The Mars Rover and the Story of a Curious Little Girl

Three years ago, I received an e-mail from a 10-year-old girl I'll contact Ann, from Brazil, my native nation, asking me various concerns. Is there life on Mars? Do you handle the Curiosity [rover]? Does NASA have a lot of technologies? Do you function with study? Do you know several scientists? Do you know the president of the United States? I was so pleased to see a girl asking me these concerns, due to the fact that I would also have been fascinated by rovers on Mars at her age. I grew up admiring NASA’s missions to discover the solar method and wondered how they had been capable to send pictures back to Earth from millions of miles away. I was the only girl I knew who had a favored spaceship, and these missions had been the purpose I decided to turn out to be an astronomer. I knew I had to meet that curious tiny girl so I wrote back to her teacher and scheduled to check out them in Rio de Janeiro at Redes da Maré, a nonprofit organization created to improve the excellent of life for regional residents, such as by means of extra educational possibilities. I had visited Redes da Maré ahead of as aspect of my personal outreach plan to trigger kids' curiosity by telling them about the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope. This time, I brought a couple of meteorites to teach them about the solar method. I showed them how it is interconnected simply because it formed out of the exact same huge cloud of gas and dust. We talked about life on other planets, and about the reality that they had been touching a rock from space. The girl who had written to me took her function as guardian of the meteorites throughout the lecture seriously, recognizing how unique the specimens had been. While I was there, I kept pondering how surreal the circumstance was. I traveled from the United States to meet a 10-year-old girl who was surrounded by poverty but who knew there had been rovers on Mars. I met her once more final year throughout the filming of a documentary on empowering girls at the exact same Redes da Maré. But the 12-year-old was not as fascinated by rovers as the 10-year-old was. She asked me about music and if I knew K-pop, her favored genre. I asked her how she was undertaking in college and she confessed that she didn’t like her math teacher in the public college. She had left Redes simply because she was now living far away with her aunt. She came that day just to see me. Honestly, I do not know if she will be capable to have a profession in science. The odds are pretty, pretty low. At this point, finishing college would be an impressive achievement. Many girls like her do not. They drop out of college, they really feel unsafe and do not have the exact same possibilities as boys to discover possibilities. But how do we make certain girls embrace science as a attainable and secure profession path? How do we make certain we do a far better job to nurture young girls’ interest in science? I do not have a magic formula for this, but I do know you cannot be what you cannot see. If tiny girls do not see girls scientists, they will not see themselves in these roles. At age 10, that tiny girl could see me, a female scientist, as a person who could maneuver the rover on Mars. But what takes place throughout teenage years that transform their perception? Life-altering events will pull them in several directions, and we want to make certain their curiosity about science does not fade with age. We will have to empower them with excellent education to preserve them engaged with science. We will have to preserve them curious throughout their journey to adulthood and enable them envision science as a profession. And we will have to enable them see themselves as agents of transform to transform the globe for the far better. Maybe then we will be capable to attract additional girls into science. When I heard that NASA’s new rover Perseverance, scheduled for launch in just a couple of weeks, named by a seventh grader named Alexander Mather, I believed about writing to the now 12-year-old girl. In my letter, I would speak not only about Perseverance, but also about the practice of perseverance. It does not matter if she is not capable to have a profession in science and she chooses some thing else. What matters is that day immediately after day, we want to discover strength to preserve our dreams alive, and education can make your dreams come accurate. As Mather mentioned in his winning essay, “We as humans evolved as creatures who could learn to adapt to any situation” and “The human race will always persevere into the future.” He is correct. Imagine how several girls and boys had been touched by the possibility of winning the NASA competitors of naming the rover. Then consider how several went beyond that and dreamed of maneuvering the rover on a different planet. When a tiny girl of the future asks me if I handle the Perseverance, I will inform her I do not, but I will make certain I inform her how considerably a tiny girl I when knew had to persevere in her life, and how her curiosity drove her to dream of maneuvering a rover on a different planet.

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