Episode 15: Science Communication for International Audiences with Dr. Elizabeth Tasker

Written By Emily Olsen

Join Emily and Alexa as they speak with Dr. Elizabeth Tasker about her trajectory in science communication for international audiences. Dr. Tasker is an associate professor at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, where she also serves on the outreach team. She originally founded and continues to write on the Institute's blog, Cosmos, and supports the English translation of press releases and social media feeds.

Dr. Tasker also does international outreach for several space missions, including Hayabusa2, and is the international outreach lead for the Martian Moons Exploration Mission, MMX. Her academic research looks at the formation of stars and planets using numerical simulations and machine learning, and also explores the use of virtual reality in creating unique online events. Dr. Tasker has also written her first popular science book, The Planet Factory, which you can check out now, and she is the lead editor and one of the authors on the textbook Planetary Diversity.

Show Notes

Dr. Elizabeth Tasker

Transcript

[Intro Music: “Space” by Music_Unlimited]

Emily

Hello and welcome to the Art Astra Podcast. I'm Emily Olsen.

Alexa

I'm Alexa Erdogan. And today we have a wonderful guest with us, Dr. Elizabeth Tasker.

She's an associate professor at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, where she also serves on the outreach team.

She originally founded and continues to write on the Institute's blog, Cosmos, and supports the English translation of press releases and social media feeds.

Dr. Tasker also does international outreach for several space missions, including Hayabusa2, and is the international outreach lead for the Martian Moons Exploration Mission, MMX.

Her academic research looks at the formation of stars and planets using numerical simulations and machine learning, and also explores the use of virtual reality in creating unique online events. Dr. Tasker has also written her first popular science book, The Planet Factory, which you can check out now. And she is the lead editor and one of the authors on the textbook Planetary Diversity.

Dr. Tasker, thank you so much for being here today.

Dr. Elizabeth Tasker

Oh, thank you very much for having me.

Alexa

So how did this journey of yours begin? What initially led you down the path towards a career in astrophysics?

Dr. Elizabeth Tasker

So I studied physics at university. That's, in the UK, that's pretty normal. Astrophysics is considered a speciality. So you don't normally do at least pure astrophysics until graduate school, although I could have chosen to do physics with astrophysics at university.

And the reason I didn't do that is, although I was pretty interested in astrophysics, that's sort of 17 and 18, I was also aware that it sort of boxes above its weight when it comes to public outreach because it is something that people are very interested in, and therefore, you tend to see a lot more about it on the news than you do other disciplines of physics. So I wanted to read straight physics and see if there were other areas that I was perhaps even more interested in.

But it turns out they were not. Though I really enjoyed my physics degree, by the time I reached my fourth year at the University of Durham, I was pretty set with the fact it was going to be astrophysics. And I also really liked computing as well. I enjoyed programming.

So quite a logical PhD project for me was to look at numerical simulations of galaxies and stars.

So I moved to Oxford to study that under Professor Greg Bryan. And I was also interested in planets, but you see at the time, and this is going to show my age, there wasn't much done on extrasolar planets at the time because this was, when was this? Gosh, this was a while ago. This was early 2000s. So it was before the launch of Kepler. And we had the first discoveries of exoplanets, but there wasn't a huge amount of research in them.

So I focused on one of the specialties of the UK, which was galaxies and stars. It was great. I really enjoyed it. And I always had this secret desire to do planets. But also, as people who have been in academia will appreciate, you end up on a bit of a rat race. So once you start in an area, it's actually very hard to change because your success depends on your publication count. And changing fields requires a pause in the publication count.

So as a result, I stayed in the same area and I built on my work for my PhD through my postdocs. I went to the US and I went to Canada. And then I finally went to Japan, initially as a professor at the University of Hokkaido in the north of Japan. And somewhere around then,

I was sent an e-mail by Bloomsbury, a publishing house. And they said, “Would you be interested in writing a book?” And I said, “Oh, yes, absolutely. I totally have time for that. I can definitely fit that in.”

And they said, “Oh, would you like to write on galaxies and stars, your speciality?”

And I said, “Absolutely not, no. I would like to write on planets.”

