Jennifer Inman: NASA Physicist

Jennifer Inman is a physicist at the NASA Langley Research Center. She manages teams that use telescopes, cameras, and specialized sensors to track space capsules. The data she collects and calculations she and her team perform are particularly useful during the communication blackouts that naturally occur as space capsules reenter the atmosphere.

Can you please describe your job?

For most of my career, I worked with lasers, collected measurements in wind-tunnels, and analyzed the data. My title changed last summer to project manager, which has been a big change, but it's been a lot of fun. Now, my job is to put together the right team of people to obtain the measurements that the Agency needs.

We use computers to predict how an aerospace vehicle is going to fly and perform. We do ground testing using wind tunnels, which can't match every condition of space perfectly, so we extrapolate the results to flight conditions. The final piece of the puzzle is flight testing, which involves flying the full size vehicle. We find out how the vehicle performs and compare it to our original computations and wind-tunnel testing. From that, we revise our methods to make our tools more accurate in the future.

My team's job is to get data from real flight vehicles for all stages of flight (launch, re-entry, and landing), depending on what a particular mission needs. Getting the right team of people in place is essential because there are no do-overs in spaceflight. You have to get it right the first time.

Right now, there are several capsules docked to the International Space Station. When a capsule comes back to Earth, we use airplane-mounted telescopes with infrared sensors that detect the capsule as soon as it breaks the horizon. The capsule is hundreds of miles away when we first pick it up on the telescopes. Looking with really high powered optics is like looking through a soda straw. You need to know exactly where and when to look. We do all of this from an airplane that's going several hundred miles per hour on its own, so we have to do all of the math ahead of time in order to figure out exactly where the camera should be pointing so that we don't miss it. We simulate what we think is going to happen and provide the pilots with a synthetic video that shows what they should expect to see.

There's a lot of coordination, including mundane details like making sure that people are able to get into the buildings that they need to get into. For example, we frequently send teams down to Mission Control Center in Houston, so they can coordinate missions directly with the aircraft team. We work closely with the Spaceflight Meteorology Group to understand how the weather will affect our planned observation. There are risk analysts who calculate how far back people need to be from the launching rocket or returning capsule. If we have telescopes on the ground, we coordinate with them to know where we can safely set up to get data.

Once we have collected the data, we bring it to the engineers who want to use it. Sometimes there's data processing we can do to stabilize images or analysis to extract quantitative information, like temperature.

What does a typical day in your job look like?

The last year-and-a-half has been different, because we've mostly been working remotely. My office is now my bedroom, instead of the office that I know and love and miss. We're doing a lot more on Microsoft Teams, meetings throughout the day to coordinate different status updates from SpaceX, Boeing, or different parts of NASA.

In recent years, we’d send teams out to the middle of the desert. Our operations team would typically deploy to the test site the day before to set up all of the telescopes. We would get calibration data on stars at night, and then the sun would come up and we’d support parachute testing. We’d get on the radios, talk to pilots and each other, and do countdowns until the capsule would drop. Those days were the exceptions for my job, but that's why we do all of the meetings and spreadsheets and presentations, in order to get the data.

Do you have a favorite project that you've gotten to work on?

I think the SpaceX Crew-1 project really hit me on a personal level. We had been doing a series of un-crewed launches and returns, and there was a mission called Demo-1 that went up to dock at the Space Station. It was going to be the last mission without people if it was successful. We were in Mission Control, getting a live-stream video from an aircraft over the ocean. We were all waiting with bated breath. Then, in the video we were watching up on the big screen, we saw a bright streak of light as the sensor operator locked on to the target, and we watched the capsule come down.

The spacecraft moves so fast, much faster than the speed of sound, and it compresses the air in front of it. The air gets really hot and really dense, creating plasma, which interferes with communications. During this communications blackout, we don't usually have a way to know that the vehicle is okay. But our mission planning allows us to have our telescopes trained in the right place, and we are able to see the capsule streaking through the sky as a single, bright object and we can confirm that it is where it’s supposed to be, when it’s supposed to be there. This visual bridges a bit of that communications blackout period by providing an indication of the vehicle’s health.

