Title: Exploring Mars: An Insider’s Perspective: Nathan Williams ‘11

[00:00:06,280] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Welcome to Engineering Career Conversations. I'm Christa Downey, Director of the Engineering Career Center at Cornell University. 

[00:00:14,240] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: And I'm Traci Nathans-Kelly, Director of the Engineering Communications Program. We are excited to bring you this forum where we will host lively conversations that we hope will inspire you. Nathan Williams earned his Bachelor's Degree in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell in 2011, and then went on to get a Ph.D. studying the Moon and Mars at Arizona State University in 2016. He now works as a science systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Our interview with Nathan takes us to Mars and back again, and there are some surprises along the way. We hope you join us. We are happy today to introduce you to Nathan Williams, who is willing to talk to us about many extraordinary things. Christa had a nice intro conversation with him the other day, but we're really excited to explore all the different ways that Nathan is having a great impact on the world and doing the great work that he does all day long. Welcome. We're so glad that you're with us today. 

[00:01:22,449] NATHAN WILLIAMS: Thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be here. 

[00:01:25,570] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Well, let's give people a little bit of background. What are you working on right now? Tell us about your current work. 

[00:01:31,009] NATHAN WILLIAMS: Oh, so many things. In general, yes, I'm working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with NASA at CalTech in Pasadena California. Most of my current work right now is looking at Mars, various landing sites, working with Mars Rover Perseverance with the Ingenuity helicopter, Mars sampler turn, and several other missions as well. But basically, if it's something related to the Mars surface, especially mapping products and relating science to the engineering, I'm often involved in a lot of those conversations to help facilitate those, to make sure that we really get the most bang for our buck out of our missions. That we're really getting the greatest science return that we can. 

[00:02:16,900] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Nathan, for someone who might be considering a path like this, can you talk more about what does this look like day to day? 

[00:02:25,940] NATHAN WILLIAMS: My day to day life is extremely varied. No two days are ever the same. In part that's because I'm on operations and tactically, we get new data down from Mars every day and we're often in a new place. We're seeing new rocks, we're seeing dust devils that pop up everywhere. No two days are the same, because we're always doing something brand new. I find that extremely exciting. Same with the helicopters. Like every single day we're flying, we're downloading new images from the helicopters. You never know what you're going to see. And that's part of the thrill of it for me. 

[00:03:08,059] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: I think it's so interesting to hear. Of course, it has to be new every day, right? Like that's the joy of working in the sciences and in technology, which is why I like being around and in this space as well. You're never rehashing anything old school. And it just seems like the work that you're doing, frankly is the work of so many movies, right? And books and things like that. So I think people fantasize a lot or have some misconceptions about how it is or how hard it is. One of the questions we like to ask is, what's the most significant challenge that you have at your work? And I'm like, every day is a challenge for Nathan. So talk us through this, like how you're getting all these exciting new things every day and it's a new challenge. How does that play out during the day? Like, how do you handle new every day? 

[00:04:01,619] NATHAN WILLIAMS: At least for me, the biggest thing is you just got to stay nimble and stay flexible. Because at least in sort of my position, I'm talking to scientists, to engineers, often very different backgrounds, different sort of ways of thinking and communicating. And they don't always, they're not always able to talk to each other as efficiently. And me having a foot in each world. I have a science background, but I also have a engineering background. I went to the Cornell College of Engineering and pursued much more quantitative like geophysics as a grad student. And I've been able to build up that rapport with multiple team members, across different, very diverse teams, and then be able to try to communicate between them. It's usually when one of them, like an engineer, comes to me with the question like, hey, we have this capability. What can or should we do with it? Me having some broader science knowledge, I can say, here are things that might be very useful. And I can also then take that to my other science colleagues and then ask them in a way that they will understand here's what the engineering constraints are, but here's what they want to see. If you can do something with will be useful. I can take that back to them so that they are actually getting that cross collaboration between them. And a lot of that day to day it's listening. It's hearing what they have to say, trying to almost translate that and the exact details of what it is day by day, those are constantly changing. But the communication between different people and different parts of a project, that's critically important. And if the two sides aren't operating on the same level, they're not going to get as much out of it. But if everybody's talking and working together, it's a lot more effective and we achieve a lot more. 