And they said, “Erm, Okay, that's fine.” And so I started writing The Planet Factory. And during that time, of course, I had the chance to get up to date with another field. Because when you write for popular science books, you write obviously at quite a general level, but your knowledge needs to be much deeper than that in order to explain clearly the concepts.So as a result, I read pretty much every single paper, I would say. It was a massive undertaking that I'm glad I did not realize it before I agreed to do it. And then the planet, when the planet factory came out, it would have been in 2017. At that stage, I was starting to attend planet conferences and I was very familiar with the fields. And so I started to do research in that area as well. In a nutshell.

Emily

That's so cool. Do you have a favorite exoplanet or one that you find particularly fascinating?

Dr. Elizabeth Tasker

They're all precious babies, Emily. [laughs]

Every single one of them is precious. [laugh]  I mean, I think the thing to realize about extrasolar planets is that where we are in the field is almost on the brink between detection era, where we've been finding out what's out there. Are planets common? Are they around those stars?

And moving on to the era of characterization, where you start to actually find out something about the planets themselves. Now, at the moment, we're caught between these two eras.

So the amount we actually know about individual planets remains quite low, especially if they are of the size that should be rocky, because that's actually a very small planet size.

Detecting them has been amazingly difficult. So at the moment, we don't really know what any of these worlds are like. So I'm certainly there's planets I'm very intrigued to know about.

So one of the questions I might have, for example, is that we know now that migration is a very big part of the planet formation process. So our own solar system doesn't show obvious evidence of this. But when we started looking for extrasolar planet systems, we found planets that orbited much closer than Mercury does around our own sun.

And the chances of them forming there is actually very low. So in all probability, they formed at a much more sensible distance. And then they were pulled inwards, either through gas drag from the surrounding planet-forming disk when they were very young, or possibly through scattering after that disk disappeared and the gravitational scattering from one planet to another can send them inwards. And what I would like to know is where did they come from?

And I think when we start to see the composition of these planets, that will be a clue to where they formed, and that will be very exciting.

Emily

Absolutely. So stepping back from exoplanets, sorry, going in a bit of a different order here, when you were writing The Planet Factory and exploring that field further, was there anything that surprised you about the writing process or did you have the most memorable part about writing The Planet Factory?

Dr. Elizabeth Tasker

I think I may have erased a lot of that from my brain, because actually it was very hard. [laughs]

I did enjoy it. It was amazing. It wasn't really a negative experience, but it was a bigger project than what I appreciated when I took on. One of the hardest things was starting, actually. So there was I: I was obviously a trained astrophysicist. I was inside a university, so I had no paywall problems. I could access all the research papers.

But one of the problems is that a research paper is sort of cutting edge. So to put it a different way, it's like a hat or a scarf or a coat, but you need a coat rack to understand how to hang it. And when you switch fields, you read this paper and you don't know, is this part of the mainstream theory? Is this an idea that's very out there? Is this expected? Is this not expected?

Because you don't yet have the coat rack to correctly hang the papers on it to get the big picture. And that was very, very difficult. So I spent a good year building my coat rack and trying to find out where is the main theories and where are what people think are, established versus less established versus completely fringe.

And it was very hard to know how to start that process, especially because a lot of planet formation, because it's a new field, the papers have been published in Science and Nature.

Now, on the one hand, that's helpful, because science and nature are not pure astrophysics.

And therefore, the papers are designed to be read by a more general audience.

And that is very useful. On the other hand, the papers are very short. So they don't have time to really go into the background. In the end, I was really struggling.

And I visited McMaster University, which is where I had done my last postdoc.

And I actually sat down with Professor Ralph Pudritz, who'd be one of my advisors.

And I said, “Ralph, I'm stuck. I don't know how to learn enough about this field to understand what I'm reading.” And he said, “What you want to do is ‘Protostars and Planets,’ the conference that's held roughly every seven years. It's just been held. It was held in Germany.

All the talks are online and they are by definition review talks.” And I sat down at  Mcmaster and I just played the whole conference. And at the end of it, I had a coat rack. I didn't have a particularly steady coat rack, but I had a coat rack. [laughs]

And then from there, I was able to read textbooks. I was able to read papers.

So the textbooks existed, and in theory, they're quite good coat racks as well.

But again, it was a very new field. So the textbooks would become out of date quite quickly.

And often they didn't have enough explanation to understand the latest papers, simply because the field was just moving at a pace of knots. And sometimes I found, and this did play very heavily into my writing of The Planet Factory, sometimes I found that people skipped things that were complicated in textbooks.

So as an example, when you form a new star and you have this protoplanetary disk around it, and this is where your planets are going to form. 

