Jessica Meir prepares for journey to Mars
On Dec. 5, NASA completed its first test
flight of the spacecraft Orion, a capsule built to carry humans to Mars within
the next 15 to 20 years.
That
may seem like a long time, but it’s a huge project involving thousands of
scientists, engineers, astronauts and administrators. Here’s a profile of one
of these NASA employees as they head into “The Mars Era.”
When
Jessica Meir (pronounced MEER) was 5 years old, her teacher asked her to draw a
picture of what she wanted to be when she grew up.
The
image she drew, of an astronaut in space, turned out pretty close to what her
life looks like now.
Ms.
Meir is a NASA astronaut candidate at the Johnson Space Center in Texas. In
June 2013, she and seven other applicants were selected from a pool of more
than 6,000 for an intensive training course that will prepare them to fly into
space.
For
her, the successful Orion test in December (just months away from the end of
her two-year training) was an impressive sign of things to come.
“It’s
very realistic that people in our class may fly on these new vehicles for their
first flight,” she said by phone from Houston. “So it was very exciting for us
to watch that.”
Unlike
many of her classmates, most of whom specialize in physics and engineering, Ms.
Meir is a biologist. That means she studies living things — specifically, how
animals adapt to extreme environments. She has gone scuba diving in Antarctica
to understand how penguins swim without oxygen and has worked with bar-headed
geese from the Himalaya Mountains to study how they fly at high altitudes.
Now
she is studying another animal in an extreme environment: humans in space. Just
as penguins adapted to long dives underwater, she and her fellow astronauts
will have to develop technology that will allow them to survive while they are
far from Earth.
Ms.
Meir is looking forward to the mental and physical challenges of that job.
“While
you’re conducting this science and learning along the way, you’re also testing
your body and your strength,” she said.
But
she and her classmates have a lot of work to do before they can go to space.
Their two-year program includes daily visits to a neutral-buoyancy lab that
mimics what it feels like to walk without gravity, engineering training and
language lessons that will help them communicate with Russian astronauts at the
International Space Station. She is also learning to fly jets — an experience
she describes as “phenomenal.”
“A
lot of the other training environments that we have are just simulations, like
the neutral-buoyancy lab,” Meir said. “But flying a jet is the real thing.”
Ms.
Meir and her classmates don’t know when they’ll get to fly their first mission,
or if they’ll be the ones to pilot Orion for the first time. But she says
knowing that her work will help get astronauts to Mars motivates her every day.
She has a doctorate in marine biology, and as a biologist she’s particularly
interested in what conditions on Mars can teach us about life on Earth.
“Mars
has always captured the human imagination for decades and decades, it’s always
been the planet that everyone’s looking toward,” she said. “Knowing it’s out
there, it’s what drives everything that we do.”
MEET
JESSICA MEIR
Age: 37.
Hometown: Caribou, Maine.
Career
building blocks: “I
liked to play a lot with my older brother’s Lego sets that had space themes.”
Attended
space camp at Purdue University at age 13.
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