JESSE: So, okay, this takes me back, way back to the beginning of our conversation you mentioned your, I’ll say mentor, calling in a favor to Hawaii for the telescope. How does it get decided, who gets to pull data from Hubble at any given time or from the new James Webb? Can you call up a friend at NASA and be “Hey, remember how I won in that Poker game and I didn't make you pay? You owe me a favor. Can you point the telescope?” How does that work? SARAH: So, it really, really, really depends on the telescope. So, for things like Hubble, for the Keck telescopes in Hawaii, the really big telescopes, the ones that are very expensive to operate that are in extremely high demand because they're so powerful for those telescopes. And there's something called a TAC which is a telescope-- Sorry, a Time Allocation Committee. And so basically, you write a proposal and you kind of make the science case for what the question is that you're trying to answer, what the data are that you need to answer that question, and then you have to have sat down and done the math to figure out how much time you need on that telescope to answer your question. Now, maybe you need 10 minutes, every night for a year, because the measurement that you need is very short, but you need to do it over and over and over again, because you're trying to look for changes, seasonal changes in an atmosphere or something like that. Maybe you just need to sit and stare at the same part of space for the entire night. And so, one of the challenges is trying to figure out how to maximize everybody getting done, what they need to do when some people are just going to want the whole night for like three days in a row where other people are going to want like 20 minutes once a week for a year. And there's also something and this was what the program that I had mentioned for Titan was doing, which is something called an interrupt. And so if you have a-- If you're studying something that doesn't necessarily happen all the time, which turns out to be a fair amount of astronomy is like a supernova or a storm on Titan or something like that, where you can't necessarily predict exactly when it's going to happen; you can basically put in proposals where you are like using a smaller telescope to monitor something and then if you accomplish a certain threshold or trigger or whatever, then you get time on the telescope. And then the other thing that we have are things called Director's Discretionary Time. And so the big telescope facilities including Hubble, and have the opportunity for you to, it’s not quite as much as like calling, but to write a very short proposal that basically says, holy shit, this thing just happened. Like, we need to go look at it right now. And if we don't look at it right now, we're never going to be able to look at it again. Or we're going to miss this really important opportunity or whatever. And then the director has the discretion to look at that proposal and say, okay, you know what, that is really important. And now we're going to shift around some of these other observations, so that we can make sure we get that. So, it's definitely an interesting scheduling problem in astronomy, because you have these things that happen very regularly that people want to do. You have observations that don't necessarily matter when they get done as long as they get done. And then you have things that just like appear, like effectively out of thin air sometime, and that people are going to want to study. But one of the things that will happen is Hubble not so much, because Hubble is definitely a special case. But with a lot of the ground based telescopes, if they're still operating on a model where a person is physically going there to observe or sometimes we do something called remote observing now where you are sitting in a facsimile of the control room, but you're not actually at the telescope, and you have control over the telescope for the whole night or half the night or whatever. People will for sure, like email or call, if they know who's on the telescope that night, and ask for a favor. And my feeling is that it's a lot less kind of like the backroom deals that that people might think, and more just we're all at some point, just in our own different ways, engage in the same collective endeavor. And so I think the vast majority of the time if people can help each other, they for sure will because at some point, it's going to be you on the other end of the phone wanting to be can you please just go look at this one thing for us real fast. And so people try really hard to work together on those kinds of things, especially realizing that these are all very precious resources, all of these telescopes, and trying to maximize the science that gets done with them is important to all of us. Yeah. JESSE: I think it's almost like you just, you mentioned backroom deals, which I kind of prompted you. But it's almost like just view it through the lens of goodness of humanity, rather than the greedy side of humanity, and you'll view it correctly. Or it's everybody's in this endeavor together. We're all trying to help each other. It's not you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back, any kind of weird thing going on. I do want to ask you about, I think it was your postdoc you spent at NASA. You spent time at NASA? SARAH: I was actually at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory between undergrad and grad school. Yeah. Yeah. JESSE: Okay. I’m trying to figure out where that got sandwiched in. You spent a year there? SARAH: Yeah. Yeah. JESSE: So, this is, again, most of these questions are layman's question, so you’ll just have to go with me, but at least from a layman's standpoint, it seems like NASA is like the place to be for studying anything space, like the mecca of space. So, I mean, you