For this special World Space Week episode, we’re thrilled to welcome Dr. Rosaly M.C. Lopes, a renowned planetary scientist and volcanologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. Originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Dr. Lopes holds a Ph.D. in Planetary Sciences and has spent her career exploring the wonders of our Solar System, from the fiery volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io to the mysterious, icy landscapes of Saturn’s moon Titan. Her groundbreaking work on the Galileo and Cassini missions has advanced our understanding of these alien worlds and earned her numerous accolades, including induction into the Guinness Book of World Records for discovering the most active volcanoes on another celestial body. Join us as we dive into her fascinating journey in planetary science and learn about her role as an inspirational model for anyone who wants to follow their dreams.
[Hari Mogoșanu] Welcome to another session of the World Space Week 2024 this time around, the theme is space and climate change, which is a very, very interesting topic. And today we are talking with Rosaly Lopes.
[Rosaly Lopes] Nice to be here.
[Hari Mogoșanu] Would you like to introduce yourself and tell us about what you do and where you work?
[Rosaly Lopes] I work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, and we are managed by the Caltech. Caltech, which is the California Institute of Technology and the university, but we work for NASA, mostly, and I been there for quite a long time, and now I’m Deputy Director for the Planetary Science Directorate, so I worry about all the missions that are flying, planetary missions that are flying that have been built and or there are they are still being planned. So I still do some science on a kind of very spare time basis. But I like to collaborate with people, and my expertise is really planetary geology and volcanology.
[Hari Mogoșanu] What got you started in your career?
[Rosaly Lopes] Oh, well, as far back as I can remember, I was fascinated by space, looking at the Moon, looking at stars, and I grew up with the Apollo program, so I was really fascinated by that. I wanted to become an astronaut. Unfortunately, I’m very nearsighted, and although I had surgery now, I was a very nearsighted Brazilian female at that time. It didn’t really look like it would be possible. So I decided to sort of adapt that into work in astronomy, working as an astronomer, and I went to college in England, and then became very interested in planetary geology. So after my degree in astronomy, I went more towards the geology side for my PhD, particularly volcanology. And my dream was always to work for NASA, and eventually I ended up here.
[Sam Leske] Oh, that’s fascinating. Yeah, we’ve actually met a lot of people who started in astronomy, that sort of area, then moved into geology and geology related fields. It’s so amazing too, that you got inspired by the Apollo program. That seems to be the spark for a lot of people’s science careers.
[Rosaly Lopes] Yes, hopefully it is, but it was a very exciting time, the race to the Moon and all that. And you know, people are still very interested in the space program, but it’s become more commonplace, let’s say, and, and it became different, because now we have all these robot explorers, which is what we do at JPL, where I work.
[Hari Mogoșanu] So NASA, it’s a United States organization. We get asked many times about “How does one get to work there?”. What do you have to do? And I can imagine it would have to be a lot of hard work. It would have to be a lot of talent. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey, and how hard did you find that, or perhaps easy, to go and work there, also considering that, as you said, you are coming from another part of the world, just like maybe many other people.
[Rosaly Lopes] Yes, and I got there almost by chance. Although I did want to work for NASA, I knew that it would be very difficult, because in a lot of NASA laboratories, you have to be a United States citizen. But I was finishing my PhD and working late one day, and the phone rang. And it was a scientist from JPL asking to speak to my advisor. Well, my advisor had gone home, but I had met this fellow at the conference, his name was David Perry. And I go like, Oh yeah, how are you? And he says, oh, you know, what are you doing? And I told him I was finishing my PhD, but the situation in England at the time was really bad. And I said, I don’t know if I can even get a postdoc. And he said, NASA has this postdoctoral program that’s open to foreigners, and in fact, we still do. It’s called the NASA postdoctoral program, and that’s how a lot of foreigners end up at JPL. So I went there for essentially two years. And actually by that time, I had a job in England, I was working at the old Royal Observatory in Greenwich. It wasn’t quite what I wanted to do, because it was more dealing with the past and I wanted to deal with the future. But it was an interesting, secure job in civil service, and I just left it all on this gamble to go to JPL for two years. And luckily, it worked out, and I’ve been there for more than 30 years now.