Now in those early years, your particles are only sort of microscopic dust particles, and these are slowly going to build up to form a planet. But what I couldn't understand is how do dust particles stick together?

Like I understand once gravity gets involved. But when they're just dust particles that have been carried around with the gas, it wasn't clear to me how you make this sticking process.

And no textbook I read described it. They were just like, Oh, yes, dust sticks together!”

And I'm sort of picturing sand on a beach. And you know you need to add water to get that sandcastle to stick. Like if you don't have water, and it's not like there's going to be liquid water floating around the star, you're not going to get these dust particles to stick together.

And I just thought, “am I being really stupid here and just not understanding?”

And again, fortunately, I was at McMaster. So I went to Ralph and I just said, “Tell me where I'm going wrong. You know, we know each other well enough. I'm going to confess I don't understand this. Please help me.” 

And Ralph turned to me and he said, “Elizabeth, nobody understands this.”

And I was like, “Why didn't someone just say that?”

Now, again, of course, there are theories. So it turns out that when they're very small, Van der Waals forces play a role for electrostatic attraction that gets you started.

And then there are various different theories about how you can build up from there.

But it turned out this is a huge area in planet formation.

And all the textbooks I was reading were just like, “Oh, it sticks together.” 

I'm like, ”No. No, it doesn't.” [laughs]

So when I was writing The Planet Factory, one of the things I didn't want to do was that. I wanted to make sure that if something was complicated, it was obvious to the reader, it was complicated. And I wanted to explain it.

And if they skip that chapter, because actually they don't want to read, three chapters on how dust sticks together, I totally get that. I have no problem with you skipping those chapters.

But what I want you to do is come away thinking, “All right, there was a complicated process.”

Not  “I'm too stupid to understand how this works.” Because I find that very, very off-putting.

Even if it makes the text quick and easy to read, I feel if I've walked away thinking there was something here I didn't understand, it must be me, then I didn't want any of my readers to feel that.

Alexa

What a validating experience it must be to be doing all of this research and be like, “I swear there's something I'm missing. Why don't I understand it?” And then going to somebody else and then being like, “No, that's everybody else. Like, none of us really understands this.” It's such a complex process and requires so much to understand.

Dr. Elizabeth Tasker

Yes, definitely. It was a huge relief. I felt like someone had taken like a, I mean, I've been battling with this for a long time before I eventually went crawling into Ralph's office.

I should have gone to him first. And it was like a huge weight of being taken off my shoulders, like, “Oh, actually, you're not a moron. Well done. You did deserve your PhD. [laughs] And you can, in fact, understand this field.”

Alexa

When Emily and I were talking about The Planet Factory, we were having a discussion about popular science books in general. And for me specifically, I remember there was a time like right after college where popular science books, I think became a little bit more popular.

I think that science communication was becoming a lot more accessible because you would go to Barnes and Noble or any bookstore at the time and you would see a lot more of them on the shelves. But as time progressed, it was interesting to see how some books really do have that solid foundation of research and experience behind them and really try to connect with an audience instead of just making it an essay about something somebody researched. Whereas some other books can be polemical or can obscure things by not really going into the details, and sometimes that leads to misleading an audience.

So it's really refreshing to read a book like The Planet Factory, in which the research is clearly really well laid out. And one thing I love in your writing style especially is your use of analogies and metaphors because it's such an easy way to click and connect with an audience.

For example, earlier you mentioned a coat rack and that's something almost everybody has experience with and they can visualize it and approach it in that way.

Has that always been your writing style? Has it changed over the years as you've been more involved in science communication?

Dr. Elizabeth Tasker

I think it probably has changed. I try to write the kind of articles that I want to read.

So as I mentioned, I hate feeling that there's something I should have understood because it was very simple and I didn't. So I try very hard to avoid that one. I also want people to enjoy it and I find analogies are normally quite fun. So although I wouldn't describe The Planet Factory as particularly humorous. I mean, there's only so hilarious a brown dwarf or a hot Jupiter can really be.

I do want people to smile and relax when they read, because I think that also makes it much easier to understand. Whereas if you're sort of, very, very tightly focused, there's only going to be a limit to how much you can read in that state.

And I find that analogies help that, because, you know, you do see something like a coat rack or something along those lines. And you think, “Well, I understand the coat rack,” and I think it does make you relax at that point because you're like, “This is going to be something I am going to understand.” And I think that should be how you go into really any learning.

