, and we know it’s because this body has passed in front of it.

Host: For that situation, is it just more information and more data to better understand Pluto, for example, or did that help then drive what you were doing on New Horizons, of, “Oh, wow. Now we know this stuff from SOFIA. Let’s look at our data in a different way?” Does that change things at all?

Kimberly Ennico: The timing was only two weeks before the flyby, so the flyby had already been programmed. But they had been pre… when the flyby occurred, because the round-trip light-time from Earth to Pluto at the time of the flyby was about nine and a half hours. There wasn’t going to be any sort of real-time changes to the event.

Host: That’s right. Because Pluto is so far away, by the time it happens and we see it, that is light that we’re seeing from – what? – nine hours away?

Kimberly Ennico: Yeah. The important thing it did actually provide is a calibration. The New Horizons flyby of Pluto – July of 2015 – was one moment in space and one moment in time. We have this amazing snapshot of this world, this crazy world, at that moment in space and moment in time.

From now on, monitoring that world, until we send another probe there, will be through these occultations. So this allowed a nice calibration between the information we can get by the light curves to what we can tie down to ground truth from the measurements of the constituents of the atmosphere. And as we follow future Pluto occultations, we could be able to monitor Pluto’s atmosphere at the global scale.

Host: Stepping away a little bit from Pluto, and just looking at SOFIA and the work that you’re doing now, are there any other occultations or any work on SOFIA that you guys are hoping to take advantage of?

Kimberly Ennico: So occultations occur… How they work is you are identifying an object in our solar system moving with respect to a bright star. There are many of these objects we can look at, the moons of the giant planets, more of these Kuiper Belt objects.

But in October of this year, Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, will occult a star. And SOFIA is going to fly to the East Coast of the U.S., down in Florida, because the shadow path of Triton will fly over the South Atlantic. We’re going to do again this exact type of experiment.

The interesting thing about Triton is its atmosphere hasn’t been measured in a very long time, mainly because where Triton is with respect to the background-fixed stars has moved to a part in our galaxy where the stars are not as bright, or as numerous, or the coincidence of this happening. So this has been a long time coming. In fact, the last time a good measurement of Triton’s atmosphere was made in 2001. It’s still about a decade and a half later.

What’s fascinating about it is we want to look at the story of whether Triton itself is undergoing seasonal changes, just like I talked about with Pluto. It had its flyby in 1989 when Voyager 2 flew by Neptune and Triton. The Voyager 2 data, in August of 1989, revealed that Triton’s atmosphere had hazes, and it had winds. The imagery showed the streaks on the surface, and, of course, had measured the constituents of a very nitrogen-rich atmosphere – very similar to Pluto.

But, again, that was a moment in space and time, and subsequent measurements in 2001 would indicate that the pressure went up. The atmosphere was changing. So this occultation in 2017 in October will monitor Triton’s atmosphere and see if it’s changing again, because, again, it’s perhaps going through seasonal cycles.

Host: Well, around that time next fall, we’ll have to have you come on back so we can talk about the results from that.

Kimberly Ennico: Exactly. Yeah.

Host: Do you guys mainly focus on the planets and occultations now, or do you have other works with other galaxies, maybe?

Kimberly Ennico: Oh, yeah. I mean, occultations is only one aspect of a flying observatory. It’s actually not the main emphasis of SOFIA. SOFIA, in its name, is the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. Its bread and butter is looking at the universe in the infrared wavelength, so wavelengths that are longer than what our eyes can see, the thermal infrared, the longer wavelengths.

And we do that by flying up into the stratosphere, above 40,000 feet, to get above 99 percent of the earth’s atmosphere, which is water, the water content, which absorbs a great deal in the infrared.

Host: Yeah. It distorts a lot of the stuff that you can see.

Kimberly Ennico: And to do infrared astronomy, you would normally also put a telescope in space, like Spitzer, which is what I was working on as a postdoc many years ago.

Host: Even James Webb coming up. . .

Kimberly Ennico: And James Webb is an infrared observatory as well. It doesn’t go as long wavelength as SOFIA. SOFIA is actually probing a lot more of the thermal emission of our galaxy, and also the thermal emission of other galaxies, too.