[Hari Mogoșanu] Wow, so, so what I’m hearing is, first, it pays off to work really hard, and
[Rosaly Lopes] there’s no way around that. You have to work really hard. It’s extremely competitive. Yeah,
[Hari Mogoșanu] and then it’s a really good idea to get to meet people and go to conferences and find your find your people.
[Rosaly Lopes] And I mean meeting people is really very important. I had another stroke of luck as I was getting ready to come to JPL for my postdoc, and I got invited to a conference in the US as an organizer. Which I considered to be an honor for someone with a recent PhD. And so I used my own money, like my vacation money, to go to this conference in Arizona and and there, before I gave my talk at the conference, I just came into the audience, and I sat down next to a woman about my age, and I didn’t know her, and I gave my talk, and I sat down again, and she turned to me and said, “Oh, that was really good”. And she said, “I’m Adriana Campo. I work at JPL”. And I told her I was coming to JPL. And so when the session ended, we started chatting. We had lunch together. It turned out, initially, she was from Argentina, I was from Brazil, and so we became friends. And when I came to JPL, she introduced me to a lot of people, including people in the team that she worked on, which was on the Galileo mission, she worked on this instrument team. We have instrument teams on the missions, and it was the near infrared team. And then I started helping them out on a few things. And when the two years were close to up, the principal investigator of the team offered me a position. He said, “Well, the Galileo mission is going to Jupiter, and one of our targets is going to be Io”, which is Jupiter’s volcanic moon, “and we need someone to do the planning and for the Io observations and lead that”. And I had never done anything on Io. I had never done any infrared spectroscopy, but I jumped right in. And, one of the things that I have really liked about JPL is that, people just assume that you can jump into a new area and do well. So I have switched areas over the years, depending on the opportunities.
[Hari Mogoșanu] What I’m also hearing is that you have to have courage and follow your dreams.
[Rosaly Lopes] Absolutely. Yes, my father always used to say that it’s the most important thing. You have to have a dream and you have to follow it.
[Hari Mogoșanu] And so your dream was to do planetary exploration. And I have to ask you this question, because you have mentioned Io, and we think Io is one of the most wonderful moons there were, and it’s a very fascinating place. Tell us about how it was to plan a mission there?
[Rosaly Lopes] Well, I started working on the Galileo mission after it had launched, but we had a problem, and that is that the main antenna that the spacecraft used for communications didn’t open, so we had to use a smaller antenna, so we had to collect far fewer data, fewer observations than than we thought we would. So when I came in, I had to really start looking at what were the highest priorities, observations, to get the most science for this instrument, the infrared instrument, and also collaborating with other teams, like the camera team and all this. So, this plan had to be very carefully thought out because, I sort of compare it with a lot of missions where you have the main antenna open and you can collect lots of observations. It’s like a tourist with a digital camera, and on Galileo, we had to be like Ansel Adams, just plan every observation very carefully, because we could not return much data.
[Sam Leske] It’s fascinating how to deal with a problem like that. We saw the engineering version of Galileo at JPL when we visited a couple of months ago. It was amazing to see the size of the spacecraft. I was blown away just how big it was.
[Rosaly Lopes] Yes, at the time, it was the largest interplanetary spacecraft that NASA had flown, and it was a very, very interesting mission, despite the fact that we couldn’t collect a lot of data, it was very carefully planned, and there are still people analyzing Galileo data. And the missions, you know, finished like in 2003 we stopped collecting data with my instrument in 2001 and after that, I moved to the Cassini mission, another great mission.
[Hari Mogoșanu] Wow. What an inspiration for anybody who’s listening.
[Sam Leske] Yeah, we grew up with these missions. I think anybody interested in space was following these things really, really closely. And, yeah, certainly the problems with the antenna, I remember that unfolding, and then how it was worked around it is quite incredible. How about having to deal with these, find ways through these problems on something that’s, you know, millions and millions of kilometers away. It’s quite staggering, really.
