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CLARE: Hello and welcome.
I am delighted to be here
as part of Adverse Camber’s ‘Gazing’ series.
And hello to whoever’s watching
wherever you are in the world.
My name is Clare Murphy
and I am a storyteller.
But I am not here to tell you stories.
Well, except for a true story
which is: once upon a time, in 2018,
I had the great pleasure
of travelling to NASA’s 
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
in Pasadena, California,
where I met the fabulous woman
you see on screen,
Miss Liz Landau,
who was Senior Storyteller at NASA, JPL.
And of course, that meant that we hit it off 
right away,
and we spent a few days hanging out
and talking about stories and science 
and creativity
and I asked her if she would come and talk
about her experiences at NASA
and with science and with story
and that’s what we’re going to do
in the next ten minutes.
We’re just going to chat about
life experiences to do with space
and looking up and what you find up there.
So, Liz, welcome!
LIZ: Thank you. So good to be here.
CLARE: And right now, you are actually,
your official title is Senior Communications 
Specialist at NASA HQ.
So, you are no longer at JPL,
but you’ve been in story and science for a long time.
LIZ: That’s right.
Since I was a child,
I’ve always been fascinated
with the stars and the planets
and I’ve really tried to build a career
around that passion
both for science and for writing 
and storytelling.
CLARE: Great.
Well that brings me my first question.
You say since you were a child so -
when do you think you actually fell in love
with science?
LIZ: Well, according to my parents
it was before I can even remember.
I used to watch 'Cosmos' with Carl Sagan,
with my father, when I was a child.
Apparently, I had just learned to talk
and I was so fascinated with Dr Sagan
and his presentation of the planets.
As long as I can remember,
I have loved going to science museums.
I grew up in Philadelphia
and I used to go to the Franklin Institute
where there is a giant human heart
that you can walk through.
If you’re a child you can like go through
each of the little channels and it’s amazing.
So, yeah, I always thought that I would be
learning about science for life
but I didn’t necessarily consider myself 
a scientist
and I didn’t think ever that I would work 
at NASA.
You know, I thought that NASA was only
about the astronauts
and creating space craft and launching them.
What I didn’t realise until later in life
was that NASA is for creative people
who are telling the amazing stories
of the science and engineering
that happens here.
CLARE: Yes ...
So, when?
What was your first experience with JPL
because it was before you started working 
there,
you had an experience?
You were a reporter with CNN for six years,
right?
LIZ: That’s right.
And I used to live in Atlanta
and I worked at CNN headquarters
for CNN dot com website
and I tried to really carve out
an area of specialty for myself in science
and space in addition to medicine
and when I learned about the launch
and landing of the Curiosity Rover,
I was so fascinated with this idea
that we were taking a car-sized spacecraft
and landing it on Mars,
in this really interesting, intricate
set of manoeuvres
whether it was a sky-created manoeuvre
and all these crazy technologies
that are involved in landing something 
on Mars
and I decided to go out to JPL
and do some stories
not only about the rover itself
but about the people 
that made the mission happen.
And I hung out with a Rover driver
named Scott Maxwell
who to this day is a good friend of mine
but I met him for the first time
for the article that I wrote
and he really opened my eyes to the fact
that it really is not a one person’s Rover,
it’s thousands of people’s Rover.
Like, people have to
make sure every aspect of this Rover
is working perfectly,
is built perfectly,
launches perfectly, lands perfectly.
And I love this idea that the Jet Propulsion 
Laboratory
is a village of people that work together
for the common goal of making
extraordinary things happen in space,
and learning about our universe
and our solar system.
And then, a couple of years later,
I happened to see a job opening at JPL
in the media office and I, you know,
just applied.
I didn’t even follow up.
It was not something in my experience.
I decided it was such a long shot
that I didn’t even think
there was going to be an interview possibility
and then all of a sudden 
I was being interviewed,
I was being offered this job
and so I decided to leave my traditional
broadcast and digital news life behind
and I came to the NASA family.
And it’s been a really great experience.
Everything.
CLARE: It’s so funny,
you use the word ‘family’
and you use the word ‘village’ and it’s
exactly the feeling I got when I was there,
of being led around this incredible, you know,
incredible site but all the people there being
so committed to what they’re doing
be it comms, or be it engineering or whatever.
And you had this incredible role
of being Senior Storyteller.
Much respect to you for that.
And you had five and half years in that role
so I was just curious about -
I know this is a big question,
but over those five and a half years was there
a moment or a story or an event or two
that really stood out for you?
LIZ: Absolutely.
So, one my favourite JPL memories
is something that I never expected
would exist,
which is singing with a group of scientists
and engineers from the Cassini Mission.
The Cassini Mission to Saturn
in addition to being an incredible journey 
to Saturn,
taking data and images of the moons 
of Saturn,
showing that there are incredible places
that we want to explore more in the future
and more insight about the rings
and all these amazing scientific facts.
More than the facts, it’s the people
and there are people on this mission who
from the beginning created a singing group
called The Cassini Virtual Singers
and they basically rewrite popular songs
to be about the Cassini Mission
and life at JPL.
