Episode 11: Mars Photography and Finding Your Way in Space with Dr. Tanya Harrison
Join Emily and Alexa as they chat with planetary scientist and space industry strategist, Dr. Tanya Harrison, about Mars, science communication, and finding your path in the space industry.
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Show Notes:
Dr. Tanya Harrison
Instagram: Tanyaofmars
Bluesky: tanyaofmars
“Moonbase 8” (tv show starring Fred Armisen)
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Transcript:
[Intro music: “Space” by Music Unlimited]
Emily
Hello and welcome to the Art Astra Podcast. I’m Emily Olsen.
Alexa
And I’m Alexa Erdogan.
Emily
And we’re back to our regular bi-weekly posting schedule with another new episode. In case you missed it, season 2 of our show started with a discussion of security and space with Schuyler Towne. If that peaks your interest, head on over to artastra.space or your favorite podcast provider to check it out.
Alexa
This week, we turn our attention further beyond Low Earth Orbit and reminisce on one of our friendly neighborhood red planets, as well as the fields of science communication and space strategy.
[interlude music - “Space” by Music Unlimited]
Emily
And today we have a very special guest joining us. Dr. Tanya Harrison is a planetary scientist turned space industry strategist. Starting out her career as a professional Martian, she worked in science and mission operations on multiple NASA missions to Mars, including the Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance rovers, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter,
bridging literal worlds as well as sectors in the space ecosystem. Tanya was previously the director of strategic science initiatives at the Earth observation company Planet and the Director of Research for Arizona State University's new Space Initiative. She is currently a fellow of the Outer Space Institute and a science advisor to multiple companies in the space and ocean technology sectors. Tanya, thank you so much for joining us! Welcome to the show.
Alexa
Thank you so much!
Tanya
Thanks so much for having me.
Emily
So previously in your career, you've described yourself as a professional Martian. What did you do as a professional Martian and what drew you to Mars in your studies?
Tanya
I mean, for the first few years of my career, I literally feel like I got to live on Mars. My job was working in mission operations for two cameras on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which got to Mars in 2006. And I came into the mission in 2008, right at the beginning of what we call the extended mission, basically NASA's bonus money of like, “Hey, you guys did pretty good. We'll let this keep going.”
And my job for one of the cameras, the context camera, was to take pictures of Mars every day, like pick what the camera was going to take pictures of, and then analyze those images when they came back to Earth from the standpoint of a geologist, since I'm a geologist, what is this image telling us that is something maybe significant about the history of Mars?
And then also looking at it from the standpoint of… kind of an engineer: is the camera itself functioning properly? You just got to see different pieces of Mars every single day.
And there's something unique about that experience that you don't necessarily get if you're just studying Mars as a geologist, because usually you'll pick a specific location on the planet, or you might be studying the landing site where one of the rovers is, or you'll pick a specific type of thing on Mars, like studying volcanoes or studying impact craters.
So getting the opportunity to look at the entire planet every single day, regardless of whatever you were taking pictures of, was this really cool experience to really start to appreciate that Mars was such a dynamic and complex place compared to even what I thought before working on that mission.
And the other main aspect on that mission was working on the Mars Color Imager, or MARCI, which is mostly a weather monitoring camera. And I think most people know Mars has these giant dust storms from movies like The Martian.
They're not quite like that, but they are dramatic, you know, for the rovers on the surface.
And so my job literally was like a Martian weather girl. I looked at the weather in these images.
We used that to plan operations for the satellites because you don't want to try to take pictures of the surface when there's a dust storm in the way.
And we would use it for picking future landing sites, but also monitoring for the rovers that were on the ground. Like, is there a giant dust storm heading toward Opportunity, for example?
The rovers can't drive fast enough to get out of the way, but you can at least take some precautionary measures like, “oh hey, maybe we shouldn't do anything power intensive on a really dusty day if your rover is solar powered.”
So, to this day, I still feel like that was the coolest stuff that I've ever done in my career. I miss having that level of relationship with Mars, even though it's been so long since that was the main part of my job. But I feel so lucky to have been able to do that and to do it as like my first real job in the space industry.
Alexa
No, that's so cool. Like it's such an intimate relationship that you have, because I imagine you were the first person to see these images as they were coming through. Is that accurate?
Tanya
A lot of the time, yeah. So you're not only the one picking what that camera's taking pictures of and you're like doing the commanding, but then you might be the first human in all of human history to see that piece of Mars at that resolution at that moment in time that you took that picture. And to me, that was just the coolest thing in the world.
Like I would dance my way to work because I was so excited to be able to like be on shift for whatever week, your operations roles would kind of change from week to week. But anytime that it was my turn to like do all the commanding, I'm like, yes, I'm so excited, like go to work today, put on my headphones, like target some images, look at Mars. It was great.
[laughter]
Alexa
So I'm curious what drew you to first of all, what drew you to geology in the beginning? And then what made Mars your favorite planet after that? Like, how did that path sort of evolve?
Tanya
Geology was almost an accident in that, like, I knew I was obsessed with Mars ever since I was fairly young. Like, I got into space when I was about 5, thanks to stuff like Star Trek. The Next Generation started when I was two and then books like The Magic School Bus: Lost in the Solar System. I still have the copy from 1987 when I was a kid that I would make my dad read to me.