If you go in positively thinking it's going to be okay, the chances are it's going to be okay in my experience. Whereas if you go in very worried about it, then you know, you're going to start second guessing yourself already. So that was a factor.

Also, when you write, you have different types of popular science book and you can't please everyone. So some of the criticisms I've got from The Planet Factory, actually I've appreciated when they've gone on Goodreads because I think it helps direct people towards the books they want to read. And some people have said, “Oh, well, there wasn't nearly enough pictures.”

Now that actually was a publisher's choice because I was limited by how many diagrams I could put in. But I wasn't like I pushed for more or anything like that. I just, they gave me a number and I just scattered them through the book where I thought they were most needed. But there are people who are very, very visual and they're going to want a lot more diagrams. There's also people who don't feel as I do, where they don't panic when they feel they don't understand something. Maybe they've got a bit more self-confidence than I do so that it doesn't cause, you know, mass panic. And therefore, actually they would rather there wasn't page after page describing how tiny dust particles stick together. They're reading for enjoyment and they would like more personal anecdotes. They would like something they can relax a bit more to. And that's obviously totally fine, but it's just a slightly different book from The Planet Factory.

And I enjoy those other books as well. If I were to give advice as well to someone wanting to write a book, I think I would tell them, “Write the book that you want to read and bear in mind, your view is not going to be universally shared and that is okay.”

It's going to be for a particular audience and you write for them and you get it right for them.

And then the other people, they will have other books and that's fine.

Emily

Going off of that, as Alexa mentioned in the bio, you write for the blog Cosmos. What kind of science communication mediums do you use most often, such as writing, such as your book and then the textbook, but also live space cafes, podcasts, general social media? 

Dr. Elizabeth Tasker

So I've done a mix. I like writing the most. That's what I really, really enjoy.

I like writing long form articles where you can really get your teeth into a topic and explain it properly. Because I feel I learn a lot when I write those, and I hope that I bring other people with me. I mean, I don't think you should have to be a professional in the field to fully understand the latest research results. I think someone should be able to explain it to you.

So I really enjoy writing. Obviously, The Planet Factory was extremely long form.

That was about 90-odd thousand words. But Cosmos Blog, which I write for JAXA, is also long form. It was originally designed because when I first joined JAXA, we didn't always have English information available for all our missions.

Typically, they would eventually get something, but certainly in the earlier stages, there tended to only be information in Japanese. And what I saw happening was I would see our researchers going to conferences. They would give talks in English. There would be journalists in the audience, but they weren't able to then fact check.

So they would probably make notes during a talk. But I think most journalists would then like to double check that they've got their facts right with an official JAXA web page. And if that wasn't available in English, it was very, very difficult to do.

So I originally created Cosmos, and it was only in English at the time, to fill that gap where we had missions that were in early stages. We were doing studies for them, but there wasn't a JAXA.jp English website about them. And I would do longer form articles. I would try and describe as much as possible about the mission. I would say how it fits into the big picture for JAXA. And then over the years, we started to do more and more English science communication. I mean, there'd always been a reasonable amount, but we started to become more bilingual across our websites. And therefore, the need for Cosmos reduced slightly.

And our now Director General, who was Deputy Director General at the time, contacted me and he said, “Look, there's a different niche for Cosmos.”

He said, "We can do all our web releases in English and Japanese, but Cosmos should be for the feature pieces where we can connect different missions because a web release is normally only one result.”

But he said, “Where are the missions that's linking, for instance, the Hyabusa 2 sample return asteroid exploration with the new Martian moons sample return exploration? So articles like that can connect missions. We can do interviews. We can do interviews with our researchers. We can do interviews with our collaborators as well and ask them why they're interested in the mission. And we can build the human picture of the missions too.”

And at that point, the blog started to go into English and Japanese. So it's normally written by me first in English, and then my colleague translates that into Japanese. But again, it's a long form article. It's something you can really get your teeth into.

And it's designed to give you all the background you need. So it's not just,  “This is a result and this is what we found.”  It's like, “Well, this is where we started and this is where we're going.” So that's definitely what I enjoy the most. However, I appreciate not everyone wants to really tuck into an article all the time. And so therefore, we do do other things.

