Tonight's NBC evening news had a feature in their "American Spirit" series
on Donna Shirley, the Program Manager for the Pathfinder mission. Inter
alia, she noted that it was she who named Sojourner for a woman; she also
says she's been interested in getting to Mars one way or another all her
life. An engineer from Oklahoma, she was shown with her college-age
daughter looking at the stereo images of the landscape at one point in the
report (gist of daughter's response: "That's really cool, Mom"); Shirley's
description of Mars exploration is that it is "sort of like the day my
daughter was born--that this was something new in the Universe."
Shirley is by no means the only woman involved at high levels at JPL, though
it does seem that a lot of the press conferences are done by guys there.
I'm lucky enough to have a sister who's got a similar role in the Cassini
mission to Saturn, which won't start making news until the next millennium.
But for Mars in this millennium, Michelle, you might want to contact Dr.
Shirley at JPL.
On the side: Thanks to Mike for a good listing of some of the pitfalls he's
seen with student subscriptions to a listserve; I've seen some of these pits
fallen into on other lists, but it's a help to have reports of some of the
warnings others have found necessary to provide to new users. Like Laura
and Kate, I like seeing students who might otherwise not cotton on to
technology find out how much useful fun and what satisfying workplay it can be.
Tess
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:25 PDT