A pair of students scurry to class. A jogger plods along. The ordinary hubbub of a college campus characterizes the scene outside of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), located in the Steven Muller Building on Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus in north Baltimore.

Yet inside the building, none of the activity falls within the realm of the ordinary. There, on the second floor of the nondescript, 1980s-style building, astrophysicists and engineers work to finalize the alignment of mirrors on the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched on December 25, 2021, and now roughly one million miles from Earth, orbiting what astronomers call L2, short for the second Lagrange Point.

L2 is the perfect place for the $10-billion space telescope to orbit. After all, it lies opposite the sun, which means the telescope can maintain the extremely low temperatures it needs to capture images of stars and galaxies light-years away. Lined up precisely with the sun and Earth, L2 also serves as what astronomers call a “gravity pocket,” an area with balanced gravitational pull that keeps the telescope in lockstep with the Earth’s orbit and eliminates the risk that it will, say, float off in deep space.

Yet the location of L2 means scientists can’t visit the telescope if something goes wrong. This differs from another powerful telescope, the famous Hubble Space Telescope, also operated out of STScI, and currently orbiting Earth at an altitude of approximately 340 miles. So far, astronauts have serviced Hubble onboard the spacecraft five times since it launched in 1990. But in deep space—which NASA defines as past the moon’s orbit—the JWST, or Webb, as it’s often called, is off-limits, meaning all maintenance and troubleshooting takes place not aboard the spacecraft but here in Baltimore, on the backside of Hopkins’ campus, along winding, tree-lined San Martin Drive.

There, Mission Operations Manager (MOM) Carl Starr—yes, his last name is Starr—huddles with his team in the Flight Control Room (FCR) of the Mission Operations Center (MOC) of the JWST, the most powerful, expensive space telescope ever built, one that promises to unlock answers to the origins of our universe, such as how galaxies first formed after the Big Bang. Like many federally and internationally funded programs—this one is a product of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA)—working on the JWST means, on top of other cognitively demanding tasks, memorizing a list of acronyms spanning 48 pages.

“Everyone calls me MOM,” says Starr, pictured above, who has worked on JWST since 2004, and whose position as MOM started 30 minutes after launch, when the telescope separated from the shuttle and began its journey to the deep, dark orbit of L2. Starr, who has curly brown-red hair, mutton chops, and a goatee, wears a blue-and-black-checkered blazer with a pin on his lapel representing the telescope’s signature 18 hexagonal mirrors, which look like a honeycomb.

The dad of a 10-year-old, Starr says his daughter finds it funny to hear his team of 600-plus people refer to him as MOM. But some of his responsibilities, it turns out, come across as mom-like. For one, he oversees the team that monitors the health of the JWST—taking its temperature to make sure instruments and systems don’t overheat, sending commands to keep the telescope on task. He also oversees communication among the MOC’s multidisciplinary teams, such as the engineers sitting in an adjoining room with expertise in areas like propulsion and thermal engineering, along with the astrophysicists and physicists working fastidiously around the corner on the telescope’s wavefront sensing technology, which uses algorithms to align the 18 mirrors and maintain optical systems.

Starr’s desk sits in the middle of the back row of the FCR, which is ground control for the telescope. Multiple signs hang on the glass wall and entryway, cautioning anyone who enters that this is a “Controlled Area by Order of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration,” in which “Unauthorized Persons Who Enter May be Subject to Prosecution Under Title 18 U.S. Code 799.”

Roughly the size of a school classroom, the FCR consists of nine desks on which stands a sea of gleaming monitors. The desks face the back of the room, oriented intentionally in the direction of two large, hanging screens that display the telescope’s movement and location. Two digital clocks flank the screens, one displaying Eastern Standard Time (EST) and the other Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), based on the Earth’s rotation.

Beyond the glowing, digitalized control room is something unlike anything else in the room: a view not into a pixelated screen but into nature. Made possible by a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, the view shows a panoply of tall oak, maple, and birch trees, swaying gently in the wind outside, a stream meandering through the middle.

The panorama of Earth comes in handy, at times, to a team with their eyes on the far-off universe. Starr included it intentionally when he worked with an engineer and architect to design the room. “Nature soothes and calms,” he says. At times, the high stakes work environment calls for it.

“My position as MOM is like the conductor of the orchestra,” says Starr. “I keep things moving, and then, when things don’t go as expected, I become more like a general on a battlefield.”

 

“MY POSITION AS MOM IS LIKE THE CONDUCTOR OF THE ORCHESTRA.”

 

With three decades of work in operations engineering, on top of military experience—Starr served in Operation Desert Shield in Iraq—he can remain calm, and keep others calm, under pressure. “When an anomaly happens, I call a triage meeting, I hear from all the leads and subject-matter experts, and I help get a new plan together,” he says. “But sometimes that $10-billion price tag falls right on our shoulders.”

Starr can tell by body language when his team is tense or frustrated.

“Sometimes people freeze, and I take off my headset and then walk up to talk to them personally and say, in a calm voice, ‘This is what just happened. It’s really critical that in the next three minutes we do X, Y, and Z,’” he says. “And then it’s ‘Copy that, Wilco,’ and we go on about our business.”

Kayla Yates sits on the front row of the FCR, next to Irma Aracely Quispe-Neira. Yates serves as the command controller, while Aracely Quispe-Neira works as the operations controller. Together, they monitor the telemetry, or the automatic measurements and data sent from the telescope via a radio signal to Earth.

Just a few years out of an undergraduate program in astronautical engineering, Yates is one of the youngest members of the team at 26, and the only one, on most days, sending direct commands to the telescope. Written in a standard computer programming language and tailored to the needs of the spacecraft, the commands tell the telescope to do things like turn off a certain system so it can cool down, maneuver to a new position, or perform whatever task the engineering, wavefront-sensing, and instrument teams deem necessary.

The command requests first go to Starr, who works with Yates and Aracely Quispe-Neira, 39, to schedule the procedure in a timely manner, among other priorities. Yates then types in the commands with her long, glossy, taupe-painted fingernails, checking the script multiple times—and having Aracely Quispe-Neira double-check it—before hitting send.

When asked how it feels to be one of only a handful of scientists communicating with the telescope, Yates is surprisingly blasé. “I think it’s the routine of it all,” says the engineer, who communicates with the telescope every day, with a shrug. “It’s the repetition of mostly looking at numbers.”

Yates almost went to art school and stands out, in combat boots and a boho-style dress, from her conservatively clad colleagues (with the exception of Starr, perhaps, and his unconventional facial hair). But she decided, at the last minute, to pursue her passion for math and science by attending Capitol Technology University in Laurel to study astronautical engineering and computer science. “It’s a very niche program,” Yates says. “It’s similar to an aerospace degree, except mine was totally focused on flight outside of an atmosphere.”

Like everyone who works at the MOC, Yates underwent extensive training for her current role, training that Starr says involved late-night studying and exams and equates to “going to school all over again.” But if anything, Yates feels overprepared. “In so many ways, the flight is going almost flawlessly, compared with what we practiced and prepared for in training on the simulator,” she says.

Right now, the preparation appears to have paid off, given that the telescope is sailing through the “commissioning phase,” a term used to describe the six months after launch, during which the various teams make sure that all systems and components work according to plan. With the telescope’s tennis-court-sized sun shield deployed and keeping it cool, plus the 18 mirrors unfolded, and, as of press time, aligned, the JWST is nearly ready to start capturing images and conducting the research that NASA and its partners created the observatory to do.

 

“WEBB WILL PROBABLY ALTER HOW WE CONCEIVE OF OUR PLACE ON EARTH . . .”

 

So far, images taken and transmitted back to Earth have exceeded even the team’s wildest imaginations. “Look at this,” Starr says, with a sparkle in his eyes as he pulls one up on his smartphone. There, on the small screen, brilliant bursts of light populate nearly every inch, like an explosion of stars and galaxies. “They will only get clearer,” he says, “and are going to blow us away.”

Like the stunning images taken over the past few decades by the Hubble Telescope, the JWST will capture and share with the public exquisite looks at stars, planets, and galaxies never seen before. But while the Hubble detects light primarily within the visible and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum, the JWST will detect light largely ininfrared—and see objects 10 to 100 times fainter than Hubble, according to NASA. This, combined with Webb’s much larger mirror and state-of-the-art detectors, will enable the JWST to peer “back in time” to see the universe billions of years in the past—and hopefully solve the mystery of how the first galaxies formed.

