The Moon, Mars, and Beyond: Nicola Fox’s Big Plans for NASA

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, ANCHOR: And while Ai Weiwei may not think AI is the future for the artistic world, it is certainly proving beneficial in science. NASA is using the technology to sift through years of data, finding connections that will be impossible for a human to detect. And our next guest is in charge of exploring those secrets. Dr. Nicola Fox is NASA’s newly named Associate Administrator for the Space Agency’s Science Mission Directorate. It’s a very long title but she’s joining Walter Isaacson to discuss future space missions, including the recent Artemis-II crew announcement.

WALTER ISAACSON, CONTRIBUTOR: Thank you, Christiane. And, Dr. Nicola Fox, welcome to the show.

NICOLA FOX, HEAD OF SCIENCE, NASA: Thank you very much.

ISAACSON: The Biden administration just proposed, I think, $8 billion or so for scientific research for NASA, what you get to oversee. Tell us what’s in that, that’s particularly exciting.

FOX: Oh, there’s lots of exciting things. So this is, you know, the biggest budget that we’ve had for NASA Science, so we’re really excited. We are sort of moving ahead, really establishing our Earth’s system observatory. So thinking about coordinated measurements that look at all different types of climate impact, so we can really protect our planet. So looking at, you know, the ocean, the water level, weather, looking at tornadoes and hurricanes and, you know, studying pollution and all of these different things, but doing it in a very coordinated way. So there — and then actually producing sort of moving on to produce actionable information. So it’s not just, oh, look at this data, isn’t it really interesting, but it’s looking at this data. And, you know, this is what it really means.

ISAACSON: Well, give me an example of that, what can we do practically from this data that you’re hoping to see?

FOX: One of our studies is actually looking at wildfires and where they’re located, and where they’re breaking out. And, you know, what the conditions are in the region, so that you can maybe, you know, start to predict that you could have welfares, or certainly bring in much quicker, you know, the ability to contain them. And so that’s, you know, one element. We’ll also — also in our budget, we are — have support for a Mars sample- return mission. And that’s a very exciting mission. So you may have seen all those beautiful images from the Perseverance rover, as it’s traversing around. While it’s been driving around, it’s actually been taking samples into — little sample tubes, and sort of either putting them into a cache inside the rover. And just a few weeks ago, the rover laid down 10 samples on the Martian surface, and then has sort of driven away. And it’s going to go take more samples. We are now designing the mission that will actually go to Mars, have a lander, pick up those samples, and bring them back to Earth. So we can actually, for the first time, really study the surface of Mars. So really excited about that. That’s a joint mission with the European Space Agency too.

ISAACSON: What about sending humans both to Mars and then from Mars to the moon?

FOX: Yes. So, of course, we are really building on the success of Artemis-I launch that happened in November of last year. You know, there’ll be crew that will go in the Artemis-II so they’ll actually go around the moon. And then Artemis-III, we will land people back on the moon, at the southern pole of the moon.And then, we’re sort of really looking at that, from a couple of things, you know, one is to have a sustained presence at the moon to actually,, you know, be able to work and do science and really, you know, do great things at the moon. But also as the sort of the first point, to then sending people to Mars. And so, you know, it’s also one big coordinated program, sending people back to the moon, sending a mission that can actually retrieve samples. It will be the first time, by the way, with Mars sample-return that we’ve ever launched something off another planet. So, you know, just a one big sort of push to really further exploration.

ISAACSON: What is the role of private companies like SpaceX in the mission that you’re going to be doing?

FOX: So we’re really enjoying the partnerships with the commercial providers. They are really helping to open up space for everybody. You know, we just look at the number of launches that we have, the number of things that we are able to put into space, you know, sending crew to the to the ISS, which is always a really exciting thing to do. And so — and really helping us make these technological breakthroughs. So pushing the boundaries of technology, and just opening up the ability for us to get to space. So they’re extremely important. We actually have a program, the Commercial Lunar Payload Service Program. And that is we’re putting sort of NASA Science onto landers and onto rovers that are provided by commercial partners. And it is, you know, we put out a call that commercial partners were able to bid to be able to host the NASA Science, also some commercial science going on there too, but enabling us to get NASA Science quickly up to the moon, to start doing those experiments that we’ve been waiting to do.

ISAACSON: One of the great technology advances that’s mesmerized us for the past few months, is the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning on huge data set. As NASA’s chief scientist, you got one of the biggest data sets around, how is that transforming what you’re doing as a scientist at NASA?

