>> Hello, and welcome to "Family Night."

We hope that you're joining us with a parent, grandparent, or someone special because we're going to grow and learn together.

My name is Keira, and I'll be joining you as we explore all things space.

Have you ever looked up at the sky and wondered about space?

When I look up, I think of words like "huge," "exciting," and to me, maybe even a little "scary."

I wonder what words come to your mind.

♪♪ >> If I had to describe space in a few words, I think I'd use words certainly like "vast" and "big."

>> Huge, unknown, mysterious.

>> Space is fascinating, expansive, mystifying.

>> The unknown, science, a desire to learn.

You get all of that from exploring space and from studying space.

>> Infinite, huge, unknown.

>> We live on Earth, so what's happening on Earth and what's going on with people obviously is a big deal to us.

It's important, but the more we learn, we're finding out just how tiny we are and how there's so much more space out there, and there's so much more stuff that we've just never seen.

You know, you have to remember Earth is the only planet people have been on, but there are billions of billions of billions of other galaxies out there, and each of those galaxies has millions of planets.

We've only seen one.

>> Are we alone in this universe?

>> As humans, we're always looking to explore, thinking about how broad, how vast of a space there is out there.

It's just exciting because there's just always going to be something else to explore and learn about, another puzzle to solve.

>> Explore and learn.

That's exactly what we're going to do.

Over the next hour, you'll meet new friends that have exciting careers in the field of space exploration.

I can't wait for you to hear about the amazing things they're doing every day.

Plus, you'll get a chance to try out some activities that will help you explore your understanding of all things space.

The best part -- you don't need special supplies.

Just a few items you can find in your home and someone special to create with.

So gather together and get ready for some family fun.

>> Support for "Family Night: Space" comes from the Pennsylvania Department of Education and viewers like you.

Thank you.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Keyboard clacking ] ♪♪ Well, I don't know about you, but I'm ready to get started on our night of learning and fun.

I'd like to introduce you to our first cool career.

This career involves training astronauts to be scientists in space.

Meet my new friend, Kelsey.

>> My name is Dr. Kelsey Young, and I am a research space scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

I'm a field geologist by training, and I do geology in the field in analog environments.

Analog environments are sites on Earth that mimic, that look like some characteristic of what we see on other planetary surfaces, like the surface of the Moon or the surface of Mars.

So my job here at NASA is to go out in these analog environments and basically figure out how we're going to explore those surfaces of the Moon and Mars with astronauts.

I got into field geology, I think, as a pretty young kid.

I think it was kind of geology and rocks that kind of hooked me and drew me in.

I think it was fourth grade my dad took my sister and I on a spring break vacation, and we went to Zion National Park out West.

So my dad had my sister and I do this really big hike in Zion National Park, and I was not into it.

I got out of the car, was really whiny, didn't want to be there, was giving my dad a really hard time about not wanting to go and go, you know, sit in the car.

I decided to just go ahead and do the hike, and within five minutes, I was totally hooked.

I got, you know, completely into hiking.

The geology in that part of the world is gorgeous and really interesting, and even as a fourth grader, I just was totally hooked on the landscape and kind of interpreting the landscape.

When I got to college, my very first week of college, I found out that I could, you know, major, get a degree, get a career in geology and hiking and learning about these landscapes that I loved so much as a kid.

Totally hooked from from there moving forward.

[ Laughs ] Space was also really interesting to me.

I think I focused most on it because I was kind of like a sci-fi and fantasy fan.

I was a big reader growing up.

But when I actually started to learn more about it and actually started to say, "Well, you can see the Moon, you know, most nights when you look up at the night sky, but, wow, what is the dark colors?

What are the white colors?

How did it get to be that way?

We've sent people there?

We're going to send people there again?"

I mean, it just -- when I started to be able to connect what I loved learning about my local environment to this thing that had been so fantastical as a kid, I just think that that sort of combination is really powerful.

We're fortunate to have a lot of data on planetary surfaces.

We got these these data from a number of different places.

We've had people visit the Moon before, so we have rock samples, which I particularly like as a geologist.

We have pictures and videos and data from from instruments that they deployed when they were there, but we also have a lot of data from orbital spacecraft and from rovers that can actually drive across the surface of the Moon and collect data.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

This is a spacecraft that's been orbiting the Moon now for over a decade, and it has several instruments on board that look down at the Moon and, you know, kind of take pictures and collect data.

So these data from spacecraft like LRO really allow us to get a really good picture of what to expect when we will have astronauts on the Moon.

Mars we call the Red Planet.

It's kind of red in color.

It's really dusty.

It's got volcanoes, and there's even Mars' equivalent of the Grand Canyon, where we think water might have flowed.

We think there might have been oceans and even rivers and streams.

The Moon does not have much of an atmosphere, unlike our own planet and like Mars.

It's been hit by four-plus billion years of impact craters, so it's just been bombarded over and over and over again by all these impact craters forming.

The tricky thing about analog environments on Earth is that there's no perfect analog.

So there's no place on Earth that you can go and you're -- you know, you feel like 100% I'm on the Moon.