SOFIA is a general-user observatory. We have lots of different topics. A lot of the users of our observatory are looking at star formation regions in our own Milky Way, and also tying that into what we can see in other galaxies.

We just recently completed a multi-flight series looking at the Whirlpool galaxy, M51. M51 is about 31 million light years away. It is not our galaxy. It’s a very, very far away galaxy. But with two particular instruments, we were interested in understanding where the gas in that galaxy goes from the atomic to the molecular state. And when it goes to the molecular state, physics would dictate it would collapse, and this would be the beginning of star formation. So using this Whirlpool galaxy as a laboratory test bed to study the evolution, or the migration, of gas…

There are two instruments aboard SOFIA that have a resolving power, that spread the light out, such that we can actually measure the speed of the gas, whether it’s flying towards you or away from you, in order to see where is this transition happening from the atomic to the molecular.

This has been a big project, but it will give an insight. And by understanding the motion of gas and the amount of gas in not only the spiral arms but also in the intra-arm regions, we can get some insights into how stars are forming in that galaxy, but also it could be applicable to our own galaxy.

Host: Previously, we had people talking about SOFIA, about the EXES instrument. One of the cool things that I get a kick out of with SOFIA is, since it’s a plane – I mean, Hubble, this space telescope is up there – it’s not exactly easy to go up, and change things out, and fix things. But with it being an airborne observatory, when it lands you can switch out instruments, depending on what you’re studying.

For some of these different observations, are you literally switching out the instrumentation in there?

Kimberly Ennico: Yes, we are. That’s one of the amazing perks about an observatory that flies home every night. You can switch out instrumentation. I mean, Hubble, as you gave an example, did actually have four servicing missions. You can service some of the space instruments at considerable effort and cost; whereas New Horizons never got serviced. That was on its way to Pluto. You just live with what you had. And it’s the same with Spitzer and Kepler, which were in drift-away orbits that you wouldn’t be able to service.

But, yes, with SOFIA – because we can touch the instruments – not only can we swap out the instruments, but we can also upgrade the instruments with the latest technology. In a space-based world, the instruments that we flew in New Horizons, for example, they were already several years old by the time it launched. And by the time we got it to do its science, they were several decades old.

With this Whirlpool galaxy in particular, there are two instruments that were used to take the data. But one in particular, called the GREAT [German REceiver for Astronomy at Terahertz Frequencies] instrument, which allows you to tune to different types of molecular lines – it was tuning to this C+. It’s an ionized carbon line at 158 microns. That was made by the latest and greatest in receiver technology. Actually, you’re really using the state-of-the-art, and this gave the observatory unprecedented sensitivity.

In fact, this instrument has the capability to map large regions of the sky at a speed much faster than its instrument predecessor, a concept on the Herschel Space Telescope. It was an ESA [European Space Agency] far-infrared space telescope that was launched several years ago, but ran out of cryogen, so it’s end-of-life. The instrument that’s similar to the instrument on SOFIA had one detector, whereas the instrument on SOFIA today has 14 detectors, and is being upgraded to more, due to the fact that we can actually touch the instrument and upgrade it.

The capabilities of SOFIA are getting better with time due to the fact that you can swap out instruments but also upgrade them. And that’s being practiced.

Host: As you’ve recently joined the SOFIA team, what is your job now with SOFIA? Obviously, it takes a whole team – you have pilots, you have engineers, you have a whole mix of a team – to make something like this work.

Kimberly Ennico: Yeah. It surprises me every day, as I walk into the office, how complex SOFIA is. It is three large projects. There is the airplane. There is this telescope that needs to stay steady when you’re in turbulence, to make sure that the light stays on the pixel and your detector where you want. And then you also have the science instrument, for which you have a variety of instruments.

And people. It is a human-operated activity, with your pilots, the mission flight planners, the mission directors, the telescope operators, the instrument operators, and also the scientists analyzing the data – and not to exclude that we have educators on board who are part of a sister program. They’re called the “Airborne Ambassadors.” They work with the scientists, and then they bring back knowledge that they learned about an airborne observatory back to their classrooms. A lot of people are involved in this project.

