Lots of us look up at the night sky with wonderment — maybe wondering what’s out there, or maybe wondering how humans are able to explore the universe.
Well, Tracy Drain, a flight systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, understands that second part. Drain helps send robotic spacecraft to explore the solar system and beyond.
From a very young age, Drain wasn't looking at the stars and saying, "This is what I want to do." She instead came to this work as she got a little older.
Drain will be presenting a show called “Cosmic Adventures” on Wednesday night at Mesa Arts Center, as part of the National Geographic Live series.
Full conversation
TRACY DRAIN: Sort of halfway. I definitely was not one of those kids who always knew I wanted to be an engineer or an astronaut from the time that I was 3. But, through elementary school, middle school, my mom had me and my brother interested in science fiction.
And so around junior year in high school is when I was starting to decide what I wanted to study in college, and I actually settled on wanting a career in space, but going through mechanical engineering as a way to get there.
MARK BRODIE: What is it about space that interests you so much?
DRAIN: I just love that there's endless possibilities and it really pokes at that sense of innate curiosity that a lot of humans kind of come hardwired with. And there's so many things out there that are so different from your normal experience here on Earth, that it's just always fun to see what's around the next corner.
BRODIE: It's interesting because I can imagine, not being involved in space myself, that sort of the infinite nature of it and the lack of knowledge, frankly about so much of it could almost be intimidating and it sounds like you just find it infinitely, pardon the pun, fascinating.
DRAIN: I do and maybe that's because I soaked up so much in science fiction and then reading stories about space when I was growing up, that I felt like a lot of it did become familiar over time. And so there are only some elements that were super weird and fascinating, and you got to compare them against the things you already knew about your neighborhood solar system.
BRODIE: So what, to you, are the best parts of your job? What do you most look forward to when you get up and go to work in the morning?
DRAIN: There's so many good parts of my job and my answer might surprise some people because over the years, the thing that's become the most motivating and sort of energizing for me is just the other people that I get to work with.
You might imagine that engineers are these very socially awkward people, sitting in an office all by themselves. My favorite pastime is solving puzzles, right, kind of people and yes, there is some of that, and I have some of those traits myself.
But I love the fact that when you sit down in a meeting full of 10, 12, 15 engineers, we're always just talking about our lives, what's going on, someone's always cracking some kind of hilarious joke.
It takes so long to develop these missions that we're on, that you spend years with these people, and they come to be your friends and extended family members. And it's just a joy to get to work with a large diverse group of people like that all the time.
BRODIE: What is it like to know that something that you helped design and maybe helped build is going into space and is contributing to the exploration of the universe?
DRAIN: There's so many things. What it's like, it is still surreal after almost 25 years of doing this job, to know that humans are capable of doing such incredible things. And so there's this weird, almost cognitive dissonance that sometimes the day job can be a little drudge work. It's not all firing phasers all day long.
But then you always have these little moments where you're deep in the weeds of trying to solve some technical problem that you need to get to work so that you can put a spacecraft in orbit around Mars, right? And that realization bubbles up to the front of your brain. You're like, “Wow, OK. This is still cool no matter what piece of it I'm working on.”
And it also fills you with this sense of pride in the human species. There are a lot of things that are awesome about humans. There are a lot of things that are kind of challenging about humans. And it's nice to get to focus on one of the awesome pieces for most of your day job.
BRODIE: Well, you work in an area, as you kind of alluded to, there are not a lot of things that a lot of people necessarily agree on at the moment, but it seems like there's still this kind of wonderment about space.
I would imagine it must be kind of an interesting experience sort of having that as obviously not everything you do is, like you said, firing phasers or looking at cool images of outer space, but the end result of pretty much everything you're doing involves something that at least a lot of people, if not most people think is still pretty darn cool.
DRAIN: That's true, and that helps tremendously. One of the things about my job as a systems engineer, we work very closely with people who have specialties in a variety of areas: telecom, thermal power, whatever.
And the systems engineer's job is not just knowing enough about the technical details to make sure we're approaching problems right, and can weave them together well, but knowing enough about how to relate to people so that when we're having heated disagreements about the way to do things, you can figure out how to help people see the common ground, how to help us find a common solution to things.
And I found that sometimes in the real world, there are lots of challenges and disagreements with people, that practicing that mindset and having such a cool thing that everybody can come together around to try to do, it helps, and it helps me try to figure out how to put that into practice in everyday life too.
BRODIE: So I wanna ask you another “what is it like” question, and I'm curious when you see images from spacecraft of planets or nebulas or stars or whatever it is that you're looking at, and you know that you contributed to that, what is that feeling to see something that maybe nobody has ever seen before.
DRAIN: It's pretty great. My favorite example of that actually is one of the things I'll talk about in the show. If you've never seen an image of the north pole of Jupiter taken through an infrared camera, which is what we did with the Juno spacecraft, it will kind of melt your mind a little bit cause you're used to Jupiter looking a certain way, and then there's just no way we could have expected or guessed what it actually looks like there.
And knowing that I was part of a team that helped get an instrument there to get the data back to the scientists, so that they could discover that and then help explain what in the world could possibly be going on there. It feels very, very good.
This whole furthering the frontier of human knowledge thing is, again, it goes right back to satisfying natural human curiosity. It feels really, really good.
BRODIE: I can imagine. I mean, is there, I hate to boil it down to one thing, but is there like a question that you are just dying to get an answer to space-related?
DRAIN: Just one? Come on, Mark.
BRODIE: I know, it's like picking your favorite child. I apologize.
DRAIN: I think for me, I won't go all the way to the, “Can there be life out there?” question, but because the Kepler mission and the test mission found that there are just so many planets in our galaxy, like a truly outrageous number of planets.
The next most interesting question for me is, do those planets have an atmosphere, and an atmosphere combined with the size of the planet and the distance from its star, such that it could support the development of some kind of life.
Those are the kinds of questions that we actually can answer. There's a proposal for a mission out there. I think the acronym is FINESSE, where it can use spectroscopy in order to look at the light from a star passing through the limb of a planet's atmosphere in order to then determine what major components make up the atmosphere.
That one doesn't exist yet, but it's out there on the drawing board, and I am super excited for that in the future.