In order to prepare for human space exploration, we kind of have to go to multiple different analog environments and kind of combine those lessons learned and what you do, what you experience at those analog sites together in your mind to kind of like form that complete picture.

I travel to volcanic flows in Iceland and in Hawaii and California and New Mexico.

We simulate lower gravity conditions on the surfaces of other planets by actually sometimes testing underwater.

So sometimes I get to visit the Florida Keys to an underwater habitat to simulate what that sort of extreme environment is like.

So I'm really lucky to get to travel a lot for my job and to travel to a lot of really, really interesting scientific locations.

We have astronauts in the classroom and in the field to train them about what they're seeing from the International Space Station when they look down at Earth, and also what they're going to be doing when they're on the Moon, collecting rocks and being our scientists, being our geologists on the lunar surface.

I love geology, I think, because it's like a giant puzzle without all the pieces, right?

You're looking at a landscape.

Your task as a field geologist is to figure out what happened, figure out how the landscape got that way.

It's basically like assembling a giant puzzle that is kind of the storybook that got that landscape to where it is, but only having, like, a couple pieces and having to use kind of like your geology goggles, your problem-solving goggles, to figure out kind of how those rocks got to be there and why.

And I just -- I find that puzzle extremely fascinating.

I think when I think about younger me and how much I loved to go out with my family hiking and even just kind of wander around in the woods near my house, I think I would think it was pretty neat, pretty cool that I could do that for a job.

So just ask a lot of questions, be really curious, and follow the path that you're interested in, not the path that you think you, you know, should be following to get to a specific goal, 'cause that's definitely how I got here.

>> Be curious.

I think we can handle that, right?

Let's continue to be curious with our first activity.

Now is the time to have two sheets of paper and something to write with.

Let's head over to our friend Anthony, who will help us with this one.

>> Hey, kids.

Do you like to look up at the night sky?

Ever wonder about what you see?

The Moon changes and the stars can look a little different depending on where you are looking at them.

Being a good observer, really looking at things, is an important part of a lot of jobs that have to do with science, space included.

We are going to make a space journal.

You'll need two pieces of paper and something to write with.

First, take your two pieces of paper and fold them in half.

Next, you or a grown-up can write "space journal" on the cover.

Scientists take good notes about what they see so they can learn more.

When you have time, and when an adult says it's okay, go outside and look at the sky.

Or you can look out a window.

What do you see?

Can you see the Moon?

Or is it cloudy?

Write the date or have your grown-up write the date, and then draw what you see.

Later, you can choose another date and do the same thing.

Think about how things have changed or look similar.

Have fun being a good observer.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Well, I hope you had fun being a good observer.

It's time to learn about our next exciting career in the field of space.

This one takes us to New Mexico, and although I know you'll think it's cool, it can also sometimes stink.

Meet my new friend, Julio.

>> Hi, my name is Dr. Julio Padilla, and I'm a scientist with NASA at the White Sands Testing Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

♪♪ I am a chemist.

We test materials and things that go to space, from rockets all the way to a pair of shorts that an astronaut might wear, for toxicity or odors so that the astronauts will still be safe.

Science was, I think, just inside of me since I was born, from being small and being curious, not even knowing what science was.

I would catch insects and just study them.

I'd put them in jars.

That's the first thing I remember being really curious about.

I was raised in Mexico, and we didn't have a lot of things, so we tend to build our own toys.

So I would build a little cart.

See, that science, too, that's engineering.

When I was a kid, all I can remember is looking up.

Who doesn't?

Everywhere you go, the sky is there.

During the day, you see the clouds and you see a blue sky, but at night, that's when the shining of the stars come through.

It makes you think how little you are and how little we know, and it's always piqued my interest, but I never thought I could actually do anything space related.

It was not until high school, I had a very, very awesome chemistry teacher who guided me into chemistry.

I decided I loved chemistry.

Everything that happens, from you moving your arm -- that's a chemical reaction -- to a volcano exploding -- that's another chemical reaction.

I just love that explains everything, and I wanted to be able to explain everything.

So I had a friend who just messaged me one day and said, "Hey, come work over here at NASA."

Seemed like a great opportunity, and I already knew I loved science and I loved space, so why not?

Why not help space exploration?

The last greatest frontier and I think the future of mankind.

So I applied for the job and I got it.

From then on, it's just been a great adventure.

They're not allowed to put the window down in space.

That could cause a problem.

So we got to make sure that what's going up to space is not only nontoxic for them, but also doesn't emit an odor.

When the astronauts go outside of the spaceship, they go out there for hours at a time.

So believe it or not, they wear diapers.

So they go potty out in space, and they come back and they have to throw it away.

It's not a very pleasant smell, so we got to make sure it stays in the bag.

Sometimes we got some tough testing, like we test trash bags, that they're able to contain odors because they have to throw the trash away.

Everything from diapers to food.

So they need something that can contain these smells.

So we've put synthetic vomit, synthetic and real urine and poop into bags.

We sealed it, and then, we put it in a larger container.

We then sampled the air from the larger container.

We have our odor panel here on site that they get approved by doctors to be able to sniff.

That means their airways are clear and their chest cavity is okay to breathe in deeply.