But then when the Pathfinder mission landed on Mars when I was 11, I remember going to the website for the mission. It was the first NASA mission to ever have a website.
And they released these images as an animated GIF, which was like, you know, a big thing at the time in 1997, that Pathfinder took of the little Sojourner rover driving onto the surface of Mars. And I saw that series of images and I thought, this is the coolest thing I have ever seen.
Like I have to work on Mars rovers. And so I started poking around trying to figure out like, what does that actually mean if I want to work on rovers?
And when I got to university, I realized, well, planets are in space, so I should be an astronomer.
Like that was as far as I had gotten. I wasn't good at building things, so I didn't think I would make a very good engineer. But I didn't realize until near the end of my junior year, when you kind of have a review to make sure you're going to graduate on time, that I actually should have gone into geology.
So my advisor was like, “You could continue on this path and go get a PhD in astronomy,” which had kind of been my original plan, because all I knew was academia. And I was fairly young at the time, you don't really know what else is out there. “Or you could pivot to a master's degree in geology, start going that route to study Mars, and then move on to a PhD,” because it would be really difficult to go from a astronomy and physics undergrad directly into a geology PhD program. I was missing a lot of fundamentals other than knowing the three types of rocks.
[laughter]
So I actually applied to both programs. I was like, “The universe will decide. I'll do whatever the universe tells me.”
And then I got into both of them and I was like, “Oh crap, but now I got to make the decision myself.”
[laughter]
But I knew there was just something that felt right. I was like, “No, I want to study Mars.”
The astronomy stuff has been cool, but the research that I did as an astronomer was very focused on stars, like spectroscopy, basically seeing what stars were made out of, very specific types of stars.
It was cool, but it was not what I loved. And so I was like, “No, I think I'm meant to be a geologist, even though this is not exactly what I came in thinking I was going to do. I'm going to change my path and go down this way.” And that was kind of like the first part of my, I don't know, journey in realizing that I couldn't plan my career too far in advance because stuff never goes the way you think it's going to go.
Alexa
No, that's so true. I wish. I feel like Emily and I, we've had this conversation too. Like, I wish somebody would have told us when we were younger, like, it's good to plan, but a lot of times these plans are never going to go the way you think they are. I think maybe the more important thing is to be able to adapt to how things change than just sticking to a plan and die hard, try to get through it.
Tanya
Yeah, I've seen too many people try to stick to plans. And I think especially people in academia to a way that it's like almost detrimental to their mental health. And my heart breaks when I see that because it's like, okay, you're telling me that you're really unhappy on the path that you're on or maybe you like went one way and realized that your heart is actually somewhere else.
Even if you're not miserable, you just realize that you want to do something differently. But like people are just stuck. They're like, “Well, no, this is what I was doing. I can't change my path.”
And like I'm sure if I had stayed in astronomy, I probably would have been really happy.
Like I didn't hate what I did. But I recognized early on enough that I was like, no, I need a change to go in this path that I think is going to take me toward what I actually want to do.
So I try to encourage people like you have control to some extent over your own destiny.
And if you're not happy with the path you're going down, it's okay for you to change that. And it's never too late for you to change that either.
Emily
Yeah, we've definitely spoken about that recently with our careers as well. What I do now didn't exist when I was in grad school, which is so weird to think about. But in terms of continuing that path, if you're comfortable, can you tell us more about what your current work entails?
What does it mean to be a space strategist?
Tanya
Sure, it kind of varies depending on the companies that I'm working with, but at the high level, it usually entails figuring out how to connect companies with the research community and to some extent the government and NGOs as well to try to figure out how can all these different pieces of the larger space sector work together in ways that makes real stuff happen.
So like in academia, you do a ton of research, you write papers, and then those papers tend to just sit behind a paywall. And for most of them, maybe a handful of people will ever read them.
And I never really thought too much about like what happens next until one of my previous jobs when I moved from Mars to the Earth observation sector working at Planet. I got to see some real examples of working at a company, collaborating with researchers at a university and NASA, on projects that led to real world action in very short time periods.
Some of it was COVID response work. Some of it was work related to food security in Ukraine after the war started there. And it just really opened my eyes to the idea that like, oh, you could be doing more in academia than just writing a paper saying it would be great if someone did X, Y, Z. It's like, no, what if we connected you with the right people to make those things happen?
Because usually it's not going to be the scientist.
Tanya
Like you either don't, don't have the resources, you don't know who to talk to. It's also just not part of the thing that you are measured on for your career success, right? It's like publications, how many grad students do you have? What's the impact factor of the journal you're publishing in? It's not what economic benefit did your work have or how many lives did your work save somewhere, which we could have a whole ‘nother podcast interview about that. [laugh]
But that was kind of the motivation behind wanting to go down this pathway. Like after I left Planet, and I was thinking about what I was going to do next, I thought, “Well, I can still do what I was doing, but I don't have to do it tied to one particular company because there's so much cool work happening out there, both on the industry side and on the academic side, the research side, that why can't I just do this across a bunch of different companies and try to see what level of innovation can happen? What more can we do if these people start talking to each other?”