And the human element of astronomy is quite enhanced. I mean, the field of astronomy, where you’re doing your observing, you have a space-based telescope for which your data gets emailed to you at the end of the day, or in ground-based, as we go to larger and larger telescopes, they’re often done with queue observing, which you don’t go to the telescope anymore and observe. You just put in what you want after it’s been reviewed, and it gets time on the sky, and your data gets emailed to you.

Whereas with SOFIA, you are making decisions as you’re there on the telescope observing, watching the data come in, and making adjustments as necessary, because, for example, if you’re interested in measuring water in your object, you have to understand the water of the background in the sky. And so you have different calibrations you can do to separate out the water contamination from the Earth, so you can then ensure that you have a good detection of water in the object of interest. You need experience to have that hands-on, real-time.

Now, there is some flexibility when you’re in the sky to change where you’re looking, but it’s limited because the telescope itself has a slightly smaller range of angles it can look at. And so if you go to the SOFIA science website, you can look at the flight plans of each of the nights SOFIA is flying. You’ll notice that the flight plans are always very different, because of where the objects are in the sky and how long you want to spend in the sky for that object.

So it is a complicated observatory in many ways, but it’s very unique.

Host: Before we wrap up, I would be remiss to not mention – as somebody who grew up as a big fan of Legos, building things… I have to put you on the spot a little bit. Evidently, you have now been immortalized in Lego form. Talk a little bit about that. How does that happen?

Kimberly Ennico: This is separate from the official Lego and women, which just came out, is also the product of this woman named Maia Weinstock. She’s at MIT, and she’s very active on social media. Over the years, when something is happening – not just in the world of STEM, but, you know, activities – she’ll immortalize you in a Lego figure.

Myself, along with the other project scientists on New Horizons – Cathy Olkin, Leslie Young, and Alice Bowman, our mission ops manager – the four of us, during the flyby, we were all made into Lego figures.

Host: That’s awesome.

Kimberly Ennico: I remember being at the Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, when I was running around meeting with all the different scientists. My colleague pulled me aside and said, “Kim, do you realize you’ve been made into a Lego figure?” I said, “What?” I was just so busy enjoying that.

But she’s also immortalized. So it was a very touching moment, and she sent me my Lego figure, which has been lovely. It’s on my desk. The official Women of NASA Lego Collection is amazing.

It features Katherine Johnson, who calculated the trajectories for Mercury and Apollo, and of course she’s been immortalized with “Hidden Figures;” Margaret Hamilton, who is also a computer scientist doing a lot of computations of the Apollo missions as well; Mae Jemison, the first African American astronaut in space; Nancy Grace Roman, who’s the mother of Hubble – she’s the one who led towards, “We need to have a space telescope,” because before Hubble, we didn’t actually think about if we could have telescopes in space; and, of course, the late Sally Ride, a role-model for me, the first [female] American astronaut in space.

So that NASA women’s collection is, of course, Women of NASA, and there are so many other women of NASA. My little Lego contribution is unofficial, but it was very touching. I was just doing my job. I was just doing my job, but it was quite fun.

Host: I’ve seen Lego models of planes and Lego models of telescopes. It’s only a matter of time. There needs to be a SOFIA Lego model, and we could put the little ones of you inside of it. There we go.

So for folks who want any more information – of course, from www.nasa.gov. On Twitter, we are @NASAAmes, but also @SOFIAtelescope. And we’re using the hashtag #NASASiliconValley. If you have any questions for Kimberly, go ahead and hit us up on Twitter, and we will loop back to her to get any of your responses. But I have a feeling that you’re going to be coming back, so…

Kimberly Ennico: Wow. Okay, thank you.

Host: Thanks for coming on over. This has been fun.

Kimberly Ennico: Thank you, Matt.

Host:You have been listening to the NASA in Silicon Valley podcast. Remember we are a NASA podcast, but we are not the only NASA podcast, so don’t forget to check out our friends at “Houston We Have a Podcast.” There’s also “Gravity Assist” and “This Week at NASA”. If you’re a music fan, don’t forget to check out Third Rock Radio. The best way to capture all of the content is to subscribe to our omnibus RSS feed called NASACasts – you can find that on the NASA app for iOS, Android or any podcast app throughout the solar system and beyond.

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