[00:05:54,180] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Now, Nathan, I think people are going to think that I've got my thumb on the scale here. I do not. I teach over the engineering communications program. And I think sometimes people out, look, they just choose people that sing Traci's song. We're not prompted at all. 

[00:06:10,200] NATHAN WILLIAMS: No, it's true. I mean, that is really how it works. And some of the most efficient teams I've seen, we all communicate with each other freely, like we have an idea, we go talk to other people. Because having that diversity and being able to communicate across these barriers, it's enabling. Because those barriers, you try to break those down and work across them. 

[00:06:34,780] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Well, that's a beautiful, beautiful song that I'd love to hear every single time makes my day. 

[00:06:41,899] CHRISTA DOWNEY: I love it. I was thinking about this in terms of, yes, students take these courses as an undergraduate and they're hopefully developing some of these skills along the way in their undergraduate and perhaps graduate careers. What other advice you have just for people in general, on further developing their communication skills in an engineering or scientific environment? 

[00:07:09,649] NATHAN WILLIAMS: One of the bigger things for me is just having a broader context, like try to learn as much as you can about all the different people that you are going to be working with. Even not necessarily directly. If you have some broader context that'll really help. Then actually sitting down and chatting with them, sometimes, not even officially, just building up a rapport with these other collaborators and coworkers. You pick up a lot of what they are thinking of and how they think through that process. It doesn't always have to be a strict, rigid formal thing, but being able to just have simple conversation and be able to speak on the same level, it's really key. Writing is also critically important as well. We do a whole lot of technical documentation writing. So making sure that what you write down, you're in a specific niche discipline. Somebody might be able to understand. But say a scientist comes in and looks at a Rover report talking about the in-depth details of like power characteristics. They may not be able to understand it if it's extremely technical, but not as broadly accessible. Trying to have both the depth and the detail, but also the accessibility from outside, I think it's a tough balancing act and it's never perfect, but it's something that I think is worth striving for and practicing. 

[00:08:34,929] CHRISTA DOWNEY: I'm thinking about also the great impact that graduates and faculty are having in their work. And one of the things we talk about here in the College of Engineering is the idea of our community contributing toward a healthier, more equitable, more sustainable world. And I'd love to hear you talk about how your work contributes in that way. And then, as you mentioned, collaborators. What people and organizations are important collaborators toward this grand vision that you're working on. 

[00:09:08,489] NATHAN WILLIAMS: Well, to the first point about it, the work that I'm doing, and NASA more broadly, I mean, we're testing a bunch of technologies and things that are, at first glance, it might not seem very applicable because we're dealing with stuff in space. We're sending instruments to Mars. However, a lot of the stuff that we're building and sending, it's taking a lot of research to make them as efficient as possible. We're extremely limited on mass, on volume, on power. A lot of the stuff that we're sending out there, it needs to be extremely efficient and small because otherwise it's just not feasible to send that stuff because we have such a limited capability to basically launch, and in my case on Mars, land materials. So we have to make a lot of adjustments to what we're doing and build new technologies for that. NASA has a great track record of, well, it is a government entity and we're funded by the taxpayers. We want to give back and the vast majority of the technology that we develop, once we develop it, we then present it back to the community, saying here, here's what we did, here's the documents for how to do that, and we hand that back to just general taxpayers as well as commercial industry to say here this is what we've been able to accomplish. It's so much more efficient, it's economical. Run with it. And we just give that free over so like for every dollar that like NASA gets, we end up generating several times more than that in just revenue. It's also helping more broadly because we're able to build more efficient things. It takes less power. So we get more out of what the technology that we have is able to do. And then we're able to keep moving that needle forward. In terms of other equitability, NASA and JPL, of course, we're always trying to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. One of the things that I really like about my job and the approach that we're taking; For me, a lot of the work that I do, it's looking at different perspectives. This is true both in the literal physical sense, as well as diversity of, of the people on the team and really including everybody in that. For me it's like, well, say you go for a walk in the woods, you're able to see, okay, there's trees here, there's plants, whatever. You have a limited perspective standing there. If you look at it from above, from aerial or satellite images, you get a completely different view of it. You can see how the trends go across larger areas. You understand a broader context from multiple different angles. It's the exact same way internally with teams in our dynamics. If we have people with diverse backgrounds coming in from different places, different ethnicities, all sorts of different ideas coming in here, as well as just the experience that everybody have had. It gives us new ideas. We're able to tackle new problems because it's not just an isolated group. We're able to include all that together. 

