TRUST ME I KNOW WHAT I'm DOING

I can’t say it enough so I’ll say it again: thank you for listening to the show and for rating and kindly reviewing it and following on social media. It’s very much appreciated, and I’m quite grateful. How often have you looked up in the sky and stared into that deep expanse of what’s out there? Gazing into the stars and the vastness of space and thinking and studying both what we see and also what we could see has been among humanity’s first instinctive curiosities, from both our earthly context and everything extra-terrestrial. Whether you’re looking on a clear night or through the lens of a telescope, it’s a reminder of how large the universe is out there and perhaps how small we indeed are in the totality of time and energy and existence of it all. And so, it was really wonderful to catch up with Dr. Swati Mohan, someone whose expertise as a space scientist is helping us better understand how to tackle this exploration, and not just designing and mapping out how to get there, but what did we learn along the way and what questions we should be asking ourselves to unlock some of the most thrilling and deepest mysteries of of space. Swati is an Indian American, who after some inspiration from a great physics teacher in high school, found her way into the world of aerospace engineering. She graduated from Cornell and after a brief stint working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Cassini mission to Saturn in 2004, received her PhD in Aeronautics/Astronautics from MIT, working on the SPHERES project for her thesis, and also helping the initial trial of the ZERO Robotics program. She re-joined NASA and JPL in 2010 in the Guidance, Navigation, and Controls (or GNC) section. Since then, Swati has worked on a number of missions, such as GRAIL, Mars 2020 Perseverance, and Psyche. Now I don’t know if you remember during the pandemic how we were all locked onto the Mars Perseverance landing, but Swati was the voice and face of Entry, Descent, and Landing for Perseverance's trip to Mars on February 18, 2021. Recently, she was the GNC lead and a Chief Engineer for the Psyche mission that launched October 13, 2023, on a journey to a unique metal-rich asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. We had a chance to catch up and chat about everything from problem solving, to representing her cultural heritage, to relating how the big visionary thinking of space science and aeronautics matters to us everyday. But we started by chatting about perhaps the most important piece of inspiration that guided Swati’s interest. I’m of course talking about Star Trek the Next Generation and as a doctor, I asked her the very pressing question of who’s more preferred - Crusher or Pulaski?