Emily
That's so cool. And it sounds especially like you're consistently at the forefront of moving this work forward more than more than what happens a lot in academia from what I understand.
Tanya
Yeah, I think like if you're on the academic side, there tends to be not a lot of awareness of what's happening outside of the academic bubble. And again, a lot of it's just because that's not really tied to what you're doing for your job. So to some extent, that's completely understandable. But the same thing happens on the industry side as well. They're speaking two different languages. The priorities are completely different. Each side doesn't necessarily always see the benefit at first of why they should be talking to each other. So having somebody that can sit in the middle and be like, “Hey, I know how to translate what you're doing and your goals and needs to this other audience that speaks a completely different language.”
As a scientist, that felt like a very squishy, soft skill at first. Until I realized after doing it for a little while and interfacing between these two groups, I was like, “Oh, so many scientists are not good at talking to not-scientists. This is actually a valuable skill.” [laughter]
Emily
And also, in terms of everything else that you're doing, congratulations on your recently published book, Mia and the Martians!
Tanya
Thank you.
Emily
Could you tell us about what it was like to work on that book and just the process behind making it and how it came to be?
Tanya
Yeah, so I feel like I have to give 99% of the credit to Emma Loudon, my co-author, because it was completely her idea. She approached me, gosh, maybe a year and a half ago, maybe a little bit more, about this idea of working on a book together. And she comes from a very literary family. She'd always wanted to write a book. And she kind of threw this idea out.
And I will admit, I had been very hesitant in my life so far about the idea of writing a children's book, because I..I felt like I didn't want my first book to be a children's book, at least. I didn't like the trope of, oh, you know, women write children's books and men write the scientific books or the pop science books and things like that. So, and this is not meant to insult anybody that writes children's books. This was purely a personal decision. Like for me, I felt like I didn't want to start down that path.
And then I thought about it after Emma had initially reached out to me and I was like, wait a minute, the thing that got you into science as a kid was a children's book about space.
Like, why would you not want to do that? And I was like, “Yeah, okay, this sounds really cool. Let's do it.”
So we went through the process of like putting together the content, trying to find an illustrator.
We just happened to find a children's book illustrator who was super into space, Witter Passman. He was like dedicated to making sure that the rovers all looked as accurate as possible while also anthropomorphizing them in like really adorable ways. And so Emma, wrote basically the bulk of the story. And then the book has a lot of factoid pop-outs in it, which was sort of like my homage to the Magic School Bus books, because if you haven't read them, they are full of factoid pop-outs all over the place.
And as a kid, if my dad ever tried to skip over those while reading it to me, I would be like, “No, go back, go back. You have to read everything.”
And so I thought, yeah, that just…this is the thing that got me into space was all these facts.
So let's put these in this book, too. And I'm so glad that it's been so well received so far.
It was definitely a labor of love. It took us a really long time to put it together. But it was a cool project and I'm really, really glad that Emma invited me to be a part of it.
Emily
Yeah, that's so cool. I have a lot of friends who have kids and that's definitely what's coming out for a lot of holidays and birthdays coming out this year.
Tanya
Nice. [laughter]
Emily
So alongside your work in space and in this book, you've also done several other creative collaborations and you're also a very talented photographer in your own right. Can you tell us about how your scientific background, if it does inform your creative practice or vice versa?
Tanya
That's a good question. I feel like the only thing really that they have in common is that they all tend to involve cameras of some kind. So I think, I don't know if it's still there, but somewhere one of my social media bios says or used to say like “interplanetary photon wrangler.” [laughter]
Alexa
That’s so cool.
[laughter]
Tanya
So I think almost as long as I've loved space, I've had an interest in cameras.
I remember like back in elementary school when you would do like the Scholastic book sales and you save up the points to get things out of the catalog. One of the first things I saved up for in grade 2, I think it was, was a film camera. And I was so excited to run around and use it. It was bright orange. Maybe that was my early days of like going toward Mars with my Mars orange camera.
[laughter]
I wish I still had it. I don't know what happened to it over the years. But maybe the other thing that's in common is I remember an ex-partner pointed out that none of my photos of Earth tend to have people in them. And I thought, “Oh, okay, maybe I just like scenery that doesn't have humans in it, regardless of what planet it's on.”
Alexa
It's so funny, because that was going to be one of my questions. I was curious if your fascination with photography had come as a result of working on Mars and then Earth observation, or if it was like the other way around, but it sounds like they both evolved very simultaneously, just like your love for Mars and geology evolved simultaneously.
Tanya
Yeah, I don't feel like they necessarily influenced each other all that much, but there's certainly, I think, skills you can take from photography on Earth and apply to doing photography in other places. Like I think a lot of people probably assume for satellites, for example, you're just taking pictures of whatever you're flying over, which is often the case for like Earth observing satellites, like Landsat, for example, is just taking the same postage stamp over and over again.
But for Mars, we have to operate under the assumption that the missions could die at any point, because you never know when an errant cosmic ray is going to hit the computer and it dies, like it's happened before. So we have humans in the loop to make sure that we're imaging things in priority order. So it's like, okay, if we lost the spacecraft tomorrow, what is the most important data that we want to get back to answer the science questions for this mission?