[Rosaly Lopes] Yes, it what was staggering is that we had to replan how the instruments collected data, and so the engineers had to upload new software and and it turned out Galileo had been delayed, and it was using this computer language called assembly language, and there were not many people around who could still use it, and it didn’t have a lot of memory, compared to today’s missions, it’s a kind of a dinosaur, but it did great. It did great things. And, we found out a lot about Io, this is one of the things I’m known for. It’s not the most important thing that I did, I mean, scientifically, but I discovered all these volcanoes on Io that no one had known about because I was looking with the infrared instrument and analyzing data, pixel by pixel. And I found where, warmer areas where I. So by the end of the mission, I had found 71.
Dr. Lopes joined JPL as National Research Council Fellow in 1989 and, in 1991, became a JPL employee and a member of the Galileo Flight Project, a mission to Jupiter. She was responsible for observations of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io from 1996 to 2001, using Galileo’s Near-infrared Mapping Spectrometer. During this exciting period of her career, she discovered 71 active volcanoes on Io, for which she was honored in the 2006 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records as the discoverer of the most active volcanoes anywhere. https://science.jpl.nasa.gov/people/lopes/
[Sam Leske] Wow. That’s amazing. 71 new volcanoes. Yeah, yeah, pretty incredible,
[Rosaly Lopes] Yeah. It’s new in the sense that no one had found them before. So, we had a lot of exciting things. And one of the things that Galileo discovered was that another moon of Jupiter, Europa, had a lot of liquid water under an icy crust. Yeah. And in October, we’re launching a mission to explore Europa, and that’s a direct result of the Galileo observations, which is so exciting.
Oct. 14, 2024: The largest spacecraft NASA ever built for a mission headed to another planet, Europa Clipper also is the first NASA mission dedicated to studying an ocean world beyond Earth. The spacecraft will travel 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) on a trajectory that will leverage the power of gravity assists, first to Mars in four months and then back to Earth for another gravity assist flyby in 2026. After it begins orbiting Jupiter in April 2030, the spacecraft will fly past Europa 49 times. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/liftoff-nasas-europa-clipper-sails-toward-ocean-moon-of-jupiter/
The full video with all the interviews before and after the launch:
https://plus.nasa.gov/video/nasas-europa-clipper-launch/
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/europa-clipper-begins-journey-to-jupiters-icy-moon/
[Sam Leske] Yeah, we’ve been following the development of Europa Clipper, very closely here. So it’s going to be a very exciting time, with the launch, of course, and then, and then in a few years, when it gets there, and the data coming back, groundbreaking discoveries, really, isn’t it?
[Rosaly Lopes] Yes, we are hoping for a beautiful launch. I am planning to go to the launch. Funnily enough, I worked at JPL for like, 30 years before I actually saw a launch. I had this habit of joining missions when they were already flying. Now I work at the Directorate, and help to manage these missions. I had the chance last year to go to the one called Psyche that’s going to an asteroid.
Rosaly did attend the launch and she kindly sent us photos and media links.
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- Europa Clipper on the launch pad
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- Rosaly Lopez NASA JPL and her son Tommy Gautier at the Europa Clipper Launch
[Sam Leske] It’d be fascinating to see these missions from the start all the way through. It’s quite good because of the length of them.
[Hari Mogoșanu] I think with the Apollo missions, when they were launching rockets at the time, there was kind of like a peak where there was a lot of interest in the beginning, because it was an interesting thing to see a rocket launching, but then there were a lot or enough launches happening so people kind of like thought launches were a normal thing, even if you would only see them on TV, they were there and probably people wouldn’t get so interested after a while. And then when all of the budget cuts happened and rocket launches didn’t happen as much as people were used to, then it kind of became like a rare thing. And now we’re back on the ascending node for people to be excited, and I mean the public, not the scientists or anybody else, to go and see rocket launches, and consider this as an extraordinary event. Because a little bit of me thinks that we took this for granted for a while, and then when they didn’t happen anymore, it was kind of like, oh, maybe these are extraordinary.
Maybe we should go and watch a rocket launch. We would love to go. We saw one from far, far away here too, yeah, in New Zealand from a long distance. We actually took photographs of it.,
[Sam Leske] Two of them, both quite exciting. But one that we did see far, far away, was the Capstone mission for Artemis. When that was the launch to test the Moon orbit, which was quite cool.