Webb’s resolution, NASA says, will enable it to capture intricate details of, for example, an object the size of a regulation soccer ball 340 miles away, or the size of a penny about 24 miles away. That level of detail, at such a distance, is unprecedented. It will “enable the telescope, and scientists worldwide, to use infrared to truly unveil the universe,” says Quyen Hart, a senior education and outreach scientist at STScI.

“Hubble enabled us to discover planets outside of our solar system in the 1990s, so now our questions are: What, exactly, do we know about these planets? Are they hot? Do they have atmospheres? Are they like Earth?” she continues. “Webb will open the door to these answers and others—and probably alter how we conceive of our place on Earth and in the universe.”

NASA and its partners plan to release the first images this July, with events and celebrations happening worldwide at informal learning institutions like science centers, libraries, museums, and planetariums. A map of more than 600 events in Baltimore and across the United States is available online, along with updates on the precise release date of the actual photos, once NASA turns them over to the public.

Space enthusiasts can also visit NASA’s Universe of Learning for activities and resources to dive into the science of Webb, other observatories, and outer space in general. And they can follow NASA’s hashtags on social media for all things JWST—#UnfoldTheUniverse and #NASAWebb.

Or they can walk the path that coils along San Martin Drive on Hopkins’ campus, and when they pass the Steven Muller Building, with the “Go, Webb, Go!” banner fluttering outside, salute the team of scientists hard at work uncovering the mysteries of the cosmos.

he phrase “the new normal” has been thrown around since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and as America struggles to define—and design—what that is exactly, colleges are paving the way for what it might look like.

After the chaos and uncertainty of 2020, colleges and universities throughout the Baltimore region began to find their groove as they moved into the 2021-2022 school year. Coronavirus safety committees had been erected, new mandates put in place, safety protocols implemented—everything from vaccine requirements to temperature checks to quarantine procedures and wastewater testing that can pinpoint a COVID infection before anyone is symptomatic.

By some counts, colleges may very well be the safest places to live and work.

“Just following simple rules of wearing face masks and social distancing, using wastewater management and testing when we need to, we have, in many ways, been able to return to normal life,” says Goucher College President Kent Devereaux. “Full athletics, student clubs, dining in the dining hall, use of the library—everything that you’d normally have, we’ve been able to return to.”

Despite the challenges and anxieties faced by students, staff, and faculty alike, some unexpected silver linings have emerged.

“It’s just incredible to watch how it’s grown into the vision that we, as a group of students, had.”

The widespread adoption of technology across college campuses has proven to provide more flexibility, efficiency, and innovation—and even accessibility, in some cases. Counseling sessions, for example, began to be conducted remotely during the pandemic and many students found that they preferred it to in-person sessions. Students who cannot, for whatever reason, make it to an in-person class can now study from anywhere.

Challenging times, combined with advances in technology and the general acceptance of it, have also brought more cooperation and collaboration among schools. It’s becoming more common, for example, for schools that offer complementary programs to partner with one another to offer students an educational pathway to continue studies in their chosen areas. That may mean a discounted tuition rate, a transfer of class credits, or an internship through a partner school.

Maybe most importantly though, schools, at their best, foster an environment where students are supported, expand who they are, and connect with like-minded people. At a time when gathering together is not always safe, being in a community has become even more precious, and students have found new ways to connect.

OCA Mocha, a coffeehouse in Arbutus founded by University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) students, is one example of how effective a gathering place can be at a time when people are craving human connection. What started as a class assignment—to design a community center of some sort—has become a gathering place not just for UMBC students and alumni, but the Arbutus community at large.

“We’ve heard a lot of stories from people who are extremely grateful to have this space,” says Michael Berardi, UMBC class of 2019 and co-founder and general manager of OCA Mocha, which stands for Opportunities for Community Alliances. The coffee shop includes a stage, a community room, and an art gallery, employs UMBC students and alumni, and provides internship opportunities for current UMBC students.

“We have local groups and organizations that meet regularly in our community space and are grateful to not have to meet in someone’s living room or church basement,” says Berardi. “We see a lot of connections being made. It’s just incredible to watch how it’s grown into the vision that we, as a group of students, had.”

We checked in with colleges and universities throughout the region to find out what’s new and what campus life and classes look like, two years into the pandemic.

COPPIN STATE UNIVERSITY
A historically Black institution founded in 1900, Coppin State University is situated in the heart of Baltimore City in the Mondawmin neighborhood. Part of the University System of Maryland in Baltimore, the school offers 32 undergraduate and 11 graduate degrees, along with nine certificate programs and one doctorate degree. It’s been rated No. 4 Best HBCU in the Nation (College Consensus), the Top 5 Best Value Online Program (Online School Center), and No. 17 Best Value in the Nation (College Consensus).

In the summer of 2021, CSU announced its Student Debt Relief Initiative, which clears roughly $1 million in student balances and provided a $1,200 credit to every student enrolled in the fall 2021 semester. CSU also created the Freddie Gray Student Success Scholarship, which is available to graduates of Carver Vocational-Technical High School, where Gray was a student.

Coppin also takes esports (competitive video gaming) seriously. In the fall of 2021, Coppin became the first HBCU to open a building on campus exclusively devoted to esports. The Premier Esports Lab opened in September with a guest appearance from Grammy-nominated artist Cordae.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,383 undergraduates, 341 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 13:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $6,809 in-state, $13,334 out-of-state
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 40%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Nursing, Business, Biology, Education, and Criminal Justice, Rehabilitation Counseling

DICKINSON COLLEGE
Founded in 1783, Dickinson College is a liberal arts college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with a suburban campus that spans 144 acres. The school offers 41 undergraduate degrees within 17 fields of study.

It’s been rated as one of the best schools in the country for its sustainability efforts, which include an 80-acre, USDA-certified organic farm. Princeton Review rated it No. 2 in the Top 50 Green Colleges, and it was rated No. 2 in Overall Top Performers among baccalaureate institutions in the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s “Sustainable Campus Index” in 2019 and 2020.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,345
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 9:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $58,708
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 52%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: International Business, Economics, Political Science & Government, International Relations & National Security, General Psychology

GETTYSBURG COLLEGE
Gettysburg College, a private, liberal arts school, sits on 225 acres adjacent to the historical Gettysburg Battlefield in Pennsylvania. Many of the buildings on campus are historically significant, so it’s no wonder that it draws students interested in studying history.

The school offers 65 academic programs, more than 120 campus clubs and organizations, and 800 events on campus each year, plus more than 100 study-abroad opportunities open to students.

Its Majestic Theater serves as a venue for the greater Gettysburg community, hosting national acts as well as performances by the school’s Sunderman Conservatory of Music students.

It’s ranked No. 12 for “students who study the most” by the Princeton Review, which also ranked Gettysburg College’s dining hall No. 9 in the country for best campus food.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,600
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 10:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $59,960
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 56%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Political Science, Economics, Health Sciences, Organization and Management Studies, History, Psychology

GOUCHER COLLEGE
A private, liberal arts college in Towson, Goucher College prides itself on its close-knit community.

Goucher was extremely proactive when it came to COVID-19 precautions, being the first in the state to implement wastewater testing, which is able to isolate COVID infections by dorm.

Also of note: The college recently opened two new residence halls as part of the school’s First-Year Village. One hundred percent of Goucher students study abroad, and the school is committed to sustainability.

Most recently, Goucher has begun exciting partnerships with other schools, such as Johns Hopkins University, Loyola University, and more to come, to provide a pathway for students to continue their education beyond Goucher. For instance, their 4+1 MBA Program allows students to earn an advanced business degree through Loyola via a “Fast Track” admission process, and at a 15% discount on tuition.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,100
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 9:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $48,000
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 79%
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Psychology, International Relations, Economics, Political Science, Business Administration

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
Johns Hopkins University (JHU) offers nine academic divisions and hundreds of courses of study, with campuses spread throughout Baltimore, including the Peabody Institute, a music and dance conservatory in Mount Vernon. Its main Homewood campus is located on North Charles Street.