Of course, as a researcher, I give quite a few talks and I very much enjoy giving public talks as well. So that's really good fun. And then for social media, we try to create as well some videos and sort of sound bites that allow people to get a little flavor of the topic, even if they don't feel like reading the whole article. Or maybe they watch the little video and then they want to read the whole article. That would be the best outcome. But it's, you know, it’s not for everyone.

So I do try to do at least a little bit of other media, even if it's not my main science communication area.

Alexa

As you were talking about that experience of the journey from the beginning of the blog Cosmos and then into what it has evolved now, I'm curious if there has been any sort of nuances that you have discovered along the way, both being a part of a more international academic community, and also writing more intentionally for a more international community that comprises of both people in your field and both people who may not be as connected to physics or astrophysics.

Dr. Elizabeth Tasker

So there's certainly one concerning the comparison between the domestic outreach and the international outreach that we have to do. So for example, we try very hard for our missions for Hayabusa2 and for MMX to release information both in Japanese and English.

And ideally, that information would be absolutely identical. In practice, it normally is, but sometimes people are working with what I would call slightly different grain silos.

And when I say grain silo, I mean the information you can expect people to know.

So growing up in Japan, you would, for instance, grow up with different fairy tales as to if you grew up in the UK or America. And likewise, there are things that are very intrinsic to the Japanese language versus Latin languages that mean things don't always translate exactly.

So a simple example would be the Hayabusa2 mission, for people who don't know, is an asteroid exploration mission. It was launched in 2014, and it returned in 2020, bringing with it a sample from Asteroid Ryugu.

Now, Asteroid Ryugu originally had the very catchy marker 1999 JU3, something like that.

And it was named after a public contest where people submitted suggestions during the Hayabusa2 mission.

And then the Hayabusa2 mission worked with the Discoveries, who were the linear team in the US, to actually propose an official name to the International Astronomical Union.

Now, the name Ryugu actually comes from a Japanese folktale of Urashima Tarō.

And in this tale, Urashima is a fisherman, and he rescues a sea turtle that was being terrorized by children, who were obviously brats, regardless of the age or culture you're in.

And as a reward, this sea turtle takes Urashima to this underwater palace of Ryūgū-jō.

And there he meets a princess, Otohime, and he spends 3 days there.

And then he returns and Otohime says, “Oh, by the way, take this box and never open it.”

So he takes this box back with him to the surface. But when he returns, he finds that everything has changed. And it turns out that actually hundreds of years have passed. And he panics and he opens the box and he gets engulfed in some sort of mist. And when the mist clears, he's become an ancient man because the box contained his old age.

So it's a slightly dark tale, but the idea is that asteroid Ryugu, we're bringing a sample back from that. It's a bit like a treasure box. And the scientific purpose of the Hayabusa2 mission was to understand actually the origins of the Earth. So in some ways it's a bit like bringing back your age in like a treasure box. So that's how Ryugu was chosen.

Now when we write about this on the Hayabusa2 blog, you could assume your Japanese audience knew the tale of Urashima Tarō . It's a classic. It's a bit like you could assume people would understand the reference to the Seven Dwarves. Whereas in European and American culture, I think we could all say, “Oh, everyone's going to know Snow White, that's not a problem.” Or maybe a reference to evil stepmothers where there's like a dozen fairy tales, where that always happens. And you wouldn't need to really add in much explanation.

But when I was translating from the Japanese into the English for the Hayabusa2 blog, I would add in descriptions of Urashima Tarō  and the fairy tale so that an international audience could understand it. So that would be one thing.

For the language, the funniest example I have actually was I was on a Twitter feed – sorry, now X feed, for Hayabusa2. And again, it had a Japanese and English version, and largely, they were just completely identical. Now, initially, when I first started at JAXA and I was doing Hayabusa2, the Twitter feeds had the same character count for phonetic versus pictorial languages. And in that case, you had to do quite different posts, because the Japanese just have more space.

They could sort of describe half the mission and throw in the extra facts, and you'd get as far as Hayabusa2 did, and you’d run out of characters. So there was a real art to putting in roughly the same information. But then Twitter changed it so that it doubled the number of characters for phonetic languages. And then you could write more or less the same post in both.

And this worked fairly well. Except occasionally it didn't. And one example would be, it's 2020 and the team is about to go to Australia to collect that sample. Now, there's something else about 2020 that again, I don't think we'll need a lot of explanation and everyone will know. And that was we were in the middle of a world pandemic.