And so I wish there was an animation of it, but we internally at the company where we built the context camera, we could build videos of like, the coverage building up over time. And you could see, oh, first we imaged Vals Marineris and then we like throw in the big volcanoes and the polar caps. You can tell like what the most “interesting” pieces of Mars are.
I guess I'm doing air quotes around the word interesting for the audience because there's obviously bias in what people think are interesting versus not when it comes to geology.
But also lighting is a big one. We would plan out what was the best time of year to image certain places if you wanted to make sure there weren't deep shadows on the faces of craters or mountainous areas where you might want to see those slopes. If you shop like south-facing slopes in the southern hemisphere in fall, I think that's right, they're in such deep shadow you can't see anything.
And you don't want to shoot when there's bad weather because then you can't see the surface a lot of the time or the images don't look good. So there's a lot more human in the loop decision making than I think a lot of people would expect.
Alexa
Out of curiosity, you speak with such passion when you talk about the work that you did with Mars and also just about Mars in general, which is totally understandable because Mars is a really cool place. Do you ever sort of miss working on interplanetary photography? Is there something that you would ever want to return to in the future, either as a direct like camera engineer, like ops engineer, or through like things like citizen science projects or something else?
Tanya
Absolutely. I think about it quite a bit. The last mission I ever really worked on was Opportunity.
And I worked on it literally until the day it died. Like I was on shift for the PanCam cameras the last day that we heard from the rover. And the last picture that we ever took just looked like snow on a TV screen.
And there were some messages going back and forth being, we already knew the big dust storm was coming, the one that killed the rover. And people were like, “Oh my gosh, is something wrong with the camera? Is it pointed at the ground? Is the dust cover close? What's going on?”
I was like, “No, it's…It's supposed to be pointing at the sun so we could do a calculation basically of how dusty the air was.” I was like, “No, it's pointing at the sun. We just can't see anything.”
And then we never heard from the rover again. And I remember just this feeling of, it was about eight months later when we finally like called the mission over, but everybody went to JPL for like sending the final commands to the rover and waiting to see if she was going to wake up.
It didn't happen. And just like walking out of that room and feeling like, “Wow, I'm not on any active missions anymore” after like, I think that was about 11 years after I'd started in my first mission ops role. It was a very strange feeling.
And the farther and farther I get from having worked on an active mission, I feel more and more like I've lost this very critical piece of my identity. And I think if somebody came by tomorrow and they were like, “Do you want to come back and do mission ops?”
The cameras that I worked on in 2008 are still functioning today. Like if I could still do that work, I probably would, because I have never felt quite as passionate about a job, I think, ever since that one. Not to say that I didn't, I don't love what I've done since then, but there's just something really special about that. And to know that only a handful of people will ever get the chance to do that. Like I just, I feel lucky to have had that experience.
Emily
That's entirely understandable. That sounds absolutely incredible and also so devastating to be on that team as even just as you said, you could see the dust storm coming and like expected it, but I still just can't. I… obviously completely different mission, but I have seen the Cassini documentary multiple times and I like bawl my eyes out like every single time. And I was not involved, obviously, at all, just a bystander.
[laughter]
Tanya
If you haven't seen, have you seen the Goodnight Oppy documentary on Amazon Prime?
Emily
I have not.
Alexa
Oh, no.
Tanya
Oh, man. That one. It's so good because they do an amazing job of capturing the human side of the mission. They kind of follow the stories of a few people that come in and out over time.
And they, I don't know how I didn't realize that they were filming the last day that we were at JPL, but there's a scene of me and a friend crying in a corner, hugging each other after they sent the final commands. And I think she was the one that sent it to me.
And I was like, oh, I mean, it's kind of, bittersweet that they caught that moment on camera.
And I mean, you can't see either one of our faces. We knew it was us. But I was so focused on what was happening in that moment. I didn't even register that there were people in there with cameras at all. So seeing the footage was like, wait, what? Where did this come from? Where were these people? Like, did they film this on their phones? But like, people were, everybody was crying.
And then when we left the dark room at JPL and you kind of like, empty out onto the street.
Literally someone was like, “What do we do now?” Because that mission lasted for 15 years.
You had people that got married because of the mission. They had children during that mission.
They had built their entire lives around this schedule of working on this rover every single day.
And to suddenly lose that, it's just… it's a very strange feeling. That's to this day, it's the only mission I've been on, like to the point that the mission ended.
And man, watching that documentary, they did like a private screening for aerospace people in DC after it came out. And I had like an existential crisis on the sidewalk with my friend afterward.
I was like, I worked on the coolest thing in the universe and I left it to work in Earth observation.
What am I doing?
[laughter]
So it was just like a minor, like, my God, how could I have left Mars for Earth?
But, the moment passed. It was just a lot of emotion watching the documentary.
[laughter]
Emily
That, yeah, it reminds me in a weird way, just I can't even imagine like having that sort of like career path, but it reminds me of that, not to trivialize it at all, but that meme of someone being like, “I went to the planetarium and when they showed the earth, somebody booed.”
[laughter]
Tanya
Boring.
Alexa
Been there, done that.
[laughter]
Emily
So speaking of the documentary, in terms of science fiction, we've talked about creative pursuits as well. Is there a particular work of science fiction that relates to space that you find especially compelling or maybe an artwork?