The prestigious, world-renowned university has a strong reputation for its public health and medical studies and has been compared to Ivy League schools.

One of its points of pride is its financial aid program, which covers 100% of calculated need for every admitted student, without loans. This means JHU works with families to calculate what they can afford to contribute toward the total cost of attendance—including meals, books, travel, and other expenses—and JHU covers the rest with grants that don’t need to be repaid.

This school year, JHU added two new minors: Latin American Studies and Writing Seminars.

It also announced new efforts this year to move toward a broader, more flexible undergraduate educational experience that will include a required first-year seminar and the streamlining of major requirements to allow for greater intellectual exploration.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 6,333 undergraduates, 22,559 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 6:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $56,313 for Peabody Institute, $58,720 for the School of Engineering and the School of Arts and Sciences
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 9%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Computer Science, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Neuroscience, Economics, Public Health Studies, International Studies

LOYOLA UNIVERSITY
This private, Jesuit institution offers undergraduate and graduate programs on a beautiful urban campus in northern Baltimore City. Education at Loyola is based in the Jesuit tradition of scholarship cura personalis, or care for the whole person. Loyola is known for its academic rigor while helping students lead purposeful lives. Seventy percent of students study abroad. It currently ranks fourth in best universities in the North region according to U.S. News & World Report.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 3,787 undergraduates, 1,353 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 12:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $53,430
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 80%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business, Management, Marketing, Journalism, Social Sciences, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Psychology, English Language and Literature, Engineering and Education.

McDANIEL COLLEGE
McDaniel College sits in a bucolic setting near Westminster in Carroll County. The private, four-year liberal arts college offers more than 70 undergraduate programs of study and more than 20 graduate programs. McDaniel’s most recent addition to its curriculum is a National Security Fellows Program that provides students with knowledge, skills, and experience in national security as well as the ability to specialize in an area of interest, such as interstate conflict, intrastate political violence, cybersecurity, ethics, and human rights.

Also new this year, McDaniel appointed an inaugural associate provost for equity and belonging who provides vision and leadership to the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and works in collaboration with the provost to co-lead the college’s diversity, equity, and inclusion administrative committee, and guides the Bias Education Response Support Team.

The school also launched a new STEM Center to serve as a physical hub to support students studying the sciences. It hosts workshops and other events while also supplying online and hybrid support.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,757 undergraduates, 1,324 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 13:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $46,336
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 81%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Kinesiology, Business Administration, Psychology, Biology, Political Science, International Studies

MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
The largest of Maryland’s HBCU’s (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), Morgan is a public institution founded in 1867. It is situated in northeast Baltimore. As a Carnegie-classified high research (R2) institution, Morgan provides instruction to a multiethnic, multiracial, multinational student body and offers more than 140 academic programs at undergraduate and graduate levels. As Maryland’s Preeminent Public Urban Research University, Morgan fulfills its mission to address the needs and challenges of the modern urban environment through intense community level study and pioneering solutions.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 6,270 undergraduates, 1,364 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 15:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $8,008 for in-state and $18,480 for out-of-state
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 73%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Civil Engineering, Communications Engineering, Business Administration and Management, Social Work, Biology/Biological Sciences, Architecture, Finance, Psychology, Sociology

NOTRE DAME OF MARYLAND UNIVERSITY
A private, Catholic liberal arts university in northern Baltimore, Notre Dame of Maryland University offers programs from undergraduate through PhD, as well as Maryland’s only women’s college. It recently launched the first master’s of art degree in Art Therapy program in the state.
The beautiful, wooded campus is just steps from the bustling downtown Baltimore culture. With values rooted in Catholicism, the school focuses on service to others and social responsibility.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 783
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 7:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $39,675
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 88%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Nursing, Education, Biology, Art Therapy, Pharmacy

TOWSON UNIVERSITY
One of the largest public universities in the state, Towson University offers more than 60 undergraduate majors and continues to draw students from other states, though it remains part of the University System of Maryland.

Its campus continues to expand, with a huge new dining hall, a 23,000-foot recreation and fitness facility with an indoor swimming pool, and its 5,200-seat arena for sporting events and concerts. In 2021, it opened its new Science Complex, the largest academic building on campus at 320,000 square feet.

In September, Towson opened its StarTUp at the Armory, a space for startups and new businesses to engage with the broader community and larger businesses. It serves as a home to Towson’s entrepreneurship programs, as well as student competitions and events.

While Towson remains the largest supplier of medical professionals and educators in the state, the university has also built a strong reputation for its College of Fine Arts and Communication, as well as its Asian Arts & Culture Center, both of which bring students into the wider community and the Baltimore community to Towson for enriching performing arts, music, and visual art programs.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 17,907 undergraduates, 2,949 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 16:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $7,100 in-state, $22,152 out-of-state
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business Administration, Education, Nursing, Exercise Science, Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology, Biology, Computer Science, Information Technology

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE
University of Maryland, Baltimore is Maryland’s only public health, law, and human services university. Located in downtown Baltimore, it offers 86 degree and certificate programs through its six nationally ranked professional schools—dentistry, law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and social work—and an interdisciplinary graduate school.

The school’s 14-acre BioPark is Baltimore’s biggest biotechnology cluster, employing 1,000 people, and remains on the cutting edge of new drugs, treatments, and medical devices.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 7,244
• ANNUAL TUITION: Varies by school
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Medicine, Law, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Nursing, Social Work

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE COUNTY
University of Maryland, Baltimore County educates a campus of more than 10,000 students in programs spanning the arts, engineering, information technology, humanities, sciences, preprofessional studies, and social sciences. Located on the edge of Baltimore County, it allows easy access into the city and all the conveniences of suburban life and housing. It also offers plenty of opportunities for study abroad.

In the fall of 2021, UMBC opened the Center for Well-Being, a new two-story complex that houses Retriever Integrated Health, Student Conduct and Community Standards, and i3b’s Gathering Space for Spiritual Well-Being. UMBC’s already significant NASA partnerships have continued to grow. In October, NASA announced a major award of $72 million over three years for the new Goddard Earth Sciences Technology and Research II center. UMBC is leading the national consortium and will receive over $38 million. The GESTAR II consortium will support over 120 researchers, creating extensive opportunities for breakthroughs in Earth and atmospheric science research, and providing major opportunities for students to conduct research and be mentored by NASA scientists and engineers.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 13,638
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 17:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $12,280 in-state, $28,470 out-of-state
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 81%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Computer and Information Sciences and Support Services, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Social Sciences, Psychology, Visual and Performing Arts

 

Cited tuition costs exclude room and board and books.

Built to alleviate a housing shortage created by World War II workers and Black veterans flooding into the city, Cherry Hill did not yet have a branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library when Valerie Thomas began school there. Nonetheless, she found something at the ad-hoc library set up at the community center that piqued her interest.

“The first book I brought home was The Boys’ First Book of Radio and Electronics,” she says. “It had illustrations of projects students could make and I showed it to my father, and he said, ‘Oh, I know how to do that, and that.’ He knew about electronics and also photography and even developed his own film, but he didn’t show me how to do anything.”

The next book she took out was The Boys’ Second Book of Radio and Electronics, and again her father did not offer to assist. “I got the message. Electronics is not for girls. ‘Go sew with your mother. Learn to do hair like your mother.’ I decided to master my sewing, which I did. I taught myself how to do hair.”

Thomas still wanted to know about science and technology, but it wasn’t until a senior year physics class at all-girls Western High School that she began learning about “what made things tick.”

The next year at Morgan State, the head of the physics department got her up to speed on trigonometry, which took all of 20 minutes, and she was on her way. Typically, the only woman in her upper-level science and math classes, she excelled. When NASA came for a recruiting visit in 1964, they offered her a job.

At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, the now-79-year-old Thomas would become a leader and expert in the development of the agency’s Landsat program, which digitized some of the earliest satellite images of Earth. Thomas became renowned inside NASA for creating the key programs and documents that enabled researchers at NASA and around the world to visualize Earth and its ever-changing landscape from reams of computer tape data.