And, I love their repertoire,
I love the people.
It is such an amazing group 
that I cannot believe
they sustained themselves 
after all these years.
Cassini was at Saturn
for more than a decade
so they have more than a decade
of material essentially
and all these different songs.
And I didn’t realise that they existed
when I wrote my own Cassini song
in the style of a song from the musical 
‘Hamilton’.
And it was my colleague, Preston Dyches,
who was like,
“Liz, you should really take this song to the
Cassini Virtual Singers and I was like,
“What are the Cassini Virtual Singers?”
And so I showed up to their first meeting
with the song that I had written
and everybody really liked it
and we all had a workshop we did together
and it really shook things up.
When you’ve been writing all these songs
for so long, I felt like some of the repertoire,
you know, hadn’t really caught up
to like 2017. [ LAUGHS ]
So this was like,
great to have like, a new hip song about Cassini,
in addition to the old classics such as
a parody of ‘Sound of Silence’ –
I think we said it was ‘Sound of Science’.
Yeah, with so many amazing classic hits
but now some more modern hits as well
were to be written about Cassini.
So I found myself performing at the Observatory
for a large crowd with the 
Cassini Virtual Singers.
We performed for the Cassini Mission Team
at their final science meeting
before we plunged the Cassini spacecraft
into Saturn
which was this monumental moment and
I have to say that I didn’t do a lot for 
this mission.
I obviously didn’t do anything scientifically 
for this mission.
I was involved marginally at the end
with communications,
with setting up interviews and stuff.
But to be part of a space mission
in a totally unexpected way,
through song, was incredible.
[ LAUGHTER ]
But that was one like great treasured 
memory of mine.
And, another one,
more towards what I was doing professionally
at JPL was,
I was the lead press officer for the discovery
of the Trappist-1 System.
So, Trappist-1 is a planetary system
where, instead of a sun,
you have a small faint star
that is less than ten percent the size of our sun.
So, it’s very faint in comparison.
And then you have seven earth-sized planets
that are probably rocky,
that are all closer to their star
than Mercury is to our sun.
They are orbiting very tightly and yet,
because they are getting less radiation
than our sun gives,
at least three of them
are in the habitable zone.
Which means that they could have water
on their surfaces given the right condition.
And, as we know from earth,
where there is water there is life.
Now, we cannot see these planets,
we cannot visit them.
They are thirty-nine light years away.
That means that light speed,
which is impossible to travel by,
it would still take thirty-nine years.
If you sent an email to the planet
it would arrive in thirty-nine years.
So, unfortunately, all we can gather is data
from our wonderful telescope.
But when we announced this system,
to the world,
it was in February 2017,
and we had a press conference at NASA
headquarters.
I got to fly to Washington for that
and we knew it would be a pretty big deal
but we didn’t know it would be such
an international sensation.
In fact, it was the front page
of the New York Times,
above the fold, the centre image on the top
of the New York Times the next day
with this picture of the planets
that two of my colleagues designed.
You know, working with scientists,
imagining what these seven worlds
would look like.
And it was so amazing that the whole world
really celebrated the discovery 
of these planets.
And when I look at the cover that day
of the New York Times,
it’s really the most positive story.
Everything else is pretty negative.
You know,
it’s everybody’s wildest dreams to be part
of something that is the front cover
of the New York Times and so this
was an incredible professional moment 
for me,
but more than that, I realised that, wow,
our whole world can come together
to celebrate space as something
that is super positive,
and something that gives us all hope
in trying times.
And, of course, we could never imagine 
at that time
that we would have a global pandemic
and all the things that are happening
right now in 2020.
But even in 2017,
it felt like people needed some hope
and it was amazing to be able
to be part of that discovery
that gave people hope.
CLARE: That’s amazing. Liz,
and I think that sums up my feeling.
That’s why I’m so attracted to space,
and so attracted to science
because it unifies us,
as human beings,
together, as a single endeavour
which is what stories do. Right?
They unify us, they bring us together.
Oh, it’s so lovely!
And I love that you’re the bridge, really.
You know, that’s why I wanted to interview
you for this because you’re the bridge
between science and creativity.
You know, your singing to Cassini – I love it.
For those of you watching,
Liz does some songs on YouTube as well
so you can find her on there.
I saw one recently, it was excellent.
It’s all about how you cope with the 
pandemic.
Very helpful.
LIZ: [ LAUGHS ]
CLARE: So,
we’ve only got a couple of minutes left.
So, I want to ask you,
What do you think –
I know that probably NASA’s got a lot 
going on,
but what do you think are the big things
to look out for in the next, say,
one to five years?
What shall we keep our eyes on?
LIZ: Absolutely.
There are so many great things happening
in terms of launches,
in terms of the continued exploration 
of NASA spacecraft
but I’ll mention two things
that I’m really excited about.
One is the main project that I work on
right now at NASA as a contractor
is the James Webb Space Telescope.
This is going to be the largest,
most complicated observatory
we have ever put in space.