FOX: Actually, we have a lot of examples of using AI ML in our data. And often it’s, it’s being able to find those little signatures that, you know, we missed when we — we’re very focused, maybe looking at event data. And so, you know, you see a big event happen, and you look at all the data and you write your papers. But often because we’re focused on those kinds of things, we don’t stand back and look at years and years, and years worth of data kind of in one go.

ISAACSON: Well, can you give me an example of that?

FOX: Yes, certainly. So if we think about sort of some of the really big solar storms that we see, that cause really big space weather events here at Earth, and we’ve been trying to find if there are sort of any precursor. Anything in there that might tell us that this event is going to be bigger. One of the challenges we had is we haven’t had a really, really, really big space weather event for a number of years. And so, are we actually went back and used data that isn’t even from scientific spacecraft. It’s some of our Air Force partners. And we took some of that engineering data. And working with Amazon Web Services, we sort of actually got that data set ready to be ingested and to be ready for AI ML. And then, we were able to find signatures that were associated with some of the larger events back over the last 50 years, and actually find some signatures that going forward. We know we should look for these signatures in future large space weather events. And since we’ve just had such an active sun with lots of great Aurora being visible, we’ve certainly got some great candidates for new science datasets that we can apply these AI ML techniques to.

ISAACSON: You’re talking about solar storms and space weather events, that sort of your expertise. But tell us what those are and how it might affect us on Earth.

FOX: So obviously, our sun is a pretty active star. We think of it as an average star, but it’s a very important average star because it’s the one that sustain life on our planet. And if you look at the sun, just invisible, it looks kind of like a plane disc. If you look at it within ultraviolet, you suddenly see there’s all this activity. And you can see all these sort of loops, of plasma, these magnetic field loops that stick up above the sun surface. And every now and again, those sunspot groups can be very, very active. And so they actually can almost explode. And these magnetic field lines break. They snap and they let all of this coronal material sort of just accelerate away from the sun. And often if that sunspot is facing us here at Earth, so as the sun is rotating, if it’s actually facing us here at earth, then all that plasma gets accelerated at millions of miles an hour, and can come and impact our planet. It can cause large scale changes in our magnetic atmosphere, our magnetosphere that sort of protects us from the solar wind and space. It can caught power very, very beautiful Aurora, just as we’ve seen very recently. But Auroras in the sky, that’s a big current system, so that can actually impact our power grids, you know, long pipelines, undersea cables. It can cause problems for spacecraft and all of it. So, you know, the more we rely on technology, the more we are susceptible to what’s happening on our sun.

ISAACSON: Your expertise is in heliophysics, which basically means the science of the sun. And you done a probe, you’re in charge of the probe that went right to the edge of the sun. What did we learn from that?

FOX: So yes. Parker Solar Probe, briefly flies through the sun’s corona in the sort of the, where it’s, you know, millions of degrees of heat. And we are learning all about the atmosphere of a star. So, you know, for decades and decades, we’ve studied the sun, we’ve studied it. We’ve looked at it in all different wavelengths. We’ve been in at that time, as far as the planet Mercury. And so, we’ve been able to study the extended atmosphere of the sun. But we really didn’t know, I mean, you know that things are happening in certain regions, you know that there’s suddenly an increase in heat, and there’s a big increase in energy, and it causes that, that corona, to accelerate away very fast. But you don’t know what the processes are, because you haven’t been — you haven’t flown through them. You haven’t actually flown and found out what is happening in that region. And so with Parker Solar Probe, we’ve been able to do that. We’ve certainly found that things that the — the sort of the processes that we thought could be causing heat, things like magnetic field lines, sort of kinking on themselves, and then snapping back straight, which actually can release a lot of heat and energy. That is happening further away from the sun than we originally thought on our very first perihelion path, or our closest approach, the very first one, where we thought, oh, you know, that’ll be nice, we’ll see some interesting stuff. And we actually started seeing these little features, these little switchbacks. They’re like sort of S-shaped features in magnetic field lines, where it kind of kinking back on themselves. We saw those in the, you know, the very first orbit. As we get closer, we’ve seen them getting larger and getting more frequent. And so, you know, finding out these sorts of reasons that the sun is such an interesting star. And what we learn about our sun, we can apply to other stars in other stellar systems where we also see space weather. We see, you know, these big flares and big events that we see on our sun. We see them on other stars as well. So as you’re looking for habitable planets, in other stellar systems, you know, what you learn about our sun is directly applicable.