Fifty years after its launch, Landsat remains a one-of-a-kind resource for research into agriculture, geology, regional planning, natural disasters—and climate change. Landsat images are used to chart deforestation around the globe as well as receding glaciers. Not that it was smooth sailing at the start at NASA, where Thomas got to know Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson, two of the women portrayed in Hidden Figures. Her first supervisor provided neither assignments nor guidance.

“There was an older Black woman, a scientist, who came by and she kept asking if he was giving me work,” Thomas says. “When his supervisors realized the situation, they moved me and my career took off like a rocket.”

Later, Thomas took every opportunity to talk with students and mentor interns, earned a doctorate, raised two sons, and became the first woman president of the National Technical Association, which focuses on helping African Americans progress in STEM fields.

A half-dozen years ago, Thomas began substitute teaching at DuVal High School in Prince George’s County, not far from Goddard. The magnet school specializes in science and technology.

“Word eventually got out about my time at NASA,” Thomas says with another chuckle. “Students would hear about my background, and then the ones who knew would tell other students when I’d get in front of a new class. They’d nudge them, ‘Google her, Google her.’”

As an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Christine Chen spends her days poring through research proposals from the world’s astronomers and astrophysicists—all eager for time on NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), considered the most powerful technology of its kind in history. Launched on December 25, the $10 billion telescope, now hurtling through space to a destination one million miles away, promises to answer questions about the origins of our universe.

What most excites you about the telescope?
JWST will probe farther back in time than any other instrument to see the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang. The universe is expanding, and these distant galaxies are flying away from us at tremendous speeds. With the telescope’s use of infrared wave lengths, we can peer into these galaxies at the edge of time and advance our understanding of galaxy evolution—and how the universe evolved from those first galaxies 100 million years after the Big Bang to the galaxies we see today.

We’ll also learn a tremendous amount about exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system that orbit a star, and the composition of their atmospheres. This field has grown immensely since astronomers discovered the first exoplanet in the mid-1990s. Since then, we’ve discovered more than 4,000, which has led to exponential growth in our understanding of planets. With JWST, that growth will continue to expand our knowledge, likely in a mindboggling way.

For example, we might learn what happens, say, on an extremely hot planet with a temperature of 1,700 kelvin, or 2,600.33 degrees Fahrenheit, versus planets with temperatures more like Earth, at 300 kelvin, or 80.33 degrees Fahrenheit. At 1,700 kelvin, silicates condense to make up the mineral olivine and gemstone peridot—deposits that cause the green sand beaches of Hawaii. So, we can imagine that there might be green clouds of peridot on these planets or something totally unlike what we see on Earth.

The international astronomy community awaited the launch of JWST for a long time. Tell us about the wait—and how it feels to have the telescope off the ground.
When I joined the mission in 2008, JWST was scheduled to launch in 2014 but ran into a whole series of setbacks. One challenge involved the telescope’s enormous sun shield. Made of five thin layers, each the size of a tennis court, the sun shield launched in a folded position and needed to unfurl in space, with hundreds of motors and actuators syncing to make it happen. When they tested it on the ground, the sun shield tore, and they had to patch it. This, in itself, caused a number of delays. On December 31, 2021, the sun shield deployed successfully in space. Now that we’re a few months in, we’re past the big milestones involving scary engineering. We can breathe a huge sigh of relief—and just get excited about the work of tens of thousands of people’s efforts coming to fruition.

With scientists worldwide clamoring to use the telescope for research purposes, how do you decide who uses JWST?
JWST is an “open skies telescope,” which means anybody can submit a proposal to use it, and data collected will be shared with the world as soon as possible so everyone can analyze and learn from it. But the telescope is in high demand, and time is limited. We use a double-blind peer-review process to remove bias from our proposal selection. This means we don’t know the scientist or institution submitting the proposal—a process that, we hope, will enable younger people and smaller institutions, not just the big R1 research institutions, to be more successful proposers. Another goal is to lower the success rate disparity between men and women.

How does it feel for you personally to be at the center of such a bold endeavor?
It’s tremendously exciting to work with the forward-thinking optimism that comes with everyone daydreaming about how our findings will revolutionize our understanding of the universe. It’s easy to get lost as a scientist, with your head down in analysis. But this reminds us that science is a human endeavor that pushes the frontier of knowledge.

We have to ask: do you expect to find life?
I think we’ll take a step in that direction, but I worry about people setting their expectations that we will definitively find life. It’s safe to say we’re looking for what we know are astrobiological-relevant molecules [which signal life] in these planets, but planets in their unique atmospheres are complex systems, and interpreting what we find will be complicated. Take, for example, when they searched for life in our own solar system and sent the Viking landers to Mars in the 1970s. They discovered that the chemistry of the planet was totally different, so the experiment they designed to work on Earth didn’t work on Mars. The challenge will be getting past ourselves and our limited experience with only one way of life. The universe has so many unimagined possibilities.

When can the public expect to see the first images?
Six months after the launch, at the end of June, NASA will share what they call “early release observations” to give everyone a flavor of the kinds of images and information JWST can generate. We can expect to see some gorgeous, newsworthy pictures at that time, while getting a sense of what’s to come.

Five years ago, on an otherwise normal Friday morning in Chelyabinsk, Russia, a six-story meteor—seemingly out of nowhere—burst across the clear blue sky as commuters were making their way to work. This surreal fireball—hurtling toward the Earth at 42,000 miles per hour and burning brighter than the sun—was caught on at least a dozen dashboard cameras before it exploded 19 miles above the city. (Nearly every car in Russia is outfitted with a dashboard camera, with footage typically used to settle traffic disputes.)

The blast from the largest asteroid to pierce the Earth’s atmosphere since the 1908 Tungaska event, which flattened some 800 square miles of Siberian forest, damaged 7,200 buildings in six cities, shattering windows and injuring more than 1,600 people.

Suffice to say, the episode was an effective reminder that about two-dozen meteors pop through the Earth’s atmosphere every year, including on average at least one the size of an automobile. It also proved a wake-up call for Congress, which began holding hearings about the threat to U.S. public safety. After all, the next 7,000-ton, flaming rock could just as likely land on I-95 as a Siberian forest.

NASA eventually announced the creation of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. The big question they needed to figure out, of course, was how exactly do you divert a rogue asteroid from an orbital collision with Earth? How do you design, model, and fly something into a speeding space rock and then measure the change in its trajectory?

The answer came to Andy Cheng, of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Howard County, in his basement during his morning calisthenics routine. Cheng realized the simplest approach was to crash a spacecraft into the smaller of a twin pair of asteroids—whose orbits are linked—and then measure the change in the orbit of the smaller asteroid against its larger twin. Up until that point, leading planetary defense scientists, including those at the European Space Agency, assumed they needed to build two spacecrafts—a prohibitive cost—one to smash into the asteroid and a second to document the change in its orbit. Measuring the changes in the asteroid’s rotation and spin against its twin, however, scientists could manage from their telescopes.

“It was a light bulb moment,” Cheng says with a laugh. “I was at home, stretching, in my normal routine before work, and I thought, ‘I know how to do it.’”

The chief scientist of the Space Department at the Applied Physics Laboratory, Cheng jokes he should be retired by now. He well remembers the year he moved to Baltimore (he currently lives in Potomac) to take a job at JHU’s Applied Physics Lab because it’s the same year the Orioles last won a World Series—1983. Instead, the 66-year-old grandfather is the co-lead investigator on the first-ever mission, nicknamed DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), to demonstrate an asteroid deflection in real time, in real space, for planetary defense purposes.

“I’m just having too much fun to quit.”

Given the way the threat of asteroids has permeated pop culture, namely end-of-the-world movies such as Deep Impact and Armageddon, it’s easy to forget that the study of asteroids is really new science. We put a man on the moon a decade before the first scientists theorized a giant asteroid had caused the mysterious extinction of the dinosaurs (not to mention three-quarters of all living species) 66 million years ago. That asteroid, with a diameter half the length of Manhattan, dented the Yucatan Peninsula with such force that it’s estimated 330-foot waves crested the shores of what are now Texas and Florida. More significantly, it ignited such an explosion on impact that the ensuing billow of dust, sulfur, and carbon dioxide blocked out the sun’s rays for years, driving down global temperatures and setting off a chain reaction of ecosystem catastrophes.

