Stephanie Gil was drawn to Cornell for the research opportunities; what she found was out of this world.

By Susan Lang

She is only a Cornell sophomore but she’s often one of the first people on the planet Earth to see and manipulate the images coming down from Mars.

That’s because Stephanie Gil covers one or two shifts a week for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) project in the Space Sciences Building at Cornell, calibrating the images as they’re beamed down from Mars. She knows what she’s doing because she’s been involved with the Cornell team that’s heading up the mission’s science payload since she was a first-semester freshman. In fact, although she was one of the youngest members of the team last year, she’s already worked at NASA’s Langley Research Center (last summer), attended a Rover launch, and worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena for three weeks when the first rover landed.

How has someone so young and seemingly inexperienced gotten such opportunities so early in her college career?

Gil started right away: her first week on campus, she knocked on Jim Bell’s door in the Department of Astronomy; his panoramic cameras (pancams) are now sending those glorious images of the Red Planet down to Earth. ”I told him I wanted to get involved any way possible,” says Gil, a mechanical engineering major. Her interest in engineering had been kindled at Woodlands High School in Hartsdale, N.Y. (where, by the way, she played competitive billiards). “Before physics, I didn’t know what the purpose was of all that math, ironically, my least favorite subject at the time. Physics was the link that was missing, the link that showed me how math and science together form the media through which we can predict and use natural phenomena to do things that may seem like science fiction.”

On the MER team, Gil learned how to use Interactive Data Language (IDL) scripts and the UNIX operating system to view, manage, and create files of images from the pancams. Over the summer, she participated in the Cooperative Education Program at Langley Research Center, learning additional computer skills. Since co-op students alternate periods of full-time study and full-time work, Gil will return to NASA next fall after she takes her fall courses at Cornell this summer.

So far, the highlight of Gil’s short career was the night at JPL when Spirit, the first rover, landed. “The whole MER team had been planning and envisioning this moment for so long; they had invested so much of their time and their hope. That moment, waiting for the tones from the rover, was intense. It was unbelievable; the anticipation was like New Year’s Eve—times a thousand,” Gil recalls.

As an assistant at JPL, Gil attended all the Science Context and Science Assessment meetings, trained to use Science Activity Planner (SAP) to view data products, worked on the Spanish MER NASA web page, and interviewed with Spanish-speaking journalists. Her fluency in Spanish is thanks to her Colombian-borne parents who immigrated to the U.S. about 25 years ago. Her current task is to calibrate the images streaming down to Cornell from Mars before sending them to JPL. She views images as they arrive from Mars, screens and reports image anomalies, and uses scripts to obtain spectral data from the calibration target mounted on the rovers to serve as a reference point for interpreting the image data.

She was at JPL when Spirit sent back images of its first RAT (rock abraision tool) target, a football-shaped rock dubbed Adirondack, and on duty at Cornell when the RAT was used on Adirondack.

Gil, who recently received a National Society of Collegiate Scholars Merit Award, one of only 50 granted nationwide, says the primary reason she came to Cornell was because of its potential research opportunities for undergraduates.

“I really hit the jackpot by having the opportunity to be a part of this mission,” acknowledges Gil, who has made Dean’s List every semester. She plans to study in Australia in the spring of her junior year and then pursue a doctorate, perhaps after gaining some “real world” work experience.

“I’m seeing firsthand what you can do with what you learn. It gives you inspiration to want to learn,” she says. “It’s just amazing how much we don’t know when it comes to aerospace and planetary science. There’s so much to discover. The problems are infinite and that stimulates my curiosity more than anything else.”