[00:12:14,500] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: It's a wonderful way of folding in. There's actual tactical reasons to have diverse groups. It's not just a nice thing or whatever, of course it's a nice thing, but it's also very strategic and wise. For all the reasons that you mentioned there, so I love that. Now I don't know about you, but I felt very ambushed with the whole AI drop last fall. Right. Like I should have known it was coming, but I didn't. So how is AI affecting work? 

[00:12:51,660] NATHAN WILLIAMS: I mean, we've been doing various aspects of automation in AI for quite some time. On Mars is particularly important because, you know, there's a delay in communications just at the speed of light going from Earth to Mars. And that can be from a few minutes to 20 plus minutes, depending on where the orbits align. And that's just Mars, never mind the outer planets or whatnot. So we basically like when we're flying a helicopter, we can't just like fly it with a joystick. Because if we told it to land, we have to wait minutes until it actually received the signal. In that case, the helicopter Ingenuity that we're flying on Mars right now, it is almost entirely autonomous. We send up a plan like, okay, we want you to fly up to this altitude, turn this direction, go with this velocity, go out this many meters, stop, land. But in terms of actually implementing that and then responding to the environment, it has to figure out all that on its own and then how to respond based on what it's seen. We've had to develop a lot of automation for that. So it's been really enabling because otherwise we couldn't fly. By the time that we would send a signal that light time duration is longer than all of our flights have been individually.  We've had to do that. It hasn't really been an option. It's been a requirement. That's been really enabling. Same with the Rover, like now we're able to do a lot more autonomous driving. Just over the past couple of days, we drove like 250 meters. That would have been a record for previous missions, but because we have the computational resources available on this Rover, we're able to do a lot more automation. It's looking around every couple of meters, seeing where the rocks are, and navigating between and around them. It's able to do that. The one important caveat I'll add about AI, which we've run into as well, is AI is a powerful tool. But it could also be a little bit dangerous if you aren't constantly checking up on it. The big challenge is that sure, we can run it, we get results, and you can act on those results. But you want to ensure that those results are valid and real, and reproducible, and reliable. That requires a lot of testing, not just only in the initial phase, when you give it a good dataset to train on and then you look at the initial output. But you need to keep looking at it over time as well to ensure that it's maintaining the same quality of results that you're getting back. If you train it, for example on the river case, try to avoid rocks. And you give it a great rock dataset and it avoids all these rocks. Fantastic. But if you don't train it to avoid sand traps, a bunch of like ripples of sand that the wheels will spin around in, well guess where it's going to go, the places that aren't rocky and are full of sand. So you need to be able to iterate through that and keep testing over time to ensure that AI is not directing you in a way that you wouldn't necessarily thought and trained for. It's actually giving you the results that you want over time as well. 

[00:16:23,180] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: I mean, if we have a helper, that's fine. But if it's a bad helper, that's worse. 

[00:16:28,940] NATHAN WILLIAMS: Yeah. And we did that for landing the 2020 Rover as well. When that came down in landing, it would take pictures. It would look at where the Rover was, trying to figure out where it was on the map and then direct itself towards a safe landing spot. And I was quite heavily involved in making the maps for that. And we made those ahead of time because we had all these satellite images. And so we detected, we used AI and automated rock detection algorithm to figure out, okay, here's all these pictures, find where all the rocks are. And we just let it run and it gave us look like relatively decent results. But when you look into fine details, it was also both missing rocks and saying there are rocks in places that there weren't actually. So we had to go through and manually verify and validate those maps and that required looking through something like 2 million rocks with a small army of employees and interns. 

[00:17:21,660] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: That's an awesome job description. Rock Spotter. 

[00:17:23,500] NATHAN WILLIAMS: But at the same time, it's critically important because you don't want to like impale your vehicle rock that you could see if you actually looked at it. But AI didn't pick it up. 

[00:17:35,469] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Right. I'm just so interested in this whole angle of it. Anyway, thank you for that explanation. Now, my head is exploring all sorts of different paths in my head. 