Closer to home, it wasn’t until 1983 that scientists discovered the first hint of the 53-mile impact crater buried beneath the Chesapeake Bay—left by the crash of an asteroid more than a mile in diameter.

“You know the saying: ‘The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program,’” says NASA’s Tom Statler, quoting science fiction author Larry Niven and only half-kidding. “Only in hindsight does it seem obvious that all these [previously believed volcanic] craters were the result of asteroids crashing into planets.” All told, Statler adds, about 100 tons of extraterrestrial matter falls onto the Earth every day, mostly in the form of harmless dust, but also the occasional small meteorite.

For the record, the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk is considered “small” by NASA’s near-Earth asteroid tracking standards. As was the fiery 26-pound rock that smashed through the trunk of 18-year-old Michelle Knapp’s Chevrolet Malibu while it was parked in her family’s Peekskill, New York, driveway in 1992, and the 8.5-pound space rock that crashed through an Alabama farmhouse in 1954, injuring Ann Hodges while she was napping on her sofa. Remarkably, there are no known human casualties from asteroids in recorded history, although a dog in a village outside Cairo, Egypt, was reportedly killed by a falling fragment in 1911. (Intercepting these small meteorites isn’t on the table at NASA or the Applied Physics Lab. Planetary defense scientists have their hands full tracking the thousands of near-Earth asteroids five times the size of the most recent Russian asteroid or larger.)

Roughly 95 percent, or about 15,000, of the large near-Earth asteroids have been located, says Statler, who serves as the NASA program scientist overseeing the DART mission. But until Cheng’s breakthrough idea, redirection was considered extremely difficult and borderline unverifiable.

“I wish I had thought of it,” Statler says.

As the timeline stands, the APL-built DART spacecraft will launch in June 2021 and impact Didymoon—the smaller twin to the asteroid Didymos (Greek for twin)—6.8 million miles from Earth on Oct. 7, 2022.

“Each asteroid has been to different places. Each has its own history.”

This summer, the White House released the administration’s 2019 budget request of $150 million for planetary defense, including $90 million for the DART mission. The White House also outlined goals to address the small but “high-consequence” threat posed by near-Earth objects, further developing technologies for deflecting or disrupting potential collisions (including a nuclear missile in the worst case scenario).

Meanwhile, notes Nancy Chabot, an APL project scientist, amateur astronomers will be able to track the DART project’s effect on the orbits of the Didymos asteroids when they are close to Earth. “We welcome anyone with a telescope to help,” she says of what will be the years-long observations of the twin rocks.

Most asteroids that stray near Earth—the Didymos pair, the Chelyabinsk rock, or others—are fragments of larger asteroids, numbering in the millions, from an enormous asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Some are rich in precious metals—asteroid mining is predicted as a thing of the future. Some asteroids are actually blown out comets with all the ice gone and just the rocky minerals left behind. Some have eccentric orbits. “Each asteroid has been to different places,” says Columbia resident Andy Rivkin, co-lead investigator with Cheng on the DART mission. “Each one has its own history.”

Rivkin adds that in recent years it has been theorized that most of the water on Earth may have come from asteroids and not comets.

The DART mission is not the only current high-profile project out of the Hopkins lab, which employs more than 6,000 people on its sprawling 20-building, 453-acre campus. The APL designed, built, and operates the recently launched $1.5 billion Parker Solar Probe, which will fly seven times closer to the sun than any previous mission. That spacecraft will explore, among other sun properties, the powerful solar winds that affect Earth, occasionally derailing satellites and GPS systems.

Other recent missions based at the Laurel facility include MESSENGER, the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, and the New Horizons mission to Pluto. And yes, Pluto is still a planet, although it is now considered a dwarf planet, of which there are many in our solar system. “The question everyone asks at a cocktail party when they find out you’re a planetary astronomer,” says Rivkin.

Meanwhile, APL planetary geophysicist Olivier Barnouin, who worked on the MESSENGER and New Horizons projects, helped write the proposal for another ongoing high-profile project overseen by NASA’s Goddard Flight Center in Greenbelt. The OSIRIS-REx project is the first U.S. mission designed to bring back an asteroid sample, from a primitive asteroid named Bennu, which scientists hope will reveal new information about the formation of the solar system.

“[With the OSIRIS-REx project], we are talking about being able to answer what are religious-type questions in the scientific community,” says Barnouin. “One hypothesis people go for is that in reality we are all aliens—that almost everything that is needed for life on Earth came from outer space.”

An asteroid estimated to be 4.5 billion years old with a diameter of the Empire State Building, Bennu, named after a mythological Egyptian bird, takes a close orbit to the Earth every six years. It is also noteworthy because it’s one of the large near-Earth asteroids with the best odds of impacting Earth, albeit sometime late next century. Granted, it’s a slim shot—an estimated 1 in 2,700 chance—but that’s still twice the probability of the average little leaguer making it to the big leagues. It’s also better odds than getting struck by lightning, which kills a couple dozen people in the U.S. each year.

Space, which is sometimes depicted as a great void and at other times as an asteroid and comet superhighway, is actually neither.

It’s both.

“Space is big,” says Rivkin. “But if you wait around long enough, something will come by.”

As Baltimoreans, we all can agree that Domino Sugar is out-of-this-world good, and as of today, it literally will be. Three pounds of the sweet, Baltimore-refined crystals, along with three pounds of the California-based C&H Sugar, will be heading to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of an experiment conducted by NASA.

The SpaceX Dragon Falcon 9 spacecraft launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida at 11:46 a.m. today carrying 4,800 pounds of research—sugar included—crew supplies, and hardware. Once the sugar reaches the ISS, astronauts will use it to grow crystals in zero gravity. This experiment will test the differences between growing sugar on Earth and in space and allows for students to get in on the research.

“We support educational STEM programs at schools around the country,” Brian O’Malley, CEO of Domino Foods, said in a statement. “We were thrilled when we were approached with this inventive program that uses our sugar products in a unique way to inspire young students to engage with and learn about science.”   

The Crystal Growth Experiment, as the project is known, was designed by space-related STEM organizations DreamUp, NanoRacks, and Xtronaut. It will teach students about the process of nucleation and crystallization in which sugar molecules in a saturated solution bond together and grow into the hard candy treat.

Domino Sugar and C&H Sugar, both part of ASR Group sugar refiners, each donated $25,000 to the Kickstarter campaign to jumpstart the effort. Due to the generous donation, both sugar makers will be the test subjects in the research for both the NASA astronauts and local students.

Down the street from Domino, students at Francis Scott Key Elementary/Middle School will be participating in the experiment by using “Crystals in Space” kits that were developed specifically for this experiment.

“When I told my pre-k students that I got an exciting email from Domino Sugar, their eyes lit up,” says Francis Scott Key teacher Ashley Demski. “[They said] ‘Ms. Demski, I pass Domino on the way to school. I can see the sign from my house!’ We do so many activities that come from kits based out of other parts of the country, so this is going to be especially meaningful for our Baltimore kids.”

She adds that she is anxious to see the results and introduce the kits to other students in the school.

“If my 4-year-olds were that excited, I can only imagine how our older students are going to respond,” she says. “STEM is right in our backyard.”

In many ways, Terry Virts is just your average native Marylander. He loves the Orioles and fondly recalls growing up in Columbia during the 1970s and ’80s. How is he not like the average Marylander? Well, as a retired astronaut and one-time commander of the International Space Station, he has spent 213 days in space, which he documented extensively in thousands upon thousands of hi-def videos and still photos. Since retiring from NASA in August 2016, he has spent his time organizing his images and career recollections into a book, the newly released View From Above: An Astronaut Photographs the World. While in town on his book tour last week, he stopped by Baltimore’s offices (where he geeked out about our Orioles-themed décor) and answered our questions about growing up in Columbia, working with the Russians, and thinking he might die in space.

*This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

The book just came out last week and is the result of your 16-year career with NASA, including your stint on the International Space Station, during which you took the most photos anyone has ever taken from space. That’s what they told me, yeah. When I landed, they were like, ‘Ugh. Finally, you’re back on Earth.’ Because they told me I took 319,000-plus pictures. 