[Hari Mogoșanu] Yeah, and that launched from New Zealand. So we’re very lucky, so we didn’t have to travel very far, but we were working – doing stargazing that night, so we just took pictures.
[Hari Mogoșanu] So I wanted to ask you, among all this extraordinary career that you had, can you pick, like, maybe one or two highlights that you really enjoyed–something, some events that you really felt they made your day, or you thought that’s why I’m here, that’s what I fought for. This was worth it, all this work and learning and everything…
[Rosaly Lopes] oh, I have felt like that many times. One time I can take it as a highlight was I, as I said, I started working on the Cassini mission, and I was working with the Cassini radar, and the Cassini radar did observations mainly of Titan, Saturn’s moon Titan. Now, Titan has a very dense atmosphere with a lot of haze, so when the previous spacecraft had flown by– Voyager [spacecraft], all it saw was an orange ball. It couldn’t see the surface. And Titan is big, about the same size as the planet Mercury. So it was the largest piece of real estate in the Solar System that we hadn’t seen and and to see those images from the radar coming back for the first time and only of a small piece of Titan, because each time we flew by with the radar, we could only get about one to 2% of the surface, but we didn’t know what was going to be on the surface. So the team was together when they arrived and that was really exciting.
But I must say that the thing that really makes me feel that it’s all worthwhile is when I inspire young people. I have spent a lot of time doing public outreach and talking to college kids and schools and and, and it’s, now and then I get a letter. I get to have some communication with someone who says that I inspired them. And I remember that I was inspired by a woman who worked on the Apollo program. Her name is Francis Northcutt, but she’s known as Poppy, and you may have heard of her, and she worked on the Apollo program, not for NASA. She worked for an aerospace company. She was on contract with NASA. She calculated the orbits to bring back the Apollo capsules, and when Apollo searching had a problem, she was the one who did the calculation to bring the astronauts back and a Brazilian newspaper, actually, two newspapers had short articles about her, a picture and a short article, and she was on Mission Control. And I thought, Oh, back then you only saw man in Mission Control. So I kept those newspaper cuttings and and, and she was like my role model for a long time, even though I had never met her. And strangely enough, I I tried to contact her when I came to the US, but she had left NASA and ended up becoming an attorney, and it was only in 2019 that we managed to make contact. And now we’re in contact regularly and and she actually has said, I mean, even in interviews, that I had talked to someone at the Brazilian Consulate who was interviewing me for something in the Brazilian consulate in Houston, and I knew that she probably still lived in Houston, so I asked this Lady from the consulate. Do you think you could try to find this person, this attorney? And she did. And Poppy says she got this call from the Brazilian consulate and she was, like, puzzled. You know, I have never been to Brazil. I don’t know anybody there. And then she found out that this scientist who worked for JPL, wanted to talk to her because she was an inspiration to me. So, you know, we have become friends and and, but just the same way that she inspired me, just by being being in this newspaper article, and now I hope to inspire other young people to follow this career, or even not necessarily in space, but maybe in other fields of science or engineering or computing, and just be connected in in some way, to exploration,
[Hari Mogoșanu] Which is why we’re doing this podcast and we’ve been looking for people who do this kind of work to get them to talk about their careers, get them to talk about what they did and how they did it. To support the world. You’re part of the people who are building a better world, a better future for our humanity at large. This is part of the work that is going on right now, and because of this year’s theme, which is space and climate change, I have to ask you, what are your favorite highlights from the work that you did? How would you connect it with climate change? What did we learn from space exploration that we can apply here back on Earth and learn from it?
