We are just hours away from launching one of our most ambitious space missions ever, #JWST At its core, we're still trying to answer a question asked millenia ago: "Who are we?"

As we answered some questions about our place in the cosmos, we found new questions to ask.

It’s always frustrating to see folks upset that we’re spending money on space when we could be spending it at home, but if you don’t mind, here are just a few personal reasons why I think this is a false dichotomy: 1) this money is spent on Earth. We don’t ship money to Mars, we employe people like myself. Almost everyone I know who works on this is trying to better humankind. In addition to the job, folks spend so much extra time sharing our STEAM journeys publicly & in classrooms.

Hello stomach-in-knots feeling, it’s been awhile #CountdownToMars I honestly forgot how nervous I was last time and it is hitting me now

HELLO @NASAPersevere IS ONLY HOURS FROM MARS #CountdownToMars AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH (you have to scream inside your heart in space since sound doesn’t travel through vacuum)

It’s already the sol (Martian day) at Jezero Crater when @NASAPersevere will land! Mars time is it’s own wild thing, but we establish a local time of noon when the sun would on average be overhead, and a Sol 0* on the day of landing. @NASAPersevere will land at about 3:53 pm local time (so on Sol 0, it’s really close to Eastern time)

To all the brown people out there today (especially): YOU ARE AMERICAN ENOUGH. You make this country better and you deserve to be here and be treated with respect. I see a lot of folks trying to reframe 9/11 as when magically for a moment we stopped being racist?

Every time I see Jupiter and its large moons, I think about how amazing it must’ve been for Galileo to observe this dance in the night sky

https://twitter.com/tweetsoutloud/status/1282448619996499970

Like can you imagine seeing these “stars” twirl around Jupiter and being like “Whoa dude” (experts do not agree that this quote is from Galileo and in fact may be from this author’s love of Bill & Ted). This is Galileo’s observations in 1610 (410 years ago)

Sharing is caring, and I want to share with you one of the tricks we use at NASA to address risk. We all have risks / challenges in our lives.
(Don't be scared by the matrix) I've used this for things that are uncertain in my personal life too. There's a few parts, so stick with me. The first part is to write down the risk in a "if x, because y, then z" format

I gave a talk yesterday about Fault Protection, the work we do to ensure errors in our spacecraft don’t result in mission failure, and I used this quote from Futurama: And it got me thinking how true that is about our current situation. In spacecraft we spend years behind the scenes making those missions work and if it all goes to plan a lot of that work never sees the light of day.

This year can we just all toast to Betelgeuse going supernova so we can start the 2020s out with a *sight* in the night sky heralding a change here on Earth To be fair, since Betelgeuse is like 500-700 light years away I guess unless toasts work through some undiscovered scientific principle of time travel, this may be pointless

I’ve been thinking this week about why the March For Our Lives protests gives me so much hope for our future, and, as an engineer, I think I’ve put my finger on it. Often times in engineering & science it's easy to let past experience dictate future development; to say because something hasn't been done before it's impossible or too difficult.

Happy birthday @NichelleIsUhura!

I have a story to tell (a thread):

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A few years ago, we had an @NASA event at @PNBallet, featuring ballet & music set to space imagery, where @NichelleIsUhura performed

I made the mistake of imagining what it would be like to be Cassini, watching Saturn grow larger & larger, sending my discoveries home... Cassini the brave; given its last marching orders, there are no more commands to come, no plan for the next sequence.