We were approached afterward by an astronaut who had been in mission control with us. He came up to us and asked if we were going to be working on his mission. He wanted to know if his family, who would be in Mission Control, would be able to see that he was okay during those couple of minutes by watching the live-stream from the aircraft. Fast forward a couple of years, and we were working on his mission. It was fun to get to email him and the crew. With COVID, their families were not able to be in Mission Control, but instead the flight was live-streamed. It was funny because when I sent the email to him and his crew, I got back the best out-of-office auto replies I've ever gotten. It said something like, “I'm going to be in space on the International Space Station, so I might be slow in responding to my emails.” It was nice to have gotten to meet a member of the crew in person and to put a human face to the mission. It made me realize that it’s not just a capsule coming down, but that's Mike coming home to his family.

What made you decide to go into this field, and was this something that you always wanted to do?

I've always wanted to be an astronaut, but I've also wanted to be lots of other things when I was younger, such as a waitress on roller skates and a teacher. Christa McAuliffe was a hero of mine when I was in elementary school because she was a mom, a teacher, and an astronaut.

I grew up in California, and my best friend, Kathryn, and I were the two nerdy math girls. We were always a couple of years ahead in math and always liked working together. It wasn't until eighth grade when I moved to Colorado that I ever heard someone say that they thought boys were better at math and science. The first time I heard that, I actually laughed out loud. I remember saying something like, “I'm sorry, that was rude. I'm sure there are some boys that are good at math and science, but have you ever actually met one?” I had it in my head that math and science were more feminine things, and boys are better at subjects like history and English. It's funny to have been shielded from that stereotype for so long.

I continued to enjoy math in high school, but I chose a liberal arts school for college. I chose it partly because I wanted to keep my options open. I didn't know what engineering was, which is embarrassing and strange to say. I also didn’t know what physics was because I didn't have it in high school. I took Physics 101 freshman year and did really well. I could have taken the 102 Honors class, but I assumed that all those people had taken AP Physics in high school. I didn’t want to get too big for my britches, so I took regular Physics 102. Sophomore year I took 201, and the class size shrank dramatically, but it was amazing. It was the first time I learned about relativity and quantum mechanics and all of the things that are mind bending about physics that just change the way you see the world. I was watching everyone else in the class, and they were nodding along as the professor was lecturing, while I didn't know what the man was saying. I had this perception that everyone else knew what was going on, while I was the one who was lost. My first problem set came back, and I got a 40%. I had never gotten a 40% on anything in my life. I went to talk to the professor, and he said I was right in the middle of the class, while I felt like I had been at the very, very bottom. He encouraged me that I was doing fine and should stick with it. I saved the exam from that class, my final exam, where I got a 60 out of 100. He wrote, “Excellent” and it's double underlined with exclamation marks. To do well in that class, for me, required a readjustment of my own expectations. Otherwise, I would feel like I was failing all of the time.

I started applying for jobs at NASA after undergrad, because I really wanted to work at NASA, but I was not getting any calls back (and I was working landscaping in the meantime). I became aware of the internship programs that NASA had specifically for full time students, so I decided to go back to grad school. I was hesitant at first, but I realized that if I worked really hard, I could do all of my coursework in two years, and then the other four years would be just research. So, I spent two more years doing coursework and then four years doing research at NASA while working on a dissertation.

Those first two years were incredibly difficult. In undergrad, I had experienced a lot of camaraderie in the physics department. About a third of my classmates were women and it was just in general a very supportive environment. In grad school, however, there were only 10 of us, and I happened to be the only woman in my class. There were also some other background issues I was dealing with during grad school, such as 9/11, one of my roommates died of natural causes, and we lost the Columbia Orbiter, which all made those years more difficult, but I don’t think I realized how much those things contributed, at the time.

When I finished my PhD, I was fortunate to get a job offer from NASA, and I've been there ever since. I started in June of ‘01, so 20 years this summer.

What do you love about your job?

I love getting to do work that I feel is meaningful and making the world a better place. Spaceflight, to me, is just so inspiring. People don't climb Mount Everest because of the commercial potential of selling the mineral that they mine on top of it. They do it just because it's hard, because it's the highest. The same thing with the Olympics. Nobody learns to do a back handspring on a balance beam because of how much money it's going to make. It's because it's really difficult to get the human body to do that. There's some kind of inherent value when we try to push the human body to survive in more extreme environments, or just to do what's never been done before. It forces us to work together.