spent time there. You're Johns Hopkins now, which is not bad. But did you want to go back to NASA? Is John Hopkins a better place than NASA? Do you feel like you're in the right place? Or is it there's like an aspirational place where any kind of special nerd wants to be? SARAH: Yeah. So, I guess that's-- I mean, I think that's something that-- I think that that's actually kind of a common question, although may be framed differently, most of the time I get asked it. But when I tell people what I do, they always assume I worked for NASA. And so I think people don't realize that and, I mean, this is true for all of science, but I think it's particularly true for space science. There's lots of different types of places where planetary scientists work. And so a lot of people are obviously employed at NASA centers. Those people, if they're scientists tend to be working on NASA missions all the time, whether that's things that are being developed or things that are currently in flight. But for the most part, that's what those people are doing for most, if not all of their time. There are also people who work at various scientific institutes, which are kind of a similar idea, but they are kind of fully supported by grant money that they have to write proposals for. And again, they're spending most of their time doing science, but not necessarily NASA mission related. So, it could be theoretical, it could be analysis from previous missions, it could be working on other things. And then the rest of us are at colleges and universities and maybe doing research related to current missions or maybe doing other work, but we're also teaching as part of our time. So, in my case at Johns Hopkins, during the school year, I'm supposed to be spending about 30 to 40% of my time teaching, rather than doing science. And so it's just a different way of doing the job because I was interested in teaching. And in that sense, we're teaching both undergrads so I sometimes teach a kind of planets 100 level class for non-science majors who are just interested in knowing more about the solar system. But I also teach graduate students and have my own graduate students who are actively working on research for their PhDs. And so it's just a different type of job. And the fact of the matter is, we're all working together. So, some of my closest collaborators are still at NASA centers, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory or since I'm out here in Maryland now at NASA Goddard, which is pretty close by. And so we all kind of work together on various things just depending on what missions are happening and what else is going on in the world. JESSE: Could you divide it is-- Is it possible to divide it in saying NASA is more, we have to figure out how to make things work right now. Whereas you're in a more academic environment, so you have the ability to do that kind of almost like esoteric research that doesn't necessarily have a straight application. I'm thinking about-- I had another guest on, Richard Fineman, who, he just finished his PhD at MIT and he was at NASA working on like increasing the mobility and usability of spacesuits, which is a very functional problem. Like how do we make these more usable when people are inside of them? So, I didn't know if it was as easy as saying, well, if you are at NASA and you're working predominantly on missions, then it's going to be things that are put into use right now versus almost just data collecting I'll call it, it’s obviously more complicated than that, but towards like what you're doing. SARAH: Yeah, it really depends on the person. So, a lot of the scientists work at NASA centers have the same ability to put in research grant proposals that I do. And in fact, we all apply to the same pots of money. And so they can get funding for part of their salary or, I guess, in some cases, all that I think that really happens to work on whatever science questions they want to work on. So, it really just depends on the person's position and their career stage and their interest and stuff like that; what kind of work they're doing there. But certainly, a lot of the scientists that are employed at NASA centers are spending at least a fraction of their time, either working on missions that are currently in development or missions that are currently flying. JESSE: Okay. Before we were at a time I want to ask you about, I'm gonna go off the deep end here. I want to ask you about your Etsy store and what you're doing over here with your artistic side. SARAH: Oh, gosh. Yeah, where do I start? So, about a year and a half ago, about two years ago-- JESSE: I should ask, do you care if I like pull some images and then superimpose them on the video so people can see? SARAH: That's fine. I’m a little nervous about which ones you’re gonna pull though. But it’s fine. So, about two years ago, and I got an email asking if I was interested in participating in this program, here in Baltimore. So, there's a bunch of other universities in Baltimore besides Johns Hopkins. And one of those Universities is called MICA, which is the Maryland Institute College of Arts. And MICA has a joint program with a Research Institute at Hopkins called HEMI, which is the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute. It's a HEMI MICA partnership. And what they're calling the extreme art, which probably sounds a little weird. JESSE: I'm imagining like since you do triathlon, we're like on the bike trying to paint at the same time, or like surfing--
Smart Athlete Podcast Ep. 34 - Sarah Horst - LOOK TO THE STARS - Part 3 of 3
So, okay, this takes me back, way back to the beginning of our conversation you mentioned your, I’ll say mentor, calling in a favor to Hawaii for the telescope. How does it get decided, who gets to pull data from Hubble at any given time or from the new James Webb?