Tanya
Gosh, I'm trying to think if there's anything that like stands out above the rest. Now I'm like looking at my bookshelf, but then also remembering that I don't have a lot of books here because most of my belongings are still in storage on the West Coast.
[lauhger] Gosh, what is one that has like particularly stuck with me?
Alexa
Or even could extend to like space mythology or folklore. Because I recall at some point, I think I was watching one of your prior TED talks and you were talking about how you watched Big Bird in Japan, which mentions like I think like Japanese moon mythology.
Tanya
Yeah. I guess that was the thing, before Star Trek and before The Magic School Bus, the thing that originally got me into space was this Big Bird in Japan movie that came out, I think, in like 1989, where Big Bird visits Japan and he meets Kaguya Hime, like the mythological princess of the moon in Japan.
And the movie doesn't actually go into the story all that much. Like the moon is not heavily featured in this movie, but there was something about it that made me obsessed with the moon and I would go outside every night and just kind of stare at it. That was the first time I realized that the moon moves in the sky because in my head, I seem to remember the first night going out and the moon was like perfectly centered in these trees across the street.
And the next night I went out at the same time and it wasn't there. And I called my grandfather because he was very into all things science. And I was just like, “What's going on?” And he's explaining to like four or five year old me how the moon revolves around the earth. And that just really kicked off like the initial spark of fascination. And I think tied to that, I've always been interested in the cultural influence of things like the Moon and eventually Mars.
Like how did these things influence human culture in not just ways of science fiction, but maybe more innocuous ways that we don't tend to think about, like mythology, like poetry, music.
There's so many cultural influences that are tied to space in ways that are really beautiful.
Like I think especially as scientists, we as a community can often disregard like that emotional artistic side of just how beautiful all of this is.
But space inspires people in a universal way, no pun intended, that doesn't necessarily happen with other things because it's the one thing that we all share. Like we can all stare up at the sky and be like, wow, I wonder what's out there. I wonder where we came from. And there are very few universal experiences here on the earth. I remember having a conversation with an exchange student from Australia when I was in like grade eight or nine or something like that.
And she said that she had never seen snow. And it blew my mind that there was somebody that was a teenager who had never seen snow, but she grew up in the desert in Australia.
And so coming to the Pacific Northwest in winter and getting to see snow for the first time, she was like, wow, this is crazy. So I realized even something as innocuous as snow or the ocean or sand dunes, like the first time I ever saw a sand dune, I think I was 25 years old or something.
But the sky is just right there and we can all see it, which I think is pretty special. I'm not sure that actually answered your question.
[laughter]
Alexa
It was a beautiful thought, though.
[laughter]
Alexa
I think it's something that Emily and I have tried to really explore through this podcast too, is all the different ways that space can influence. Like one thing that really struck me is when you said poetry, and it was something that I hadn't thought about before, but yeah, it totally makes sense.
Of course, there are so many beautiful, natural things around us on earth that inspire great works of poetry. Why not celestial objects? Why not the moon that's visible or like any of the planets that are visible or from either earth or beyond? So yeah, it's always interesting. You think you've figured out every single way that space has possibly influenced humanity.
And then somebody else comes into the sphere and it's like, yeah, I'm working on this thing where I'm combining space with like, I'm trying to think of something unique right off the bat.
And I can't. [laughter] But some like unique type of art form. And then you're just like, I never thought of that. Like it never ceases to amaze how many creative things people can come up with.
Tanya
Absolutely.
Emily
The we've Alexa, unfortunately, has been subjected to my TED talk about this in the past, but the one of my favorite facts, I was an I was a literature major in college and I am a huge fan of Dante's Divine Comedy, and have a whole bunch of normal thoughts and feelings about it.
Emily
But what is really interesting to me, so the Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoferretti, to celebrate Dante's, I think, 400th birthday, read a section of Paradiso from the ISS.
Emily
And I was so excited about it and talking to my friends, and they were admittedly like, it's a bit random.
[laughter]
And I was like, well, it's really cool.
One of the reasons why I love the Divine Comedy so much not necessarily one of the reasons, but one of the things that is always really interesting to me that other people are surprised by is that the last word of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso is stars.
And then his whole theory of how the universe works is that it's guided by love. And so his definition of God is like the love that moves the sun and other stars.
Tanya
That’s beautiful.
Emily
And I was just so struck by that. And it's so funny because it's like, it is kind of a random connection or it's not necessarily something you'd think of because people mostly know like the Inferno and it's unexpected to find a celestial theory of love in this like medieval Italian poem.
Tanya
Wow, that’s so beautiful.
Emily
Right? I love it. Anyway… [laughter]
Alexa
Cristoforetti also was the astronaut who dressed up as Captain Janeway, right? From Star Trek.
Tanya
Yes.
Emily
Yep.
Alexa
Star Trek Voyager. That was my, even though like other Star Treks came before me, or like when I was younger, there were other Star Treks, but it's like once I hit Voyager, that was the one that hugged me.
Tanya
Absolutely. I think DS9 became my favorite when I got older, but as a teenager, I was like, yep, Voyager is where it's at. Captain Janeway is so incredible. Yeah.