Were they ever like, ‘Maybe hold off taking pictures for a day or two?’ Oh, totally. And it wasn’t just fun pictures. Like sometimes, if you’re doing an experiment, they want three different views. If you’re filming experiments, that payload stuff would kill all the downlink so there’s no time to get your fun stuff down. We had RED, this Hollywood-quality camera. Jim Cameron told me he used it to film Avatar. The RED camera was the worst. My last week I was like, ‘You know what, I took enough stills.’ So I got the RED out, and they had always warned us to be real judicious with it because it uses so many gigabytes. But I just filmed away, and they were like, ‘Oh my God!’ But you know what, a week later they had it all down, and they made the most popular UHD highlight reel. It was a couple years ago when UHD was new. It’s amazing. And they’ll have that forever. Yeah, it was like, ‘Sorry. You’ve got to download it.’

So tell us something about space that the average person doesn’t know. So it’s nothing like Star Wars. The Wookiees are not that loud in real space. The Storm Troopers are actually nice guys. [Laughs]

Well, tell us about floating. In space, you move with your hands and you carry things with your feet.

Why? Because you have to grab onto handrails to push yourself around. The way we’re designed: Hands are fine motion and feet are [mimes pounding his feet]. You can do that [mimes jumping], but you’re going to shoot up to the ceiling.

What are the annoying parts about being in space? Well, floating is super annoying. Like, anybody can move over there and get to the door, but to end up at the door [facing it with your hand near the handle], you have to push and rotate at the correct number of degrees per second and your brain has to figure out that it’s going to take five seconds to get there and I need to rotate 10 degrees.

How long does that learning curve take? The first couple of days, it is pretty steep. After a week, I was still not there. After two weeks, I was good but I wasn’t [at my peak]. It probably took me a month before I was good, and I got really good. 

What about sleeping in space? Yeah, you get sunrise and sunset every hour and a half, unless you’re in high beta [orbit]. I went through a week with no sunsets. 

It’s like living in Scandinavia in the summer or something? Right or Antarctica in the winter. It’s just constant sunlight. So you close the windows and you don’t know what the sun is doing and you set your alarm to GMT [Greenwich Mean Time]. 

Why GMT? Because it’s the International Space Station and the bus and the subway system [in Russia] does not run in the middle of the night. So we had to pick a time that was close to their normal work hours for their mission control people. Going GMT is close, it’s a couple hours difference. We didn’t just cave and use Moscow time. So it kind of saves face for us. [We can say] ‘Okay, GMT, that’s official.’ But the real reason is the Moscow subway schedule—so I’ve been told. I was still in the Air Force when the [ISS was launched]. 

Speaking of the Russians, you were up on the ISS with how many others? Five others. There were three Russians, two Americans, and an Italian.

This was in 2015, which, even then, was a tense time in U.S.-Russian relations. How did that affect your working relationships? It was great. It was the highlight of my mission having my Russian crewmates there. It was a lot of fun to hang out with them. We all knew that these things were happening on Earth and we would just consciously, actively say, ‘We’re going to ignore the politics and focus on staying alive.’ Because on the other side of the window is vacuum and death. In a universe of a lot of bad stuff happening, the space station was a good example of how people can work together. 

Can you give an example of something political that threatened to divide you? Well, [the U.S.] put sanctions on Russia. And when that happened, the ruble got devalued in half. So my cosmonaut friends were calling home asking their wives, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ And I’m the guy that did it, and I’m commander, so that could have been very divisive. So I made a very active decision to spend time with them, have dinner with them, to talk. And actually, the cosmonauts are paid in dollars—that’s just the way their contract is—so in the long run, their salaries doubled.

And then [the U.S.] had an orbital rocket that blew up here in Virginia, a Russian Progress rocket blew up, and a Space X rocket blew up. Three rockets in eight months. When the Progress blew up, it was the Soyuz [Russian spacecraft] rocket after [the one that delivered me to the ISS], so they wanted to do an investigation before they launched the next crew to replace us. So we didn’t know how long we were going to be stuck in space. And we were very flexible. Every day I would say, ‘Okay, guys, tell us your rumors,’ because I didn’t want rumors. I was like, ‘Let’s get ’em out. What is everybody hearing?’ And the Russians had the best because it was their rocket. I would talk to the station program manager [at NASA] and he was great. He was just like, ‘Here’s what we know. The reality is, it’s their rocket and they’re going to decide.’ I was like, ‘Okay, I can deal with that.’ There have been other examples when crews got delayed—or they didn’t even get delayed; they had threats of delays—and they were like, ‘Arggghh!’ But we were very positive. And our international partners get paid by the day. When they get extended, they get paid even more. The folks were not that upset about having to stay longer. 

You were born in Baltimore, grew up in Columbia, graduated from Oakland Mills High School. What are your memories of growing up in Columbia? I lived in Lanham and Gambrills first. I didn’t move to Columbia until fourth grade. My fourth grade teacher just found me on Facebook. He remembered stuff. He was like, ‘There was this trip to D.C. and you bought a prism, and you spent 15 minutes explaining how a prism works.’ I remember that but it’s crazy that he remembers that.

So obviously you had an aptitude for science. Yeah, math and science were my strong suits. 

What was your experience going through Columbia’s public schools? It was amazing. The public school system then, that I went through, was rated one of the, I think, top 10 in the country. First of all, it was a multi-racial place. It was kind of weird because I didn’t really think about when I was growing up because I had friends of all [backgrounds]—a Korean guy, an Indian guy. We had everything, and it just wasn’t a big deal. And academically, it was amazing. I got to take Calc 3 in high school and had French every year, seventh through twelfth grade. I became a French minor. I became an astronaut because of my French experience. Madame Micka, I talk about her in my book. She was my French teacher in high school. 

What do you mean you became an astronaut because of your French experience? There are 100 test pilots who are great, but I was the guy who had done an exchange at the French air force academy, and I had international foreign language [experience]. For something like being an astronaut that’s so competitive, you want to have something that makes you stand out, and that made me stand out. No one ever tells you why they picked you, but I just know in my heart that it wasn’t only math and science, it was also the language side of things that got me in. 

You really did want to be a pilot from a young age. There’s a cute picture of you in the book standing on the wing of a plane. Where do you think this love of flying came from? The first book I ever read was about Apollo. It was one of those picture books for kids and I was in Lanham, and I can remember it. It just stuck. My mom was a secretary at Goddard [Flight Center in Greenbelt] and my dad and my stepdad both worked at Goddard. But they weren’t pilots. It was satellites, not human space flight. 

But you were around the culture. Yeah, they would bring home pictures. I remember when Viking landed on Mars I got pictures from Mars. They would get, probably, posters from books they could bring home. They would just bring stuff like that home and my room was just covered with airplanes and stuff. And every summer I’d get Astronomy magazine and, the day it showed up, I would sit there and read the whole thing. 

Do you think a human is going to go to Mars? I’m sure, eventually. I hope sooner rather than later, and I hope America leads it. If we don’t, other countries will. The thing about humanity is that nothing is static. Just ask the Portuguese, ask the Brits, or ask the Chinese. They decided to build a wall, and for 1,000 years they just wallowed in themselves and they didn’t grow. The whole world did this [mimes expanding] and China was behind the wall. So America had the 20th century, right? That was our century. But that doesn’t mean the 21st century is going to be our century unless we decide to make it so.

 What is the most dangerous situation you’ve ever encountered in spaceflight? There’s a whole chapter in the book about it called “Emergencies in Space.” There was an ammonia leak. We’re sitting there, minding our own business, and the alarm goes off, and we pop our heads out. Samantha, my Italian crewmate, we’re looking at the panel. I see ‘ATM.’ There are three kinds of emergencies: There’s fire. There’s an air leak. And there’s toxic atmosphere, which is ammonia inside the atmosphere. Ammonia is the coolant. So cars have radiator fluid, the station uses ammonia. That’s how it stays cool—on the American side. The Russian side uses sugar water. It’s not as efficient. It’s not as good a coolant, like ammonia, but it’s sugar water. Ammonia kills you dead.