And I've just told you, we are leaving Japan to go into Australia to bring, I mean, those things just, you just don’t do them in 2020. So Japan and Australia had some of the strictest border controls in the world. It was very, very difficult. The governments had to work very closely together to bring the team safely in and out without posing any risk. 

And once they did all of that, you had the problem that there were just no flights.

I mean, they couldn't risk flying to Sydney and then flying to Adelaide, which is what they had to do. Because in Australia, there was even a lot of border control between the different states.

So they really had to fly direct to Adelaide, and there were no flights for doing that. So as a result, they had to charter. So it was a very unexpected expense for JAXA. But there was enough to be done.  We couldn't just leave the sample capsule sitting there in the desert.

So we had to go.

So they chartered a flight and they chartered it with Japan Airlines. And Japan Airlines gave the flight the number 8823. And the Japanese post was like, “8823, isn't that great? Oh, how nice of them.”

And I translated this and I was like, “Um, yes? That's nice. They're nice numbers. What is going on?”  And I had no idea at all. And I had to e-mail our mission manager.

And I was like, “I require more information.” 

And it turns out that 8823…So normally you would pronounce that “hachi hachi ni san” in Japanese. But every kanji character, every Chinese character used in Japanese has multiple ways of pronouncing it. So it is actually possible to pronounce 8823 as “Hayabusa.” 

So that was the sort of joke nicety of JAL for chartering this flight, and they gave it the number Hayabusa, which really was lovely. It was a lovely touch. But as you can imagine, the English post had to explain that, whereas the Japanese one did not.

Alexa

That's so wholesome. I didn't even think about when you were talking about the difference in social media and different types of languages running into different character counts. 

Yeah, you'd want to make sure the actual information of what you're trying to get across is preserved and also the undertones of it in both languages or in multiple languages. That's such a fascinating sort of balance to find and really a skill, it sounds like, in international science communication.

Dr. Elizabeth Tasker

My colleague and I who do the Japanese to English and back and forth, we always say that translation is not a science, it's an art.

Alexa

For sure. 

Emily

In terms of moving forward in the future and what ways you can use to connect your audience with science communication, Alexa mentioned virtual reality in your bio. Can you speak more about that?

Dr. Elizabeth Tasker

Oh, yes. So I work with a team called Future of Meetings, TFOM. They are interested in really improving online meeting experiences.

So online meetings are really, really important. I mean, we found that during COVID, of course, they became essential. But also, if you look at some of the scientific literature that examined the demographics at conferences during COVID, you can see it basically exploded.

It doesn't matter what you're measuring, whether you're measuring geographic location, whether you're measuring country GPA, whether you're looking at gender, whether you're looking at sexual orientation.

The diversity is much, much greater when you go online because actually in-person meetings and conferences suit very few people. And that's true whether you're talking about a scientific meeting or whether you're talking about outreach.

So for example, when I was a child, we visited a planetarium in London and I found that very, very inspiring and I really, really enjoyed it. But we were lucky enough that we were able to go to London. I was growing up near Oxford. And it wasn't a long train journey to make with a nine-year-old, which I was at the time.

But if we'd lived elsewhere in the UK, there might not have been a planetarium where it was an easy day trip to make with a nine-year-old. And so we never would have gone. So I think we need better ways of reaching people where that travel isn't necessary.

And going forward, the problem is going to get worse and not better. I mean, we're seeing now that there's always a problem with travel. If it's not, you know, a world deadly plague, then there are political considerations. I know our US colleagues at the moment find it very difficult to travel. And political unrest between countries means that visas aren't always easy to get. So there's lots of things that keep us apart. In fact, I would argue that at the moment the world feels like it's been ripped apart.

And yet the problems that we need to tackle, things like climate change, clearly require a global response where we all have to work together. And even in my field, which, you know, it's not climate change, it's obviously exoplanet formation.You need people from all different disciplines working on that. And it's not enough to just take your local city and hope that you've got enough people in there to solve these problems. It's just not going to happen. So obviously we can all go onto Zoom. Zoom works very, very well at one particular task. And that is a sort of one to many situations when someone's giving a talk and everyone else is listening.

Zoom is exceptional at that but it doesn't work very well for discussions and networking.

So everyone was forced onto Zoom and similar platforms during COVID. They all worked and everyone absolutely hated them. So how do you get all the benefits of online without people wanting to gouge their eyes out at the end of the day?

