I learned how to play the clarinet ... in fifth grade. My husband plays a lot of stringed instruments and he was into bluegrass. ... I play the electric bass when I'm in the bluegrass band. ... [We also play] some country, and every now and then my husband and I will play a little old rock 'n' roll, like the Beatles. The [band's] name is Mountain View. We'll do the assisted living places and a couple of churches.
New Horizons launched in 2006 after five years of planning and construction. Was launch a scary time for you?
It was a little scary. ... We wanted to see that work come to fruition, and you knew you had to go through this very violent event to get there. ... We weren't able to get telemetry [data transmissions] from the spacecraft, by design, until after the separation from the ... motor. What that meant was, we had a 50-minute outage from launch until when we could get telemetry. ... So we were anxiously waiting. When we got that first bit of telemetry, that was the point where we knew we had a mission.
So how is New Horizons doing?
It's doing pretty well. We've had some issues [four computer shutdowns]. ... We didn't really expect this. Thank goodness it's something that, while we didn't anticipate it ... we did code the autonomy to look for it. In that sense it was fortuitous. ... We hope that we can solve the problem. ... We've narrowed it down to a certain portion of the [software] code.
Will you stay with New Horizons fulltime through the 2015 Pluto encounter?
I think I am committed to the project, even on those bad days when you go home and you think, "I don't know if I can take another day of this." After you've thought about it for a while, you can't imagine it not being part of your life after you've invested so much.
You're not going to know whether this mission has succeeded at Pluto until 2015. How do you deal with risk of failure after so many years of hard work and $700 million invested?
You've got one chance. ... The near encounter [with Pluto] part is probably 48 hours, so with the [round-trip time for radio commands] of almost nine hours, there's not much you can do except sit back and hope that all your testing and reviews and thoughts have paid off, and you've uploaded something that's going to give a big science return. And you just won't know until the spacecraft turns back after its encounter and starts sending the data. Hopefully, that's what we'll see. It's a challenge. I guess that's what motivates a lot of us, the challenge.