[00:17:47,350] CHRISTA DOWNEY: So my head's exploring around this idea that Nathan and I talked about last week around life elsewhere in the universe. And I'm thinking about AI and the data you're collecting and the work that you're doing and, you know, how close are we to knowing that? You know, maybe AI plays a role in that. I don't know. I'm curious what your current thoughts are on that topic in general. 

[00:18:13,929] NATHAN WILLIAMS: Yeah, how close we are? It's hard to say. We have a sample size of one right now. We know there's life here on Earth. With 2020 Rover in particular. We are trying to get samples back that will tell us if Mars was ever potentially inhabited. Because we have some Mars meteorites, but we don't know where they were from. They were probably from deeper in the crust, not where you find life. We're hoping to get those samples back to hopefully try to answer that. Maybe there wasn't life on Mars. That's a possibility too, it could be elsewhere. That's just going to take more time to look at. I think either way, whether or not we're alone in the universe, I still find it really exciting and inspiring. I see it has two different options. Either A, we're not alone, in which case that's really awesome. We're part of a network of creatures throughout the universe, which that's just really freaking cool. The alternative, well, the universe is only 13.7 billion years old. There has to be a first for everything. It is also possible that we could be the first, in which case we would be leading the way in exploring the universe. And basically we could be the standard bearers for all life to come in the universe. So either we're part of a really cool collective and network of life or we're leading the way. Either way, I think it's just really cool and fascinating. 

[00:19:51,159] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: I've never heard anybody pose it as what if we're the first. It's always been what if we are one of many? And then that makes everybody freak out a little bit. But I think being the first might calm some folks down. Right. Like it's exciting. 

[00:20:05,840] NATHAN WILLIAMS: Yeah, really, we don't know. Right. But it's exciting to be able to think about and for all we know, we could find something in the next few years. There's plumes of water coming out of icy oceans on Enceladus and Europa. Typically, when we look at places where there's water, there could be life. We haven't seen any yet. But we have missions that are exploring that. So it could come out there. We could find evidence for life on Mars, too. It's a big question. And, you know, we're really trying to push this frontier of understanding. And it's something that NASA has really been working hard on, other space agencies. But it's something that we, as humans, we all have a real stake in trying to explore our origins. Why are we here? How did we come to be here, and what else is there out there? 

[00:21:06,240] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Now, you mentioned something earlier that I want to rewind back to just a little bit. Now. You mentioned the Ingenuity helicopter. I know nothing about this. Can you fill us in? 

[00:21:16,659] NATHAN WILLIAMS: Yeah, Ingenuity, the Mars helicopter, it's a small drone. It has two sets of counter rotating blades, so it looks like a helicopter. But 2 sets of blades are stacked on top of each other. It's about 1.2 meters, blade tip to blade tip. The whole thing only weighs four pounds, even under Earth gravity. So it's even less on Mars. But it's our first attempt to actually  fly in the air a spacecraft on another planet, on Mars. Yeah, we landed with the Rover, it was actually on the belly of the Rover. Deployed it shortly after landing. Originally, we were thinking it was going to be like five flights. As of this past Thursday, we are now at flight 63, two and a half years later. We expected maybe five flights in 30 days. And because of just the amazing engineering, design, implementation, and operation, we've been able to achieve much more than we expected. And I don't think anybody on their team even dreamed of that. That we'd still be operating, and flying, and making new observations. We just scouted out a new area for the Rover last week. It's really fascinating. The other difference between Mars and Earth, of course, is the atmosphere. The atmosphere on Earth is about 100 times as dense as it is on Mars. So there's not a lot of air on Mars for us to really try to fly with. But because of lower gravity we can spin the blades faster on Mars. We're actually able to generate enough lift to fly quite stably, even more so than we expected. We thought we'd be a lot less stable in the air, but it's actually proven to be a remarkable spacecraft. And yeah, we've now flown, I think like 13 kilometers. We were originally planning for 50 meters. 

[00:23:24,439] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Oh, that's amazing. 