So I go, ‘ATM?’ It was such a big deal that I just couldn’t process it. So we put on oxygen masks, run down to the Russian segment, and close the hatch because the Russian segment is safe. And then you’re supposed to take all of your clothes off because if there’s ammonia in your clothes, its poisonous, and then you go through another hatch. But we didn’t take our clothes off. No one smelled anything. We were like, ‘We’re probably fine.’ And the ground was kind of mad at us about that. Thirty minutes [later], the ground goes, ‘Hey, just kidding, it was a false alarm.’ So we’re just like, ‘Ugh.’ It just kills the day’s schedule. So we get back and we’re putting things away because we had just dropped everything and the CAPCOM [the Capsule Communicator] calls up and says, ‘Execute ammonia response now. This is a real thing. This isn’t a drill.’ It was this super intense voice. We were like, ‘Crap!’ We put the masks on, we go down, we close the hatch, we don’t take our clothes off. We do the whole thing. We get a sampler out. Okay, the air is good. Twenty or thirty minutes later we take our masks off and we’re like, ‘huh.’

What I knew had happened was the computer [activated] the alarm automatically. I knew there would be a crowd of engineers looking at every little bit of data. What I assumed had happened was, after the first alarm, they went, ‘Nah, that’s not really a leak. Tell them it’s not.’ And then they [continued] to watch the data and it [looked] like it was still leaking and they said, ‘Yeah, that’s a leak. It’s a small one, but it’s a real leak.’ And then they called us back. Since I’ve worked in mission control for years, I knew what was going on; they didn’t tell us this. And then we sat around for hours on the Russian side and the Russian deputy prime minister called up in the middle of sanctions and all these bad things and says, ‘Hey Americans, you can stay as long as you want. We’re going to work together.’ This was the same guy that had said we could take a trampoline to the space station after the U.S. had put sanctions on Russia. The same guy who was having a Twitter battle with, I guess, Obama at the time called up and said, ‘Hey we’re going to work together and get through this.’ So it was a great, great, great example international cooperation in space when things were really bad down here.

So we spent the day like, ‘So, there’s a small leak on the station.’ What’s going to happen if it continues to leak is the station pops. It just gets over-pressurized and the metal explodes—unless they vent it. They could vent it and then there’s no air and ammonia stuck to the walls. So we’re like, the station’s dead, and we’re going to stay on the Russian segment for a few weeks—with the one pair of underwear because all my clothes are over there—and then go back to Earth and the station will go into the Pacific. And then I went and took a nap. I was like, ‘I don’t have anything else to do. I’m going to take a nap.’ And then they called up and said, ‘Just kidding, it was a false alarm.’ [Laughs]

But then when we went back to the American segment they said, ‘But just keep your masks on just in case.’ So my crewmate and I, we put our masks on and we had these samplers and we were floating around and it was like this surreal alien movie. There were things floating around—we just abandoned stuff and left—so it was like being the first person on this ghost ship in space. And then everything was fine. That’s a story that no one knows and it’s an amazing story.

So, essentially, you got told it was a false alarm twice? Yes. And there have always been false fire alarms, and there have been a few false air leak alarms, but there’s never been a false ammonia alarm.

Ever? That’s the one and only ammonia alarm. The ammonia alarm is a big deal. That’s the one you don’t want to get. They sent a text to my family at four in the morning. The text is in the book. My wife got it and she gave it to me for the book. In general, space flight sucks for families. It’s just hard. Everyone’s always like, ‘Oh you’re so lucky your dad’s an astronaut!’ My kids are like, [rolls eyes]. We were watching the NBA five or six years ago and my daughter, she was probably like 10 at the time, and we were watching the Heat and they were in the finals and she just looks at me and says, ‘Dad, why can’t you be more like LeBron James?’   

Rider Fulks, wearing a T-shirt that read “Big Dreamer,” patiently awaited a break in the cloud cover atop the Maryland Science Center rooftop Monday afternoon, hoping to glimpse the first eclipse in nearly a century to sweep across the country.

Suddenly, at about 1:15 p.m., the sky broke clear.

The awestruck Parkton 7-year-old, donning safety glasses, tried to describe the rare celestial occurrence to his mother and 5-year-old brother: “It looks like the moon is taking a bite out of the sun,” he said.

The line outside the Science Center began forming a couple of hours before the Inner Harbor institution opened in anticipation of the eclipse, which turned night into day in a stretch of the U.S. from Oregon to South Carolina over the course of 90 minutes. In Baltimore, the eclipse wasn’t total, but estimated at 80 percent—though that hardly dimmed enthusiasm for the witnessing the historic alignment.

“We sold out all 300 tickets for each of our five rooftop viewing time slots,” said Science Center program manager Samantha Blau. “We expect more 3,000 people overall. It’ll be our busiest day of the year.”

Eclipses actually occur every 18 months or so, but they rarely darken a path that traverses the entire length of the country; instead dropping the moon’s shadow across one of the oceans or some other continent. The next eclipse path across a significant swath of the United States will arrive in 2024 when the shadow of the moon will move from Texas to New England, coming closest to Baltimore—about 300 miles away—somewhere in its swing between Cleveland and Buffalo.

The Science Center passed out special eclipse safety glasses to all those purchasing a timed pass to the rooftop viewing party, which also included a special exhibition on the sun. The Science Center had also ordered small, unused pizza boxes in advance of the event, assisting visitors in making their own pinhole viewing devices. Many families came equipped with their own pinhole devices made from cereal boxes, which seemed to work better for some than others.

“The tin foil got wrinkled on the drive over here,” said one mother, smiling as she shared safety glasses with her 5-year-old daughter. “Apparently, I needed to keep a better eye on the cereal box in the car.”

Dr. Lisa Schocket, ophthalmologist, and associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, was on hand as well to remind visitors not to look at the sun without proper precautions—not just during eclipses, but anytime—because of the potential harm to the retina. 

Inside the Maryland Science Center, NASA’s livestream and coverage of the eclipse was screened at the Davis Planetarium.

In 2012, the Science Center partnered with NASA on a then-new permanent exhibition, Life Beyond Earth, which explores the solar system, and beyond, and also proved a popular destination for visitors Monday.

“The really cool thing is that today you don’t need to be an astronomer and you don’t need a telescope to watch something really cool in the sky,” said Blau.

Kenneth Sembach was just a fifth-grader in suburban Chicago when a book report set the course of his life. He was perusing his school’s library, looking for a worthy title, when the bell rang. “I was out of time,” he recalls now, nearly 40 years later, a faint Midwestern lilt still detectable in his measured, thoughtful speech. “I picked up a book on the shelf—I had to have something—and it was a small field guide to the stars. . . . So I would go outside at night and see if I could find these things. This sparked my imagination, and I’ve been in love with it ever since.”

The “it,” of course, is astronomy. Or maybe the universe. Or maybe scientific discovery. Or maybe all three. In any case, Sembach is still staring up at the sky in wonder, asking questions—only now he’s in a position to answer them.

Sembach is the new director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)—a facility located on the Homewood campus of The Johns Hopkins University and operated by a consortium of astronomical research universities for NASA. In a beige office building off San Martin Drive, he now leads some of the world’s best minds—a Nobel Prize winner among them—in some of mankind’s most ambitious scientific endeavors.

The most famous of these undertakings is the Hubble Space Telescope for which STScI runs science operations. The data that Hubble has sent back and STScI scientists have analyzed has transfixed astronomers and the public at large, most dramatically via exquisite images of swirling nebulae, billowing dust clouds, and kaleidoscopic galaxies.

In October 2018, Hubble will get a companion in the skies—the James Webb Space Telescope, affectionately known as “the Webb.” Though as monumental a project as Hubble—which has, among other things, helped astronomers determine the current rate at which the universe is expanding—the Webb will differ in several key ways.

Unlike Hubble, which circles the Earth in a low orbit, Webb will be propelled a million miles into space and parked. Operating just a few degrees above absolute zero, it will be able to look back through time to detect the dying embers of some of the first stars and galaxies that formed not long after the Big Bang.

That is, if all goes according to plan. Because of its distance from the Earth, the observatory will not be serviceable like Hubble is—“so,” acknowledges Sembach, “it has got to work.”

The reason for the distance is because the Webb, unlike Hubble, is primarily an infrared observatory, meaning its instruments will distinguish wavelengths of light that are beyond the visible spectrum (aka ROYGBIV), but that can suggest temperature. If it were in orbit around the Earth, the heat from the planet and the sun would interfere with its readings. And we want those readings crystal clear. They will help answer some of mankind’s most enduring questions.