It has instruments that are going to tell us
about the first galaxies of the universe,
it’s going to be able to look at planets
like the Trappist-1 planet
and actually be -
do these planets have atmospheres
and if so, what is inside those atmospheres?
Could there be chemicals hospitable to life
in the atmospheres of exoplanets?
You heard just two of many 
scientific questions
that James Webb is going to tackle
and I am so excited about that Observatory
launching in October of 2021.
So that’s a little over a year away.
And the other thing I’ll mention is
the Perserverance Rover
and the Ingenuity Helicopter
are, right now, on their way to Mars.
They just launched a few weeks ago.
This is the first time that we have a helicopter
that’s going to look around on Mars,
actually fly.
We’ve never done anything like that before.
And the Rover itself is going to look at terrain,
the soils and actually take some samples
of Martian soil
and put them in these little containers
for later bringing back to earth.
And we’ve never brought back 
a sample of Mars.
So, I’m really excited that in several years
there will be a Mars Sample Return Mission
so we can finally look at what is in
the soil of Mars
and really get closer to the question of
is there life on Mars
and/or was there life on Mars?
These things are still possible today
even though Mars is, right now,
extremely inhospitable to life as we know it.
There could have been life many billions 
of years ago
when Mars actually had oceans and rivers.
Could there be underground some kind
of micro form of life?
That’s still possible if there is indeed water
deep underground.
Those are two things that really get me 
excited right now.
CLARE: Ah, yes, they are extremely exciting.
So, Liz, I heard a rumour about a project
called Artemis.
Can you tell us more?
LIZ: Oh, yes.
That’s something that I am really quite 
excited about as well.
So, NASA is going to be sending
the next man and the first woman
to the moon.
No-one has been back to the moon 
since the 1970’s
but there is so much more to explore.
And by learning about our moon,
we will learn more about the history
of our own planet
and really the entire solar system.
The Artemis Programme will be
taking astronauts to the moon
also with a view towards eventually
sending people to Mars.
And really, everything that we do
with our rovers and other robotic spacecraft
is a stepping stone
to the ultimate goal of the human exploration
of Mars.
So this is all really quite exciting.
CLARE: Great! Project Artemis,
we’ll watch out for that.
Thank you, Liz.
I don’t know who’s going to watch this.
This is going out to the whole world
and obviously Adverse Camber
has a big following in England,
but, who knows, it could go out beyond that.
So, there’s a lot of people who aren’t working 
for NASA
but love space and love what NASA is doing.
How do we ...?
What do we look out for?
What’s a good way to connect
to all this amazing stuff that is happening,
like online?
What do we look for in the night sky?
What’s a good way to connect to that?
LIZ: Sure ... yeah ...
So NASA has a huge social media presence
so the best way to keep up with NASA news
is to follow NASA on Twitter, Facebook, 
Instagram –
wherever you get your social media
consumption these days.
But we also have specialised series
that I want to plug right now.
So, I actually work on a podcast called
‘Gravity Assist’
which is a great way to learn, this season,
about the thirst for life beyond Earth
and the origins of life on Earth.
We are talking to Astrobiologists
who are going to look at other questions like,
‘Is there life on Mars,
on Saturn’s moons – Titan or Enceladus –
on Jupiter’s moon, Europa,
where we have a mission
called Europa Clipper going in a few years.
As well as people who are finding 
microbial life
in the most unlikely places on Earth:
in deserts, in Antartica –
places we would never think to live,
somehow, microbial life has found a way.
This is also very exciting research,
so listen to 'Gravity Assist'
wherever you get your podcasts.
And then, to learn about
what is up in the night sky,
is like a whole other kind of a question,
and is so important
because I love star gazing.
Star gazing is the way that many people
become inspired to learn more about 
the Universe.
So, we have a JPL video series called,
‘What’s Up?’
If you just look for ‘What’s Up’, JPL
on YouTube, you can find that.
Every month you can have a little 
star gazing guide
hosted by my friend and colleague, 
Preston Dyches.
You will get to learn about
what you can see.
Recently, there was a Comet called 
Comet NEOWISE
that a lot of people got to see.
It was the brightest comet that has passed
in the vicinity of Earth in quite some time
and won’t be back in more than 6000 years
So, I hope that some people got to see it
and if you did not see it,
there are some spectacular images
that people around the world took
with their cameras and telescopes.
CLARE: Amazing.
And that ‘What’s Up’ series is by the fabulous
Preston who is another person who bridges
the world between science and creativity.
Both ‘Gravity Assist’ and ‘What’s Up’
are great ways to stay connected.
So, Liz, thanks a million.
We know how busy you are.
You’ve got to go and plan launches
and help astronauts get into space.
You can find Liz on Twitter.
Your handle is @lizlandau, isn’t it?
LIZ: I am Liz Landau on Twitter 
and also YouTube.
You can actually hear some of the 
Cassini songs
that I helped write on my YouTube channel.
CLARE: That’s brilliant.
And listen out there for Adverse Camber’s
story themes and Star Gazing themes.
Thanks a million for listening to us today
and keep your eyes up!
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