[00:23:25,939] NATHAN WILLIAMS: We just, yeah, blowing away all expectations. I think that, that helicopters like Ingenuity are going to be sort of another way of exploring in the future. Originally, when we first landed on Mars, we had landers and then we had Pathfinder and the Sojourner Rover. And that sort of, that was a groundbreaking moment. It's like okay, now we're going to do Rovers, we're going to move around on Mars. Now we can fly around. We don't have to be blocked by terrain that is otherwise really challenging, we cand fly straight over it. I really think that helicopters are going to be incredibly useful and an able tool for future exploration on Mars and elsewhere. I know Dragonfly is also planning to go to the moon. Titan as well, to explore, to explore its geology. That's a little bit different because it's the much colder, outer solar system. Also going to need a lot of AI and autonomy because it's really far away. But it's enabling us to travel places that we never could before. We are constantly expanding our capabilities. Even just within the past six months, we've doubled our flight speed, we've doubled our maximum altitude. We're still trying to find the boundaries of what we can actually do, and at this point, the sky is still not really a limit. 

[00:24:47,969] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Love it. Yes, Nathan, we have many undergraduates who listen to this podcast, and some of them might be reaching out to you after they hear this and want to learn more. Because as you might remember, there are many students here who dream of doing this type of work for their career. We can give them something more in terms of insight or advice. What do you wish you knew when you were a sophomore? 

[00:25:17,610] NATHAN WILLIAMS: Well, in terms of getting involved in a lot of this work or whatnot, if you can get involved in undergraduate research, definitely do that. I started actually as a freshman at Cornell. I was fortunate enough to be able to start working, doing undergraduate research from then, did that for Earth, then on the moon. And then that led the way. Through that I was able to build a network. Network building, I know we often hear about that. It's like you have got to network, network, network. It is actually really important. Both for getting jobs, but also opening up all sorts of opportunities. Even when you're not just networking and you're just applying for things, just keep applying for stuff. I personally, I fought with imposter syndrome myself quite a bit. But at the same time, try. You know what you can do. You know that you will also learn as you're doing more things. As you continue your growth as an engineer or scientist or whatever, keep learning. Keep expanding, and understand that you're going to do that. Don't sell yourself too short. The other thing I'll mention is that at least for if you're interested in sort of my kind of work, JPL and NASA, we have a bunch of internships over summers that are paid, as well as like postdocs and whatnot. So if you're interested in that, apply. I personally take on like three to five interns every summer. And we work on stuff. Some of it's looking at rocks, some of it is planning out, literally just planning out future landing sites on Mars. But there's a wide range of things. It's a lot more engineering based, mechanical engineering, electrical, software engineering, there's a lot of that as well. If you're interested, jump on it. Totally apply for all the opportunities that you see. 

[00:27:13,930] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Then you had mentioned earlier something about reading and staying up on current information. Where do you go to stay up on current information in your work? 

[00:27:24,625] NATHAN WILLIAMS: At least for me, at least more the science side of things. I often read journal articles. But if you can go to any of the professional meetings, those are, I think, some of the best places. Not just to network, but just to make sure that you are at the very forefront of whatever discipline you're looking at. I know like IEEE is one that a lot of my engineering colleagues will go to. For planetary science, I go to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, which is held every spring. There you're able to both update yourself on what is the current understanding at the very leading edge, as well as actually being able to go out and meet people and make connections and to make opportunities to go do some of this work yourself. 

[00:28:08,039] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Yeah, I think that's really great. I love going to conferences because you're right. Because people are telling you, I did this thing last week and there's not that delay of, you know, publishing time. And so they can be really, really important moments for you to just like know the brand new newest thing.  

[00:28:28,839] NATHAN WILLIAMS: Because what people are thinking about for like the next six months or so, like hey, I had this idea and I'm trying to still figure things out, but maybe we should work on this together. 

[00:28:38,719] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Yeah, the networking thing is so huge. And I was listening to Christa talking about networking just last week with students looking for jobs and everything. So that really struck home with me. I don't think I quite emphasize that part of it enough to my students. And so the two of you have re-energized that for me. 