“At some point, we’re going to look back and say, ‘Oh my gosh, we did that.’”

On a dreary November day, just a little over two weeks into his tenure as STScI’s fifth director, Sembach sits perched on the edge of a couch in his unnervingly neat third-floor office. (“That’s ’cause I’ve just moved in. Give it time, give it time,” he cracks.) He has just come from giving a pep talk to some of STScI’s approximately 650 employees. With the telescope still in pieces around the country and staffers buried in minutiae prepping for its assembly and launch, he says he reminded them to take the long view.

“You come and you work on it every day, and sometimes it just doesn’t sink in,” he says, “but you step back and you say, ‘Wow, that was something really great that we did.’”

To illustrate the difference Webb’s infrared view of the cosmos will make, he pulls up side-by-side images taken by Hubble of towers of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula known as the “Pillars of Creation.”

One of the images, taken using visible light, is ethereally beautiful, like a detail from a ’70s rock concert with a kick-ass laser light show and smoke machines on full blast. But the other, taken using infrared light (Hubble has limited infrared capabilities), is so sharply, densely brilliant with stars that it resembles a close-up of a diamond-encrusted dress.

“If you want to look into clouds of gas and see stars forming . . . the infrared light’s longer wavelength just kind of goes right in—or in this case comes right out—so you can see
objects that are enshrouded in dust,” Sembach explains.

But it’s not just about clearer images. It’s about what those images can tell us—and it’s a long list.

“We can answer questions like when did the first stars and galaxies form. . . . Those first stars that formed black holes and were the nuclei for galaxies, what did they look like? When did those stars and black holes start shaping the medium around them? How did those galaxies evolve over 13 billion years to the kinds of galaxies we see today? How do stars form? We still don’t really know how stars form. That’s kind of amazing,” Sembach says.

Then there is the wish-list question.

“Obviously, whether we know it or not, we’re on this quest to find out whether there are other planets like the Earth out there,” he says. “We have a chance now, probably not with Webb, but you never know. We’ve done things with Hubble we would have never thought of.”

There is one more major difference between Hubble and the Webb, and that is that STScI can claim the Webb in a way it never could with Hubble. Of course, STScI has been and will continue to be deeply involved with Hubble, but mission control for that observatory is 30 miles down 295 in Greenbelt. But for Webb, both the flight and scientific operations will happen at STScI. In fact, the command center at STScI is under construction right now. “Once it’s up in the sky,” Sembach acknowledges, “it is, for lack of a better term, ours.” Which means that, to a very large extent, it’s also his.

If you have to rest the weight of an $8.7 billion space-exploration project on one person’s shoulders, Sembach seems a good choice. After receiving an undergraduate degree in physics (with honors, naturally) from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he earned a three-year fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Following that, he stayed on at MIT for a year and a half before coming to Hopkins to work on a project involving ultraviolet light. He joined STScI in 2001 as an instrument scientist for Hubble and, as he says, “moved up the food chain here.”

“Once it’s up in the sky, it is, for lack of a better term, ours,” says Sembach.

He notes that this assignment, which is as much about team-building and leadership as it is about scientific know-how, has arrived at a good time in his career.

“When I was a kid, astronomy was a very personal thing,” he says. “It was mine. It was something for me. And it was that way even well through school and the early part of my career. [There were] things I really wanted to do, things I really identified with that I really wanted to know. And now it has become a broader perspective. A lot of times, it’s the people I work with, the people I meet, the people I can help motivate, that’s what gets me up in the morning.”

But there are other things in life besides work, even for Sembach, who rarely takes vacations and says he is “on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.” When asked to name his hobbies, he cites gardening, woodworking, and running, but you get the impression he could survive without them if he had to. Only one thing seems to truly rival his passion for work.

“I spend a lot of time talking to Marguerite,” he says, referring to his wife, Marguerite Hoyt, a writer, historian, and former women’s studies professor at Goucher College. “One of my favorite things to do is just sit at the coffee shop and talk with her. We talk about everything, what she’s doing, what I’m doing—science, history, politics.”

The couple met during their first day of freshman orientation at the University of Chicago, and their union, by both accounts, is rare in its compatibility and devotion.

“We’re very close. We are absolutely a real team,” says Hoyt. “It’s as simple as, when he gets home every night, we cook dinner together. He does all the chopping, and I do all the cooking. My mother has said, ‘You guys are like a ballet in the kitchen. You work together so well.’ And we do. It’s almost like we can read each other’s minds sometimes.”

And though Hoyt admits her husband’s job can be an occasional inconvenience, she has long since accepted its central place in their life.

“A long time ago, just before we were getting married, I was complaining about him being an astronomer and being out of town all the time and working all the time,” she recalls. “And another astronomer’s wife, who is a friend of mine, she looked at me and she said, ‘Hey, wait a minute. You knew exactly what his job was going to be when you got together with him. So you can’t complain about this.’ And I thought, ‘She’s absolutely right. I cannot complain about this because I knew this is what his life would be and what he wanted so badly.’ You kind of have to make peace with that.”

A few years ago, Hoyt quit her job at Goucher and now devotes herself to creative writing projects and keeping the home fires burning at their house in Ellicott City. She says she doesn’t regret leaving academia and takes pride in her “tiny contribution” to her husband’s noble mission.

And it is noble—though Sembach is too Midwesternly modest to use the word himself. But it is obvious he thinks of the Webb as the next great leap for mankind.

“James Webb is the largest science project this country is doing,” he says. “It’s going to be amazing, it’s going to be absolutely amazing. At some point, we’re going to look back and say, ‘Oh my gosh, we did that.’”

You grew up in Cockeysville and went to Dulaney High. What sparked your interest in space and/or flight?
I had a keen interest in flying for most of my childhood although I didn’t actually fly an airplane until I joined the Navy many years later. I think having the A-10s at Martin [State Airport in Middle River] fly over our house all the time and seeing the Blue Angels at the Naval Academy was what really sparked my interest in flying.

I also distinctly remember the space shuttle flying over Towson on the back of the 747 when I was young. I didn’t understand why but thousands of people crowded parking lots to watch it fly over so I knew it was something special. I also was very impacted by the Challenger disaster in 1986. We were in the cafeteria watching when that occurred. Oddly, I think that tragic event had a big part in my fascination with spaceflight.

Before NASA, you flew fighter jets for the Navy in combat. What’s scarier: flying into combat or being propelled into space on a missile?
I’d have to answer that with a “yes” and a smirk. Both were scary for their own reasons. Combat was scary because it was very personal, if that makes sense. Spaceflight is scary at times because of the enormous energy involved in getting us off the planet and back. Any time humans play with that much energy there is a chance for failure. I would get nervous roughly three days before any big event—launch, a spacewalk, landing. But as the event would approach, those nerves would turn into adrenaline and joy.

From May to November 2014, you lived on the International Space Station. What were the best and worst parts?
The best part was everything—the view of Earth, floating, working on the science, living with a multinational crew, watching how simple things like water behave in microgravity. The worst part was knowing that we were working on experiments and hardware that cost millions of dollars and were usually unique with no spares, so making a mistake could be very costly. Just like with every job, there were many good days but also some tough days that really tested our resolve.

You gained quite the social media following during your mission. What made you want to engage that way?
I honestly had no idea it would become so successful. I simply wanted to try to share the view of a rookie astronaut flying into space. I wanted to share the personal side. What does it feel like to be in such a crazy place? What is good? What is bad? I also pushed hard to get Vine up and running so we could put our world into motion on the Internet. That was incredibly successful and really fun to work on. In the end, Twitter was an amazing yet accidental journal of my time in space.

What’s the first creature comfort you reached for once you returned from space?
I wanted a pizza really bad toward the end of my mission, but then, on the plane ride home, I saw a fresh green salad and I dove in. I hadn’t had fresh lettuce in half a year and that hit the spot in a big way. If food doesn’t count as a creature comfort, well I guess the other answer would unfortunately have to be the old smartphone. Although I don’t use it nearly as much as I did before my mission. There is a big beautiful world out there and sometimes you gotta put down the phone to just soak up the beauty of everyday life.