In 2009, the day before NASA lead mission analyst Jenny Gruber (ENG’99) adopted her now 10-year-old son, the Hubble Space telescope mission, STS-125, landed safely on the ground. While simultaneously going through the emotional process of adopting a child, Gruber was responsible for making sure the crew returned to Earth in one piece.

“I just felt this sense of peace,” she says. “It was a moment of feeling like I am exactly where I’m supposed to be, doing exactly what I am supposed to be doing.”

As a self-described explorer and adventurer, Gruber has always been intrigued by space. She was first inspired by the 1983 movie The Right Stuff, and by following along the news about the Apollo missions when she was a young girl in Nebraska. When she came to Boston University to study aerospace engineering, she was one of only four women in the program. In 2002, after graduating, she landed her first role at NASA mission control. Now, she serves as lead mission analyst for NASA’s Exploration Mission 2, which will be the first mission to take people back to the moon.

Aurora Kesseli, a PhD candidate in BU’s astronomy department, is looking for the next Earth-like planet. How does one even begin looking for a habitable planet in the vastness of outer space? By characterizing and understanding stars around newly discovered planets, Kesseli explains. This is because observers are not directly seeing the planet—they are seeing the signature in the star’s light.

“So you really need to know what the star is doing in order to get an accurate density or size of the planet,” Kesseli says. “We have new planets being discovered all the time and new instruments that are going to allow us to characterize them better than we ever have before. It’s a really exciting time to be in exoplanets.” She has been working with Phil Muirhead, assistant professor of astronomy, all while coleading BU’s Women in Astronomy group and preparing for graduation in May 2019.

The group gets together about once a month, varying from informal trips to see Hidden Figures or other female-centered films, to important group discussions on issues that could negatively affect women in the department, such as implicit bias and imposter syndrome.

Inspired by late astronaut Kalpana Chawla—the first-ever Indian woman to go to space—Dolon Bhattacharyya, a research scientist at the BU Center for Space Physics, decided she wanted to study astronomy as a young child. After coming to BU in 2010 as a graduate student, she began studying Mars, primarily focused on the escape of hydrogen atoms from the upper atmospheres of different planets. For a planet like Mars, understanding hydrogen escapes can potentially answer the long-standing question of whether or not the planet was ever capable of harboring life.

In her experience, one of the main reasons for the gender gap is the lack of successful women who can serve as mentors to junior female scientists. She has noticed other factors, like unconscious bias and a lack of support for individuals with family, also contributing to this disparity. Along with her work as a research scientist at BU, she is working on projects with the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s MAVEN mission.

“It is critical to educate young women in their early-career stage about what space physicists do, how they contribute to society, as well as expose them to many successful women working in the space physics field,” says Wen Li, assistant professor of astronomy at BU. She remembers looking at the sky as a child, feeling curious about what is happening in space—a place she thought was unreachable at that time. She one day learned about people sending man-made satellites into space and was totally amazed.

Li has already greatly contributed to the field by researching “killer electrons” in Earth’s radiation belts. These highly energetic electrons can potentially damage critical electronics of satellites and be hazardous to astronauts in space due to their high radiation. Li hopes to expand her research to Jupiter and has been actively involved in NASA’s Juno mission the past few years.

“When I was a kid, I loved mystery stories,” says Marissa Vogt, research scientist at the Center for Space Physics. “But I was always drawn to Nancy Drew, and for some reason never had any interest in reading the The Hardy Boys books. It was easier to relate to the Nancy Drew novels because she was someone I could relate to.”

From 2016 to 2018, Vogt was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at BU. She has been studying the effects of the solar wind—which is a stream of charged particles that is constantly blowing out from the sun—on Jupiter’s magnetosphere and aurora. When the solar wind interacts with a planet’s magnetic field, it can create solar storms and put on beautiful displays of aurora, much like the natural light shows visible on Earth, but differs from planet to planet. Vogt is also a member of the science team for the MAVEN mission to Mars.

Merav Opher, associate professor of astronomy at BU, is not afraid of breaking boundaries in space sciences or afraid of rethinking how boundaries at the end of our solar system protect us from the sun. In 2015, she and her research team discovered that this boundary—an area called the heliosphere—could very well be shaped like a “croissant,” challenging a decades-old belief that the heliosphere is shaped like a comet.

“This could mean we are much closer to the interstellar medium than previously thought,” she explains. “We are a much smaller bubble.” Opher has been a guest investigator in NASA’s Voyager missions since 2005. As of December 2018, Voyager 2, and sibling craft Voyager 1, became the farthest-traveled spacecraft from Earth and will continue to provide clues to astronomers like Opher about what lies beyond the heliosphere. “Now we have the data from Voyager,” she says. “And we need to put together this puzzle.”