[00:28:58,539] NATHAN WILLIAMS: Yeah, it's something that I'd heard that back when I was an undergrad and I was like, yeah, I accept that, that's probably helpful. In hindsight, looking back, it's like, okay, that was more helpful than I was expecting it to be. Yeah, definitely go for it, at least within your capabilities. You don't want to work yourself into the ground. And that's where the other thing that I guess as a sophomore, as you asked, I wish I had known is it's good to really focus on your work, to do a really good job at it. But you also want to balance work and life. You don't want to burn yourself out, which I have seen and experienced a lot of. You need to find that balance as best as it suits you. Keep pushing forward, but also don't work yourself into the ground. 

[00:29:43,730] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Well, we were going to ask this question in just a minute, but what do you do to maintain your work life balance? What do you do for fun or to recharge? 

[00:29:52,110] NATHAN WILLIAMS: My favorite hobby is bird watching. I go out to watch birds, see whatever I find. It's also sort of a sense of discovery because you don't know what birds you're going to see when you go somewhere. Um, could be some rare thing that shows up and you just stumble upon it, and that's cool and there's all sorts of different neat ones. I've been bird watching since, oh, I was a little kid, Even when I was at Cornell. I was involved in the Cornell Raptor Program, which I'm pretty sure is still running there. And we took care of like 40 different birds of prey. Like working with them in person, feeding them every day, bringing them on public outreach and education programs. And just being able to see and work with them up close. It was just so wonderful. I don't have the time right now to commit to that level of what I did back at Cornell because I was doing it like a couple of hours every single day because I had a bird that I was working directly with. But don't have the time to do that right now. Especially, you know, with operations and especially when we were on Mars time weren't even on like an Earth day time schedule. But back then, it was so wonderful to be involved in that. And I still love just going out, just hiking, and seeing what birds I can. 

[00:31:12,209] CHRISTA DOWNEY: I don't even know where to begin with the questions, but I'm going to start with, can you tell us about Mars time? 

[00:31:18,470] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: We both looked at each other and went, Mars time? When you said that. 

[00:31:21,550] NATHAN WILLIAMS: So Mars time is fun. Typically we only do that during, we only like work to that during the early part of missions when it's really critical. We've just landed and are trying to get the ball rolling and we're a little bit nervous that things might break or not work as expected because we don't have the baseline experience where things have actually working on the surface. The general crux is that Mars days, or sols, as we call them, they're a little bit longer than here on Earth. It's about 40 minutes longer per day, so 24 hours and 40 minutes. Sometimes, depending on when we get Rover data back, we usually send a plan up. The Rover does what it does for the day, then sends data back. And then we look at it. We plan the next day of activities. Some days we'll start going in at work at like 8:00 A.M., 9:00 A.M., 10:00 A.M. It progresses every single day just because Mars day is slowly moving out of sync. Eventually it gets to the point where it's not eight or nine, or 10:00 A.M. It starts moving up into the afternoon and evening, and overnight. In those critical stages of the mission, you want to make sure that everything is working as you're expecting it to. And so we were working at all hours on this ever shifting cadence of work shifts as a result. Yeah, it gets quite challenging. The human body normally has a 24 hour circadian rhythm. And both physically and psychologically trying to break that, it's difficult to say the least. I handled it relatively well because I was, granted, we also landed during the pandemic, so I wasn't able to go many places anyways. But I tried to control my surroundings and basically trick my body into accepting a Mars-like circadian rhythm of a longer day. I had like blackout curtains. I had one of those like daytime, daytime wavelength lights. And I would use that to literally create my own day/ night cycle just within my apartment. And make sure that I had to like schedule out when I would eat because I would, my body knew what time it was, so we would otherwise forget to eat, which is not a good thing. So I had to like, intentionally go ahead and plan out, from this time I'm going to be eating like set aside specific times, a lot of extra cushion, and make sure I got enough sleep at night. Because even still, it was like operating under months of jet lag continuously. 

[00:33:56,539] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Right. I mean, it's a nuance of your field that no one else thinks of or knows of. Many people are working across the globe and yet you know what that rhythm is to work with people in any given, you know, continent or time zone. Wow. 

[00:34:13,979] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: It reminds me of what people have to do when they live very far north, you know, and they have the four month of all sun and then what, 3 and a half months of total darkness. And they have to do all of these same sorts of things to keep their bodies healthy and their minds on top of things. 

[00:34:29,979] NATHAN WILLIAMS: Yeah, it is challenging, but at the same time it's an opportunity. So I still jumped for it. Because we were on Mars. 

