By Frank D. Roylance , frank.roylance@baltsun.com|September 07, 2008
Alice Bowman is the mission operations manager (M.O.M.) for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, now on course for a rendezvous with the (former) planet Pluto in 2015. It's her job to watch over the health of the spacecraft, to manage continuing upgrades and changes to the software for its support systems and scientific instruments during its nine-year voyage across the solar system.
From the mission control room at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory near Laurel, she and her team receive weekly signals from New Horizons reporting that all is well or, on occasion, that something needs their attention.
Last week, they awakened the craft for its three-month annual checkup, an intensive review of all systems. Their work is designed to assure that years of work by thousands of people - who began in 2001 to design and build the mission - will pay off with a scientific bonanza.
You majored in physics and chemistry and began your career doing cancer drug research at Cal Tech. How did you become interested in space exploration?
Space was just fascinating ... and the possibilities were just endless. As a child I would just look at that [points to a 1972 National Geographic poster of the Apollo astronauts on her office wall]. ... It was like, all the things that you could dream of happening were starting to happen, and I wanted to be a part of it.
What was it about math, science and physics that appealed to you as a kid?
When you got the right answer, you knew it. It was very logical and concrete, whereas writing and philosophy and things like that ... just seemed open. And science was just fascinating to me, sort of the small things, the cellular part and the viruses and all the things that work on a cellular level; and then the space stuff. ... I wasn't too interested in the stuff in between. It was either the little or the big.
With a mission this long, does the time seem to pass slowly?
If you think of where we started in January [2006], pretty much at 1 AU [an AU equals the distance from the sun to the Earth - about 92 million miles] and now we're at 10 AU ... time seems like it's just flown by. We've been so busy.
What do you do with your time when you are not worrying about New Horizons?