ISAACSON: When you got your degree in physics from Imperial College London, you’re often the only woman in any of the classes. Tell me about your path, and tell me about the way we can open up that path to more women big in physics and astrophysics.

FOX: Yes. So I did do physics and it was a pretty low percentage of women. And, you know, it was tough. It was tough because sometimes, you know, you felt like I don’t understand something. But I don’t want to ask the question because I don’t want to be the one who looks dumb. And so, you know, it takes a little while to get comfortable with being OK, asking the questions. And, you know, I guess, I did my degree, I did a masters in engineering. And then I came back to Imperial College and did my PhD. And, you know, move to the US. There was — there weren’t a lot of women. I’ve seen a great increase in the number of women coming into the industry, taking up very leading roles. And I think it’s, you know, it’s important as a woman to talk to other, particularly to girls, and say, you know, you can do this. And there is a role for everybody in this type of business. And to make sure that, you know, you’re being very supportive. I’ll do things like I’ll ask the dumb question, you know, the one that, you know, that I’ll embarrass myself and I asked the question. And then everyone feels comfortable asking questions. There’s just little things that you can do that make a huge difference to help people interact with one another.

ISAACSON: What’s the really big question that you’d love to have answered during your career?

FOX: Oh gosh, so many. But I really think, you know, that it’s that are we alone in the universe, you know. We are really focusing with the James Webb Telescope finding so many exoplanets, finding, you know, even — and even now managing to take measurements of the atmospheres around exoplanets, you know. You know, what are the building blocks, what are the things that actually would sustain life, you know. We’re excited in September of this year, we have OSIRIS-REx returning to Earth bringing samples from an asteroid, Bennu. And that asteroid has been around a long, long time. It was back, you know, we think it was there sort of at the time that our planets were forming. So it’s got those kind of molecular building blocks inside the asteroid that may be able to tell us about planet formation, about what caused us to be able to sustain water here, and therefore sustain life on our planet. And then, it tells us what, you know, what kind of things, what signatures we might want to look for when we’re looking in other stellar systems. The next big astrophysics mission that we will start will be the Habitable Worlds Observatory. And that really is a mission focusing on not just looking for, you know, exoplanets or looking for planets that happened to be orbiting stars, but what is it that we would look for to find signatures of life. Also sending Europa Clipper to fly sort of through the methane plumes at Europa, and see if there’s any signatures of life there. We have a Dragonfly Mission that’s going to go to Titan, that’s a sort of a — it kind of hops around, it’s like a quadcopter. And they’re going to be looking for signatures of life in Titan. So they’re the kind of questions that it’s just — not necessarily finding another planet like ours, but just finding life elsewhere. I think that’s the big question that I’m really excited about.

ISAACSON: And why it’s so important?

FOX: For me, it’s just curiosity. It’s that feeling of, you know, really, there must be, you know, what else is out there? If you think just back to the 1950s, we didn’t even think we could go to another planet or go to the moon, you know. And now we’ve got — we’ve sent our own spacecraft that have left even our protective bubble, our heliosphere, the two voyages that we have, you know, gone past every planet, and then now out in interstellar space. You know, looking at next generation missions that might go very fast out of our heliosphere and actually explore interstellar space, thinking about what it would take to get to the next nearest star, and how do we just — how do we expand what we know. And that’s why I think it’s important.

ISAACSON: We’ve talked about the practical reasons that we’re doing all these things at NASA. And you’ve talked about the pure curiosity, the elevated reason. I want to read you one of my favorite quotes in science, from the mathematician and physicist Poincare. And he said, “Scientists do not study nature, because it’s useful to do so. They study it because they take pleasure in it.” Tell me, is that true for you?

FOX: Oh, it could not be more true. I mean, it’s — everything is fascinating to me. I mean — but, you know, being a scientist is just fascinating. It’s the wanting to know more. It’s the, you know, again, talking to talking to kids, being a scientist is not about being super smart. It’s about being really curious. And it’s about really liking to ask questions, and always wanting to know more. And it is — it’s just a joy to study this. And, I mean, being at NASA is, is even, you know, we’re studying things that are just amazing. The technology is at the forefront, the science is at the forefront. And there are always more and more questions. Every mission you fly, you have three questions roughly you want to, you know, they have sort of high level science goals. But you know a good mission is going to create 30 more questions from those initial ones. And so that’s — it’s just a joy to do it.

ISAACSON: Dr. Nicola Fox, thank you so much for joining us.

FOX: Thank you very much.