Emily
She's so cool. And then also moving forward into other intersections of space and pop culture, has your knowledge and background of space come up in any unexpected ways?
I will say, I thought of this question, I think I either saw on your social media or Colonel Hadfield's that the Canadarm, please forgive my pronunciation if it's wrong, was in a Marvel movie. It was in Deadpool vs Wolverine as super randomly.
Tanya
Right, yeah. I'm trying to think like, I'm sure it has come up in random settings before.
I'm trying to think like, what's the most random thing I've been asked to consult on that was related to space where I was like, oh, why would you… why would you need that?
[laughter]
I guess. I have one really good example, but I don't think I can say what it was because of an NDA.
[laughter] But it was definitely one where I was like, you want a space person for that?
Okay, if you're going to, do you want to pay me to tell you about Mars for that? Sure, why not?
I'm sure that it has come up in unexpected situations. It usually just is something that leads to interesting conversations in many day-to-day interactions, because obviously people always ask, if you're like at a coffee shop or at the doctor's office or in an Uber, they'll be like, “So what do you do?”
And usually my short answer is just like, “Oh, I'm a Mars scientist” or a space scientist, because sometimes people don't, when you say Mars, they're like not expecting it. So they're like, wait, what? And you have to explain.
But it usually leads to a lot of really interesting conversations because people will start asking questions. They're like, “Oh man, that's so cool. Like, what are the rovers doing? Like, what's the deal with black holes? Like, have you ever been to space?”
Which…I'm like honored, but no, I'm not an astronaut. But the general public doesn't realize that like so few people have been to space, I guess. Like it feels more commonplace now, which is kind of cool, but also feels like a little bit of a failure on the science communication side of things. I also get the question pretty often, like “was The Martian based on a true story?” Like serious question from adults, which again tells me, ooh, science communication problem there.
But I love that it generally leads to curiosity. People really want to ask questions about it. It's very rare that someone's like, oh, that's cool. Lately, sometimes it leads to some political questions, which is more depressing. But generally it leads people to like excitedly asking questions about space, which ties back to that idea that like space fascinates almost everyone in a way universally that you don't tend to see with anything else. And that always warms my heart.
Alexa
You mentioned people asking if you've ever been an astronaut. Is that something you ever would want to do? Either like to go to space physically or to participate in like an analog astronaut program on the earth for like a Mars-themed simulation.
Tanya
I'm like terrified of flying, so I don't think I would go to space. I mean, Emily knows my love of trains quite well. [laughter] Partly it's because I think trains are cool, but partly it's due to like being very claustrophobic in airplanes.
So I'm happy being the person that stays on the ground and does mission operations for other people to go to space. I'll probably do an analog mission though. Like that could be kind of cool if I had the time and ability to get to one, I feel like it could be kind of fun.
Alexa
I'm so curious what the analog astronaut selection program is for a lot of these simulations. And it'd be really cool to be an analog astronaut that goes there, and then next to you have somebody who's actually operated Mars cameras. That would be really cool.
Tanya
This reminds me, this is a good answer to your previous question. Like A decade plus ago, I was asked to consult on a show that was being pitched to CBC here in Canada called “Mars 2,” which was about an analog Mars base in the Canadian Arctic for basically the astronaut rejects that didn't get to go to Mars, but they were doing the stuff on the ground here while the real crew was going to Mars, which I thought was a hilarious concept for a show. I was like, of course, I would be happy to work on this. Unfortunately, it didn't end up getting picked up.
But there was like a similar concept with Fred Armisen that I think HBO showed sometime during COVID. I only saw the first episode. And at first I was like, “Oh man, of course, this is going to get more press because Fred Armisen.” But I think even that one only lasted for a handful of episodes. But getting called up to consult on a comedic show about astronaut rejects was very unexpected.
Alexa
I would watch “Mars 2.”
Emily
Me too
[laughter].
Emily
I wonder if with the renewed interest in Mars, if there might be more shows and movies about it moving forward.
Tanya
Maybe. It would be cool to see excitement around it from like a very selfish standpoint of thinking like Mars is cool, so it'd be great if other people think it's cool.
Unfortunately, some of the branding around it has made it less cool because of who it involves nowadays. And that part is kind of unfortunate. But I feel like it presents motivation to try to reclaim that narrative of space is cool and awe-inspiring from the people that have kind of corrupted what that view kind of used to hold for a lot of people. Like, forget about the guys today. Like, let's think about Carl Sagan. We need that kind of vision to come back.
Alexa
Yeah, no, 100%. Mars belongs to the people.
Tanya
Yes. [laughter]
Alexa
And to space, but. [laughter]
Tanya
I'm imagining like a Soviet era propaganda poster. ”Mars belongs to the people.”
Alexa
I would love to see that. There is, was there an artist, Emily, that you were showing me? Am I misremembering this that makes like propaganda posters?
Emily
Yes, the, because I was going to make a joke about the Red Planet, but it's probably not going to go over well. [laughter]
There is, there's been a couple artists. Do you mean like art historically or recently?