[00:34:39,640] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: It's exciting right, you're on Mars. That's awesome. 

[00:34:44,400] NATHAN WILLIAMS: It is really challenging though. And thankfully, I didn't have any special like familial obligations. I didn't have to like drive kids to school or anything, and a lot of my other colleagues and co workers, they did. So I was a little bit more fortunate in that I didn't have a lot of these external pressures. I could isolate myself, but it was a tremendous, tremendous lift by, by the whole team, individually, personally, as well as all their families and friends to really support all of us as we were trying to really push our bodies and minds to the max as we were, you know, landing and operating a new spacecraft. 

[00:35:24,319] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Wow, I so appreciate that you extended your thanks out to the families and the support groups of the people doing this because that's something that doesn't often get mentioned, is like that whole it takes a village. 

[00:35:38,400] NATHAN WILLIAMS: A village, the entire US, every taxpayer, those taxpayer money, we're trying to make the best use of it that we possibly can. And yeah, the endeavors that we're going after, like trying to understand is there life out there? Where are we from? Like we're other planets similar to Earth back in, you know, billions of years ago or potentially similar in some ways today. Those are human endeavors. The work I do, a lot of it, is operating literally in a vacuum of space. But we don't operate in a vacuum in our communities. We are a community and that support is fundamental to our success. 

[00:36:20,800] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Well, new motto for NASA right there, or JPL, it is a wonderful sentiment. And I think that it needs to be just more expressed out there. So I'm glad that you were able to articulate that so beautifully. I'm going to make you shift gears. One last question, all right? If you weren't doing this, what would you be doing? 

[00:36:42,619] NATHAN WILLIAMS: It's a tough challenge of a question to ask like this is the dream job that I had like since I was a kid. I mean, it's really, you know, planning out where we're going on different planets. I've always had much more of a science interest and focus. If I wasn't doing this, I'd do something like ornithology, studying birds in a research setting, or if I would still going to do geology, depending on how you want to phrase the question, I could be doing some geology on Earth, looking at maybe remote sensing images, doing some other tectonic studies, which is what I started doing when I was at Cornell. Alternatively, I could potentially have gone in a more like IT and computer science direction. I still apply a lot of those skills to my current work. I still do a fair bit of programming because we've got to program things and send them to the Rover. But yeah, if I wasn't doing the specific work, I'd probably be expanding out into that. Because programming, especially these days, is becoming so useful in so many fields. Especially now with AI coming up with so much data available now, it's becoming harder and harder to physically crunch a lot of that data yourself, and you need programming skills to do that. Those are probably the different avenues I would have taken if not for this. But I'm just incredibly fortunate that I was able to pursue this career path. 

[00:38:17,339] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: It's amazing. Are there any last words of wisdom that you want to share with us? 

[00:38:24,340] NATHAN WILLIAMS: I would say it's lofty and perhaps a little bit idealistic. But the sky is no longer a limit. There's limitations to what we can do. But by working together, trying to understand broader context, both of your own work, of the work of those around you, of other people, having that context and being able to communicate across barriers. Is I think really critical, no matter what field you're in, what work you do, because that's how you both connect personally and externally. But also how you're able to make the biggest and best contributions to everybody's lives. So I will leave it at that. 

[00:39:12,889] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Nathan, it's been such a joy to talk to you today. Thank you for all of your time. 

[00:39:17,629] NATHAN WILLIAMS: My pleasure. And I'll also add on, I don't personally have public social media, but NASA, JPL, we have public social media for those. If you want to hear the latest of what's actually going on with the Rover or other missions or plans for the future. Most of the major platforms, we have accounts on those, so feel free to follow along on those as well. 

[00:39:40,409] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Yeah, the pictures are fantastic. Thank you for that recommendation. 

[00:39:45,069] NATHAN WILLIAMS: Yeah, it is. Out of this world. It is. 

[00:39:48,209] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Thank you so much. Until next time. 

[00:39:52,990] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Thank you for listening. If you are enjoying these conversations, please follow, rate, and review on your favorite platform. Join us for the next episode where we will be celebrating excellence and innovation among engineers whose impact contributes to a healthier, more equitable, and more sustainable world.