The Case of the Curious Question

More Musings on a Career in Science Writing

A few years ago I was at a conference about communicating astronomy to the public and ran into a colleague I hadn’t seen in probably 15 or 20 years, back when we were both Young Turks in our community.  We’d served on some committees together in various groups we belong to but really hadn’t chatted or kept up with each other recently. So, we had a good time catching up on each others’  lives and accomplishments.

My friend asked me what I’d been doing lately, and as I’d just finished working on some exhibit materials for Griffith Observatory and was about to start on the exhibits for the California Academy of Sciences, I described that work.  We swapped some tall tales about exhibit designers and curatorial committees, and then got to talking about writing books.  I’ve written and/or edited several astronomy books over the years since I worked with this colleague, and apparently this person wasn’t aware of the work I’d done. Nor was my colleague aware I’d gone back to grad school, worked at Sky & Telescope, or doing video projects about astronomy, or been teaching some workshops in script writing for planetarium folk. Totally understandable — we’re both busy people and don’t always have time to keep up on everybody we know all the time.

After I’d heard about my friend’s latest work and I’d described all I’d done, there was this sort of quiet moment as we both caught our breath. Then came a sort of plaintive question, “So, tell me Carolyn — how is it that YOU have gotten to do all this interesting work?”

It was a curious query and I had to think about it a moment. It’s like one of those questions you get during a job interview and the interviewer lobs it out there as much to find out how you’ll react to it as they do to find out the answer.  Was my friend truly curious? Or, working from knowledge of me when I was younger and still starting out as a writer?  Had a couple of decades of writing, graduate school, and more writing flown by so fast that I and my friend hadn’t realized it?  I suspected that curiosity was really driving the question, so I replied, “Well, I’ve gotten to be really good at what I do and people recognize that. But, you remember back when I first started, I was going to become the best science writer I could be!”

It sounded really self-serving, but my friend nodded sagely and agreed and then said, “Well, you’ve earned every bit of it. Now I have to go read some of your work and see what I can learn from it.”

That was a couple of years ago, but I still think about that conversation. I like to write about science in as many venues as I can — as my friend Kelly Beatty said at dinner recently, “You’re omnivorous” when it comes what I write about and where my work appears. And, that’s cool. It wasn’t quite where I set out to be described as when I was a beginning science writer, but it has been an adventure to be a science writer and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I Can See the Lander from Here…”

Spotting Evidence of Human Exploration of Mars

As the Mars Phoenix lander started to get a glimpse of the Sun towards the end of the northern hemisphere winter, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera was used to image the Phoenix landing site despite the low light levels. (Courtesy NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

Back in late (Earth) summer, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HIRISE Camera  (MOR-HIRISE) took an image of an area near the north pole of Mars.  It shows that the region looks like a frigid wasteland — which it is during Mars winter.  But, smack in the middle of the image is something kinda neat — the Mars Phoenix Lander — standing out against the background terrain.

Phoenix was sent to measure conditions for a short time near the pole. It performed quite well before going to sleep during the onset of northern hemisphere winter. For now it is dormant and quite possibly dead.  Scientists are going to try and communicate with it as spring approaches. In the meantime, though, the MRO continues to study the surface in the polar regions to help us understand what sorts of changes it goes through during the yearly freeze and thaw cycle.

In this portion of the larger image returned by the HIRISE camera, the large expanse of white area doesn’t actually doesn’t indicate the amount of frost surrounding the lander.  Since this image was taken in a low-light situation, its bright and dark values have been stretched to bring out the contrast and allows us to see details in the surface near the lander. Many factors affect how the surface looks in an image. Scientists need to take into account the size of carbon dioxide ice grains mixed in with the surface soil, the amount of dust mixed in with the ice, the amount of sunlight hitting the surface, and different lighting angles and slopes. In addition, the winds blow here constantly, and their directions change all the time.  Depending on how strong the winds are,they can move loose frost and dust around, changing the way the surface looks. Studying these changes will help planetary scientists understand the nature of the seasonal frost and winter weather patterns in this area of Mars.

I think it’s pretty amazing we can spot evidence of our robotic exploration on Mars. So far as the evidence from the various mappers and orbiters have shown us, humans are the ONLY ones to have explored Mars in its history — and that makes this pretty darned unique!

A Career of Communicating Astronomy

Sharing the Universe’s Information

In a recent edition of Science News (a magazine I heartily recommend to anybody who wants to keep up with science), there was an article about an old friend of mine, Stephen Maran.  Steve has been the heart and soul of the American Astronomical Society’s press room for as long as I can remember — and I’ve been attending AAS meetings both as press and as a long-time member since the very early 1990s.  In an interesting “six degrees of separation” style, the editor of Science News, Tom Siegfried, was a frequent attender of press conferences at AAS meetings back when he worked at a newspaper. I find it amusing that he’s now featuring our press room mentor in the magazine.  Cool beans.

The press attending AAS meetings has always been a coterie of very well-informed science writers, sprinkled with a few general reporters who happened to be local or sent along for a particular story. As such, the press conferences at AAS have always felt more like science seminars to me — with the questions being quite a bit more high-level than many presscons where the press corps has consisted of general reporters, TV “stars” (often without much background in science, if any), and assorted hangers-on.  Part of that collegial atmosphere has always been due to Steve’s gentle (and often not-so-gentle) insistence that scientists be prepared when they give their press cons and that science writers be prepared as well. It’s been a good atmosphere and I expect it will continue under the guidance of the AAS’s new press officer, Rick Fienberg (who, in the interests of full disclosure, was MY boss at Sky & Telescope for several years in the late 1990s).

So, I’m reading the story in Science News and realize that many of the discoveries that Steve Maran talks about in the interview were ones that I witnessed in the press conferences at AAS over many years. That gave me a kind of warm, fuzzy feeling — as if I’ve been following the universe’s news for a long time. Which I have.

I first began going to press conferences at AAS as a writer back when I was still in graduate school and working as part of an HST instrument team for my keep (and tuition).  By that time, I’d been a science writer for well over a decade, beginning with stories I wrote about the Voyager 2 mission to Saturn for the Denver Post. The AAS presscons were (and continue to be) a gold mine of information. Through them I met others like me who had studied science and turned to writing, or had begun as writers and fell in love with science enough to learn more about it to become better reporters.

My own career as a science writer has spanned entire spacecraft missions, a well as the careers of scientists I’ve come to regard as friends. It has allowed me to share the universe with literally millions of people through my books, planetarium shows, vodcasts, podcasts, exhibits, and public lectures.  Often people write to thank me for opening the universe to their consideration, when they can find me. I’m not there for every planetarium show that gets presented or exhibit tour or what have you — at least not in person. I’m with them in the words that I wrote for the show they saw, the exhibit they experienced, the book they read on a snowy winter afternoon, or the online  media they downloaded and enjoyed. I’m like the little voice telling them the story of the cosmos that scientists have shared with me. And that gives me a great deal of satisfaction. In a sort of unique twist, I’ve recently begun hearing from planetarium professionals who saw one of my shows when they were kids in school, and now they’ve grown up to run their own planetariums and they’re running my shows.

It’s a great job — sharing the universe. I couldn’t do it without the scientists who stand there gazing out at the cosmos, teasing out its secrets and revealing its facts. And, thanks to folks like Steve Maran, getting those stories from the scientists has been a great joy and one I’ll look forward to doing for many years yet to come!