And one solution to that, and actually I'm going to go to a meeting in virtual reality after this one, is to use platforms like virtual reality. And once upon a time, you would have needed a fairly extensive gaming setup to even attempt that. You would have needed a gaming PC. You would have needed a headset that plugs into it. It was just financially not practical to even suggest that a lot of people had this.

But nowadays, you can have standalone headsets, which don't require a gaming PC at all.

They're a lot cheaper than even a domestic conference. And of course, you can use them again and again. And a lot of these platforms are cross-platform. So you don't even need the headset.

You can join the 3D space from your web browser or from a dedicated phone app.

So the headset gives you the best experience in my opinion, but it's not essential if you really don't want to use one. And by having a sort of physical location in the virtual space, by having an X, Y, and Z coordinate in the virtual space. You can have much more natural conversations because you can have audio fall off. So if I'm closer to you, you'll sound louder. If you're speaking from my left, you'll sound like you're from my left. And that allows you to have sort of overlapping simultaneous conversations just like you would in a conference hall or in a networking situation. And so that's the idea behind using this.

And we've done it for several conferences, but we've also designed some exhibit spaces.

So we designed an exhibit space based on some of the JAXA publicly released assets, where you can go and you can give the model of Hayabusa2 a poke.

So rather than just looking at a picket chair. You can actually walk around it. You can stand on it, which I promise you cannot do for the real thing. [laughs] You can go and look up the sampler horn, which would be a huge contamination issue if you were to do that in a clean room.

And you can, yeah, examine all its attributes, perhaps while listening to an audio tour at the same time.  So it's a very interactive experience, which is pretty fun. So that's the idea for that is to try and keep people connected really in a world where we feel we're being pulled apart.

Alexa

That's so fascinating. And I love that it increases accessibility too in a way that really harnesses the kind of technology that we have access to now. So as we start to wind down, I know you touched on it a little bit before with… when you were talking about writing your book.

But for folks who are interested in the fields of astrophysics and/or science communication, not specifically writing a book, but maybe going into long-form writing or maybe just wanting to get into the field of science, is there any particular advice that you would offer to those kind of people?

Dr. Elizabeth Tasker

So I got my book deal through Bloomsbury by them coming to me. That is a very, very unusual way of getting a book deal. The reason it happened was that I was writing a blog for years.

And I was writing a mixture of things. I had a personal blog where I just wrote about day-to-day mishaps in what I hoped was an amusing and light-hearted style that allowed me to somehow hide the embarrassment of whatever had just happened that day. And I've been writing that for about 10 years.

And then I started to write in science communication. I entered science writing competitions, and then I would just sometimes write short pieces on things that either frustrated me or I particularly liked. And I put it all together on my website, and that made me findable.

So, of course, I got incredibly lucky. And there's no way I could guarantee that the same thing would happen again if we were to just rerun the last 10 years. But I will say there is… things you can do to get lucky. And I think telling people what you want to do is a big part of it. And I think that putting it out there in a findable way, so having proof that you can write, that you enjoy writing, both gives you the experience because you can try different styles and find the style that suits you and gives you pleasure when you write it.

But also you're showing other people what you can do, you're building your portfolio.

And that enables you to be found if someone is looking for a writer like you. And I think that does help a lot. Now, if you're in academia and interested in science communication, you can start for writing places like The Conversation, where I think the byline is “Academic accuracy, artistic flair,” where they want the actual experts to be writing for the general public.

And so they'll be very keen if you are, I think they take… I mean, you can try, I think, at any level, but I believe they usually want grad students and above. But check out some of their articles. They have sites all over the world. I wrote for them a lot as well when I was starting out. And I found them really good. 

And the other thing is that when I started my job at JAXA, so I was originally working at Hokkaido University. And I was an assistant professor and an associate professor in the Department of Physics. And I enjoyed my job there, but I was getting more and more passionate about science communication. Now, Hokkaido had absolutely no problem with me doing science communication. I was in contact with their PR team. I was writing a monthly blog for them called Spotlight on Research, and that actually continued after I left, which I was really pleased about. 

And I did a random walk really through the departments where I'd hear a rumor or some exciting research, and I'd go and send the person an e-mail and be like, “Can you talk to me in English?” And they'd be like, “Yeah, sure.” And I'd go and I'd interview them, and then we'd write an article for Spotlight on Research, but the time wasn't protected. So the physics department did not mind me doing it, but they didn't count it as part of my department duties. And I was very anxious that they were going to increase my teaching load. There was a lot of talk about offering more English classes. I was the only native speaker in the department, and I could kind of see the way the wind was blowing there. So I was getting anxious that I would end up with no time to do this. So I started very casually, really, looking for other positions. 