I think getting to be a part of space exploration, even if I can't be the one to go to the Moon–just adding a small piece to the puzzle is such a privilege. I’ll be sitting in Mission Control and listening to someone just across the room talking to the Space Station, and they're troubleshooting a problem with one of the radios or something. And I’ll look down and see the NASA logo on my notebook or my shirt sleeve and I’m just blown away.

I hope I live to see people set foot on Mars; I think we need to talk more about how impossible it currently is to get a person there and bring them back alive. Then we can go about solving the problems to make it possible. To me, that's exciting.

Do you have any advice for young women who want to go into a STEM field?

In the real world, science and engineering are not done in isolation; they’re done in a collaborative environment. For example, professors used to encourage us to do our homework in groups.

For me, it's been really helpful to read some of the research on gender differences in people’s experiences in the sciences and engineering, because until grad school, it didn't seem like it mattered to me that I was a woman. But now I’ve realized that some of the challenges I’ve faced are not unique to me, that I often underestimate myself because I, too, have breathed our culture’s sexist air and have seen myself through that lens.

When I was new at NASA, people asked me all the time what I wanted to do and what I wanted to work on. I would respond with something like, “I don't know--what needs to be done? You tell me what needs to be done and I'll try to figure out how to do it.” Well, I've always wanted to be an astronaut, since I was a little girl, but I thought everyone would say that, so I never did. I’ve realized things like that actually matter because they tell people around you what you think is cool, where your passions lie. Lean into those quirky habits or hobbies that you like, because if your work lines up with your passions, it gives you fuel to get the hard work done.

I put off taking any computer science classes until my senior year as an undergrad because I thought it sounded boring. Ha! Oh my gosh, I loved it. It was the only class where I would get an assignment done three weeks before it was due. I would stay up until four in the morning working on it because it was like a puzzle that my mind couldn't let go of. I had a misunderstanding and a misperception of what it was going to be like. I'm fairly certain that if I had taken that class freshman year, I would have ended up as a computer science major. So be willing to question your assumptions about what something is like if you haven't actually tried it for yourself. When I discovered how much I love sushi after years of refusing to try it, it turned me into an adventurous eater because who knows what untried favorite is out there, waiting to be discovered? If you can take the same approach to academic courses, you’ll up your opportunities to find something that you enjoy to the point that it feels like work and play rolled into one.

Some personal takeaways:

• It was beyond exciting to get a glimpse into the work of a NASA scientist. I have always admired and looked up to those who get to work on such incredible projects. Ms. Inman told such interesting stories, connecting her work to the astronauts in space. I almost felt like I was in Mission Control along with her.

• Ms. Inman said that she was unaware of the stereotype that boys are better in math and science than girls. Growing up, I felt the same way. I was always one of the strongest math and science students in my co-ed middle school, and now I go to an all-girls high school.

• I loved her comment about trying sushi for the first time, and how it opened her up to being an adventurous eater, because who knows what untried favorite is out there? It would be good for me to take the same approach with academics, given as how I’m not sure what STEM-related subjects and careers most interest me. I’m also an adventurous eater and love sushi, too!

• It was helpful to hear about her experience getting poor grades in her 200-level Physics courses in college, how she went to her professor for help, and how she found the courage to persevere. I hope that if I’m ever faced with a similar challenge, I’ll be able to readjust my expectations and continue working hard, as she did.

• I loved hearing her story about meeting and corresponding with an astronaut, who asked her help in keeping his family informed about the health of his spacecraft during his reentry to earth. Sometimes I feel that those who are driven to innovate in STEM fields are just driven to find the newest thing. It’s nice to hear stories about the personal side of STEM and how the work really impacts those for whom it was designed.

• Ms. Inman didn’t originally think that Computer Science was her thing, but after trying it, she loved it. I, too, was skeptical, but now that I’ve been taking an AP Computer Science class for a few months, I’ve learned that I love the problem solving and satisfaction that comes with coding.