Alexa
I don't remember. I just have this memory in my brain that connects Emily with propaganda posters with science. I mean, this in the best way. [laughter]
Emily
Because there was a lot of…for the March for Science a couple years ago, some people had more propaganda style art specifically related to, at the time, earth sciences. Because in terms of Soviet propaganda art, I did go through a phase in college where I loved it a lot. Especially like Rodchenko comes to mind. People were doing for Marvel superheroes like Black Widow and the Winter Soldier, there was like a series of artworks done in the style of Soviet propaganda. And that I think would have also have been around the time for the March for Science. But in terms of a specific one, I can't think of one right now.
Alexa
Not to immediately put you on the spot, sorry. [laughter]
Emily
No, both of you know that I'm a huge nerd, so it couldn't be. I'm sure this happened. [laughter]
Alexa
That's awesome. Yeah, so talking of analog astronauts and getting people inspired about space and all that, if there were people listening to this, for example, who were interested in the space sector, might be interested in some of the things that you've been doing, like being, for example, a sort of translator, I'm using air quotes, translator between industries to ensure that science gets communicated, or even if somebody wanted to go into something like operations, do you have any type of advice that you could pull from your past experiences that you would pass along to people like that?
Tanya
I guess I would say there are probably a lot more opportunities out there than you might realize. I think a lot of people just think space astronauts, well, I'm never going to be an astronaut, so I can't work in space. Or I'm not an engineer, so I can't work in space. But I would say most of the people that I have actually worked with directly, like very few of them have been engineers. And after academia, very few of them were even scientists.
if you're looking on the industry side, that you need all of the kind of people that you would need to support any other business, HR people, accounting people, office managers, sales people, like anything that you can imagine that has like an application in some other job, there's probably an equivalent to it in space. So if you don't see yourself being an engineer or a scientist, that doesn't automatically disqualify you.
There's also just things that maybe you would never think of that are completely unrelated to that. There's people who their job is like official launch photographer. If I'd known that was a thing when I was younger, maybe I would have thought about that in addition to Mars rovers. There's like artists that paint the portraits of, you know, astronauts that hang in some of the art galleries. There's mission concept artists. They're the people that work in marketing to put all these beautiful visuals together. So whatever you are interested in, there's probably a way to tie it to space. So don't be afraid to kind of dig into what the opportunities out there might be because there's probably something out there that fits exactly what you're looking for.
Alexa
Yeah, I recall you talking about the sort of intimacy in engaging directly with space, like seeing pictures of Mars that you've sort of taken yourself versus like seeing something through a telescope or like seeing pictures of a launch site or like of other planets that are taken by other people. That's sort of difference between like direct engagement and sort of passive engagement, but not passive in the sense of like having like a negative connotation.
Are there sort of, are there ways that come to mind for people to more directly engage with space? Obviously, like not everybody can have as much access to something like being involved with a space mission, but something that allows them a little bit more of that intimacy, that connection.
Tanya
Yeah, I mean, there's some ways you can directly connect, like there's a camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter called HIRise that actually has a public-facing website called HIWish, where you can go in and request spots for the camera to take pictures of.
It won't always take the picture that you're looking for, and it'll go into a queue of priority order, again, operating under the assumptions that we made before. But if they do take your picture, you'll get an email that's like, “Hey, here's your picture of Mars.” And so you get to kind of see what it would be like if you were the person doing that as a job. There's a lot of citizen science efforts out there to map different things in the universe as well through like Zooniverse. You can go there and find tons of different projects. Not all of them are even space related now. They've expanded to some other science projects as well. So that's kind of a cool thing. You can just go in and poke around and be like, what in here looks cool that I want to work on today?
And you're also helping scientists as well. Like it's almost gamified in a sense, but a lot, you get to see what it's like to be a scientist where a lot of what you're doing is just sitting there and classifying things. And it's actually not all that glamorous, but the work has to be done because that's the data that we work with. And a lot of those, you don't need a lot of training to get started. They'll give you some little lessons to help you identify what you're looking for. And then off you go, you can start doing some science after that.
So even if you don't want to work as a scientist or work in space as your day job, this is a way that you can still engage with it and be contributing to the science while also doing something else.
Emily
That's so cool. And we'll definitely link to all of the resources that you've mentioned in our show notes. The other thing that we've mentioned before, is NASA socials and other opportunities as we try to find them on our platform. We try to put them out on our social media as well.
Tanya
That's a really good idea. That's if you've never tried to do a NASA social… For the listeners, like that is a fantastic way to get access to some of these NASA sites that most people never get the chance to do and meet a bunch of other space nerds in the process. And most of the people that they select, they're not space people. I did one, gosh, for the MAVEN launch back in 2013, I think it was. And there were a couple of other space people, quote unquote, there, but for the most part, like I just met a lot of other really cool people, some of whom I still stay in touch with to this day. And we got to do like behind the scenes tour at Kennedy Space Center. We got to see the rocket on the launch pad the night before it launched. So, cool.
If you see an announcement come out for that and you want to sign up, even if you aren't like a social media celebrity or something, that's not what they're looking for. You don't have to be a celebrity. You don't have to be a space person. They want to give this opportunity to just regular people so you can see what NASA actually does. And I think that's so cool of them.
Emily
I agree. And I think it's so fascinating from both a marketing standpoint in terms of getting the word out there, but also a storytelling and just casting the net as broad as possible to make sure that everyone has the opportunity even just to get excited about space. I love that program so much.