And an academic role opened at JAXA, not a science communication role. But I emailed them and I said, “You've got the Hayabusa2 mission. You're going to want a lot of English outreach for that. These are my credentials, you know, here's my blog, here's the fact I'm writing a book, here's what I've written for the media. Would you consider hiring me for this academic position with the understanding that part of my work would be in science communication?”

And obviously they said yes, and I moved in 2016. But the point was the job did not advertise that job was actually for a straightforward academic position of which I was qualified, but probably wasn't the strongest candidate because my work was theoretical. And JAXA would, by default, be looking either for an engineer or by looking for a scientist who would work directly with the mission data. And that was not me.

So I emailed them and I said, “You're not advertising for this, but I think there might be a need here and I think this is a job I could do.” And so based on that, they actually technically hired someone else in my position who was very closely related with the mission data, but they went to the Japanese government and asked for a second position to be opening so they could hire me as well. And you know it all came about because I told people what I wanted to do. So that would be another big piece of advice. It doesn't just apply for writing, it applies for almost everything. If the job isn't advertising exactly what you want to do, why don't you ask them and see if your application would still be welcome?

Emily

That's absolutely phenomenal. Are there any upcoming projects that you'd like to shout out if you can?

Dr. Elizabeth Tasker

So there's a few things I'm working on. Obviously too many and I probably shouldn't be working on half of them, but I can't say no. It's just too exciting. 

So one of them is I'm working with Professor Sean Raymond at the University of Bordeaux to design an educational game that is for planet formation. So you would play the game and build a planetary system and hopefully learn something about the things we know and the things we don't know and which bits seem to be random and which bits are pretty well established as you go through this game.

So we're a little bit behind and that's entirely my fault, but I'm hoping that we will make good progress this year. So that's really exciting on the planet formation front.

The other thing, of course, at JAXA is our upcoming Martian Moons eXploration mission, which I think I would be very wrong as the international outreach lead if I didn't give that a shout out.

We are launching almost exactly in one year, and it will be going not to Mars itself, but to Phobos and Deimos. And the main focus will be Phobos, which is Mars' innermost moon.

It's packed with instruments. It's going to be doing a remote analysis as it orbits around the moon, and then the spacecraft will collect a sample to bring back to Earth. And it's also got the most adorable rover that's been developed by the French and German space agencies. It's called Idéfix after the Asterix comics, the little dog. I think in English it's Dogmatrix, but in French it's Idéfix. And the rover was named after Idéfix, so please look out for that.

Alexa

That's so cool.

Emily

That's phenomenal. You've mentioned your website. Where can folks find you online? And we'll be sure to include links in the show notes as well.

Dr. Elizabeth Tasker

So my current favorite social media is BlueSky and Mastodon. So it's very easy to find me on both. I'm Elizabeth Tasker on both of these platforms. So that would be the best place. And at the moment, you'll find a lot about cat rescue, but I promise I do also talk about space stuff as well on there and planets. It's just at the moment, I'm in the middle of rescuing a cat, and that's honestly on my mind all the time at the moment. [laughs]

Alexa

Amazing. Thank you so much, Dr. Tasker. This has been wonderful. We really appreciate your time and also navigating the time zone difference.

Emily

It's been so wonderful to speak with you.

Dr. Elizabeth Tasker

It's been a very easy time for me, so I think I'm probably keeping at least one of you up very late.

So thank you very much. [laugh]

[interlude music: “Space” by Music_Unlimited]

Alexa

Thank you for listening to our discussion with Dr. Elizabeth Tasker. Links to her work and the transcript for this episode are available in the shownotes on our website at www.artastra.space. The Planet Factory is also available in physical and digital bookstores, so please feel free to check it out and share your thoughts with us on socials!

Emily

And if you liked what you heard, please consider subscribing and giving us a rating or review on your podcast platform of choice. This helps other listeners find our podcast! We are also on social media platforms at ArtAstraPodcast. 

Til next time! 

Alexa

Til next time! 

[Outro Music: “Space” by Music_Unlimited]

Emily Olsen
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Episode 14: A Unique Career at NASA and Mentorship with Herb Baker