INSIDE THE SKY AT NIGHT
Originally from Herefordshire, UK, Nicky Fox is now NASA’s head of science. In this month’s episode of The Sky at Night, she spoke with the team about the agency’s plans
What do you do as NASA’s head of science?
I manage, look after and nurture all the science missions for NASA – anything that’s not human space exploration falls under the Science Mission Directorate. Right now, we have about 144 missions. Some are still on PowerPoint charts; some have been in space for 47 years, like Voyager. We have a lot of medical research science that’s on the International Space Station. There are missions to study the Sun, the planets of the Solar System and obviously our favourite planet, Earth, plus we study the Universe with our astrophysics telescopes.
I get very involved in the missions, especially as they’re preparing to launch. The technology is really inspiring when you hear about what the missions are going to do. But I often have to make tough decisions such as whether we’ll accept a risk, or if we’re willing to take an instrument off a mission to make it simpler.
How did you come to work at NASA?
I’ve always genuinely loved space. When I was eight months old, my father picked me up to watch the Moon landings. I did physics at Imperial College after which I moved to the US and started at NASA. The last mission I worked on was the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP). That will actually launch next year, which I’m excited to see.
What is the best part of your job at NASA?
It’s an incredible team we have at NASA headquarters – high-performing, dedicated and everyone just loves what they do. There’s a shared purpose among everyone that works here. We all feel what we do is important and it’s pushing the boundaries, discovering things about our Universe we didn’t know before. There’s an energy everybody feels, no matter what role they play. You need a very diverse group of people with different skill sets, points of view and expertise to be able to put a mission together, so it’s an exciting place to work.
What are your biggest challenges?
One of the biggest challenges is we have a certain budget but there are always more things we want to do. There are tough choices around what to focus on to ensure we get the maximum amount of science.
Certain missions are challenging in a constrained budget environment. I would say Mars Sample Return is a big one. We have some studies out with industrial partners looking at innovative ways we could bring
samples back for less money and more quickly. It’s exciting, but it probably takes up more time than any other mission.
What are your goals for the next few years?
The safest place for any spacecraft is always in space, so our biggest goal is always to get missions launched. Europa Clipper is due to launch later this year to study the ocean moon around Jupiter. Then we have Dragonfly later in the decade. That’s going to be something like a drone that will fly, land and hop over Saturn’s moon Titan to study the methane cycle there. The Nancy Grace Roman Space
Telescope, aiming to launch in 2027, is NASA’s next big telescope that will do huge sky surveys, allowing us to do incredible science.
What missions are you looking forward to?
Certainly Mars Sample Return. There’s also the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which will be the next astrophysics flagship mission. It’s designed to look at the atmospheres around very distant planets orbiting stars, looking for signs of life, or a world that could be habitable. That won’t launch until the 2040s, but there are wonderful things being done in the meantime.