[Rosaly Lopes] Well, I have not worked with climate change research or even atmospheric science, but when you look at just the Earth, you’re seeing a small subset, let’s say, of conditions. When you look at other worlds, you start to understand physical processes a lot better, because you can see a planet like Jupiter, which is mostly gas, is mostly atmosphere, and Titan with a dense atmosphere. And really the greenhouse effect was actually discovered because of observations of Venus with a lot of CO two in the atmosphere. You know when Carl Sagan did a lot of that work and so on. So the planets teach us a lot about the Earth and that’s one thing. I can say in geology, for example, impact craters: people used to look at the craters on the Moon and think that they were volcanoes, you know, back like in the 1950s and 60s, and because they only knew about volcanic craters they were comparing it with the Earth today and then they started finding out that actually, these craters were from meteorite impacts. When people started looking at the Earth and actually finding old impact structures on Earth. And then the whole concept of that we are in danger from meteorite impacts – that’s how people started realizing it all the planets have all these other craters because they didn’t have erosion or plate tectonics, and the way that the Earth did so, they preserved that early record. But there are still impacts happening, and although they are much rarer now than in ancient times, closer to the time when the solar system formed, but that’s one example of how studying other planets can help us understand the Earth and the other aspect is technology, that there is a lot of technology that is developed because of the space program, for example, the technology that led to cell phones that came out of the space program, and that’s because we had an need to make things smaller and lighter to be able to fly in spacecraft. So again, a lot of technology development, which you know, helps in the study of atmosphere and climate change.
[Sam Leske] Yeah, it’s quite fascinating. From that technology point of view to miniaturizing things to go on spacecraft and rovers, and how that sort of comes into everyday use on some of the items are used, like you said, like with your cell phones. It’s quite staggering. Here’s something that was born in space travel that we now all carry around in our pockets. Spin offs are absolutely fascinating. And I guess the sensors needed to understand other planets, like you were talking about the radar for Titan earlier, those kinds of technologies are now turning around to look at Earth so we understand Earth’s climate a whole lot better. Is quite fascinating as well.
[Rosaly Lopes] And of course, we do a lot of observations of the Earth from space, yeah,
[Sam Leske] which is, which is more like a recent thing?
[Rosaly Lopes] No, no, but at JPL, actually, sometimes people think that we just do planetary exploration because we are known for our rovers and our missions, but actually a big part of JPL is of science with all the you know of observing satellites and and another big part is astrophysics and technology development.
[Hari Mogoșanu] Which is what we need for a happy planet, we need all of these things but more than anything we need science and we need people to understand science and the impact it has on us;
[Rosaly Lopes] Yeah agreed being science literate is very important for people, being able to question, being able to look for evidence, apply the scientific method even if you are not a scientist
[Hari Mogoșanu] It is our hope that we can argue that even if you have to learn a little bit of science will make an impact on the society at large
[Rosaly Lopes] Yes because the scientific method teaches you to question, teaches you to weigh evidence. You have a hypothesis, it is consistent with your hypothesis or not so it makes people more discerning.
[Hari Mogoșanu] I have one last question for you, which I have not written down but not on purpose. It is a question that we ask everybody we talk to when we do this podcast for the World Space Week.
And the question is…
What is the future of humankind?
[Rosaly Lopes] I wish I knew… I have to say personally, and this is my personal opinion, I have a lot of faith in humankind. I think that when we have problems we find solutions and science and technology helps us to find solutions and I have a lot of hope that whatever problems there are in the world today that science and technology will help us solve them.
[Hari Mogoșanu] Thank you so very much for being part of this interview and we look forward to putting this online and having people inspired by you – we definitely have been very inspired by you.
Follow Rosaly https://x.com/rosaly_lopes
Find out more about Rosaly Lopes on NASA JPL https://science.jpl.nasa.gov/people/Lopes/
Transcribed by https://otter.ai and edited for clarity
THE WORLD SPACE WEEK ASSOCIATION PODCAST SERIES
A series of conversations with visionary thinkers and doers, sharing their unique insights and aspirations for the future of humanity beyond Earth — made possible with the support of the World Space Week Association.
World Space Week Association Podcasting Team
Host and producer: Haritina Mogoșanu, Co-host: Samuel Leske, Milky-Way.Kiwi
Special thanks to
– Milky-Way.Kiwi and New Zealand Astrobiology Network for the recording equipment and time.
– Rhian Sheehan for his song “An afternoon on the Moon”
The podcasts have been produced for the global World Space Week network.
Think big, start small!
Our podcast series engages the public with cutting-edge advancements in space exploration by connecting with global thought leaders who are shaping the future of their space environment. Every space endeavor begins as a dream, and no matter who or where you are, pursuing that dream can make it a reality. In these episodes, we dive into goal setting and uncover sources of inspiration, tapping into the collective wisdom of pioneers to chart the course toward a future as a spacefaring civilisation.