Also in your bio, you've mentioned working a lot with ocean technology. Can you talk to us about how that came about, especially when, while we know that Mars had water at some point, they seem like very disparate fields at first glance.
Tanya
It was kind of unexpected. I was basically here in Ottawa and a friend who was in town to do some microgravity experiments because we have a microgravity plane here that launches from the National Research Council near the airport here. So he was doing some experiments through some work from SETI. And we just met up to catch up over coffee and he was telling me about this ocean technology company he was starting. And he had asked if I wanted to be an advisor. And I said, “I don't know a lot about the oceans, but sure, but like, you're great. I know that you do good work, so happy to help where I can.” And this, you know, one hour coffee meeting on the calendar turned into like multiple coffee shops as like one would close and we rolled to the next one and the next one. And by the end, I realized like, oh, actually what you're trying to do is super well aligned with some of the experience I have from the earth observation sector in terms of like, the technology and software and what kind of products you would make and mistakes that the Earth observation sector has made, but we've learned from them so you could not make those in the ocean sector. Because like ocean tech feels a little bit antiquated compared to what we've managed to achieve in space in the last 10 to 20 years. It's still very big, it's slow, it's expensive. And so the goal with this project, with this company, was to try to kind of bring some of these so-called new space approaches to the ocean. Like, could we do something cheaper? Can we do it faster? Can we bring modern technology into the ring here and modern software and things like that?
So I've had to learn a lot about the ocean and a lot about fish [laughter] in particular that I did not know before. The first model that this guy made for this company was like for a specific kind of fish that I had never even heard of before. So I had to look it up. And then I felt embarrassed because it was like, oh, these fish basically swim right by where I grew up and I never even heard of them before.
But it's been fun because it's like literally jumping into an entirely new field and kind of daunting to start from the ground up. But once you realize that the skills you gain in one area can be applied to others, it's like so many new doors open. And I think this has happened multiple times in my career, like when I was finishing my PhD, thinking about what I was going to do next.
It was another one of those kind of dark times in academia where I was seeing lots of people struggle to find faculty positions since they were on their second or third postdoc. I was like, “What am I going to do with a PhD in Martian landslides?” And I went to, I hate to admit it, a career fair for the oil and gas sector because I was like, I need a job. And that's what you do in Canada. If you work in geology, you either work in oil and gas or you work in mining.
And I was pretty honest with the recruiter. I was like, I work on landslides on Mars. I don't really have any oil experience. I really don't have any Earth experience other than looking at landslides to see what they look like compared to Mars. And she helped me zoom out and look at my experience at a more holistic level. She's like, well, you know how to do operations of camera systems. A camera is a camera regardless of what you're pointing it at.
And that seems so obvious now, but in the moment I was like, mind blown. And she's like, “Yeah, you know how to do image interpretation….” She like listed off all these skills that I had from both my mission operations job, because I did mission ops for like 4 years between my master's and PhD. And then she like translated a bunch of the skills from my PhD work into just sort of generalized job language. And that was so life-changing because I had no idea what I was going to be able to do in terms of a job other than just being a professor. And that kind of started me down the path, I think, of thinking about things in terms of translating. Like, okay, what does this...term mean to someone else or how do I need to translate it so that someone else understands what I'm talking about or what skill I'm bringing to the table or what skill some like partner that you want to be talking to another partner in like the business sense, like how should they be speaking to each other? So I thank that recruiter, you know, very belatedly for helping me change the way I thought about all of that stuff.
Emily
Amazing. Yeah, no, that's such a helpful way to look at it, because I don't think that would have occurred to me as well, of just like that zoom out and the translatable skills, even as someone who's jumped, I've jumped from the like for-profit and non-profit in museums and cultural sector, and I only realize in retrospect how much of those skills are transferable, because I was thinking about them in such specific contexts.
Tanya
Mhm. Yeah, it's hard. You just have tunnel vision when you're working on one specific thing. It can be really hard to kind of look up and be like, oh, wait, no, my skills as a whole are actually very valuable. But you just don't get the chance to think about it that way.
Alexa
Yeah, for real.
Emily
And as we wind down what has been such an exciting conversation, thank you so much again for joining us. For anyone interested in following more of your work, do you have social media accounts or where can people find you online and follow your projects?
Tanya
Yeah, you can find me almost anywhere as like @TanyaofMars or my website is TanyaHarrison.com. I think on social I'm mostly on bluesky these days, but maybe I pop up every once in a while somewhere else. [laughter] We'll see.
Emily
Perfect. And we'll make sure to include all of them in our show notes as well.
Tanya
Awesome. Thanks so much.
Alexa
Thank you so much, Tanya. This was so wonderful. It's such a delight and an honor to be able to speak to you.
Tanya
Oh, thank you so much. This was great. It was awesome to get to meet you guys.
[interlude: “Space” by Music Unlimited]
Emily
Thanks for listening to our interview with Dr. Tanya Harrison. I was able to remember the space art propaganda Alexa remembered previously. JPL released a series of posters in the style of vintage travel posters! The link to that will be on our website along with our show notes.
Alexa
If you enjoyed the show, please consider leaving a review or a rating on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you listen. This helps other listeners find our podcast!
Til next time!