We give them three smells directly to their face using a syringe.

They rate the smells from 0 to 5, 0 being no smell, and 5 being a very strong, strong smell that you can easily detect.

I had people actually gag and push me away when I give them the dose of the smell.

So it's always very, very interesting to see their reaction.

Odors are important because you don't want anybody distracted.

You can imagine trying to do your homework in a stinky bathroom.

You can't concentrate very well.

So it's important that our astronauts are focused on what they're doing, for their safety and for the success of the mission.

Young me wouldn't believe that I'm doing what I'm doing.

Like I said, I was raised in Mexico, and all of this wasn't really obtainable or even -- It was unfathomable.

You couldn't even think about that I was going to be a scientist for NASA.

>> Well, who knew that things that went to space would need to be tested for smells.

In a few minutes, we'll be doing our next activity, and for this one, you'll need paper, tape, a pen, and aluminum foil.

But right now it's time to learn about our next cool career.

This one takes us to California, where they're trying to help us learn more about the planet Mars.

Meet my friend, Haley.

>> Hi, I'm Haley Cummings.

I work at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and I'm the principal investigator for the ROAMX Project.

So what we're looking to do in ROAMX is build off of the success of Ingenuity.

The Mars Helicopter Ingenuity is flying around on Mars right now.

It has shown us that flying on Mars is possible, so it's really paving the way, we think, for future Mars exploration via flight, and specifically via helicopter or rotorcraft.

My dad worked for Continental Airlines and then United Airlines, and, so, I was constantly on planes.

We traveled a lot.

Something that I never could get over was taking off and just the feeling of, like, sitting there.

It's an incredible experience to me to be going off of the ground in this, you know, manmade contraption.

When I was five or six, I went to an air show with my dad, and I got to sit in the cockpit of the Blue Angels, one of the Blue Angels.

I mean, that was just so cool.

I think the Blue Angels are so cool.

I think those planes are so cool.

I knew that I could definitely see myself doing something related to planes.

I actually never really specifically liked building things or designing things.

I think that's a little bit atypical for engineers.

I played soccer.

Started out playing when I was five or six years old, and I just kept playing.

Something that I loved about soccer was it's a puzzle.

You're on a team of 10 other people.

You're just playing this puzzle, trying to unlock the other team and score.

As I got into high school, I didn't like math.

I didn't think I was good at it until, I think, my junior year of high school.

I took a math class that, finally, it just clicked.

I understood everything.

I could do all the problems.

I still had to work at it, but I understood it and I felt like I could be successful at it, and that, to me, was really exciting.

I also found that I really liked the puzzles that we were solving in physics, as well.

So, okay, I'm like, okay, I like math and science.

What can you do with math and science?

And engineering seemed like a pretty natural path to take.

I wanted to find a school that had both a Division I women's college soccer program, as well as mechanical engineering.

Studying engineering and playing soccer was -- it was challenging, but I think that that time really helped me with my time management.

And I think that it has really carried over seamlessly into what I do every day now, in terms of being a leader and also working hard being able to prioritize things.

I ended up working in the Rotorcraft Aeromechanics Branch, which focuses on helicopters.

The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is on Mars right now.

It's been doing amazing.

We were so excited to see the success of Ingenuity.

What we're looking to do with the ROAMX Project is to take the success of Ingenuity and build upon it.

We're looking to optimize blades specifically for flight on Mars.

On Earth, if you were to, like, stick your hand out of the window while you were driving, you can feel the air pushing your hand up or down, depending on how you rotate your hand.

That's how airplanes generate lift, by passing air under the wing, and it's the same way that helicopters generate lift, by spinning the blades around.

You need air to generate lift, and on Earth, we have plenty of air, but on Mars, there's actually 100 times less than there is on Earth.

It's a much different environment that we're flying in.

So we're looking to show that, if you take a vehicle the same size as Ingenuity, and you specifically optimize rotor blades and rotor blade cross sections, you can have a much more capable rotorcraft.

We've got some really exciting results that we're still working on finishing up.

We found that the same distance that the Curiosity rover was able to travel in five years, a rotorcraft using optimized blades could cover in only three days.

And to me, that's just so exciting.

Rotorcraft are really opening up the ability to traverse Mars in a way that it just hasn't been done before.

What does the future hold?

I think, if there's anything that the last seven years, you know, since I started with NASA, has taught me, it's that you can dream big.

>> Dream big.

What a great message.

I hope that you're dreaming big with us at home.

Well, now it's time for our next activity, so grab that paper, tape, a pen, and aluminum foil, and let's head back over to see what our friends are up to.

>> Hey, kids, did you know that people who study space have a lot of really interesting tools they can use to see things that are very far away?

We are going to make a pretend to look at some stars.

You will need tape, paper, a pen, and a piece of aluminum foil.

First, roll your paper and help it stay closed with a piece of tape.

Next, take a small piece of aluminum foil and place it over the end.

You can secure it with a few pieces of tape.

This also works if you use an empty paper towel roll, and it's a little sturdier.

Next, use a pen to carefully poke some small holes in the foil.

Now look inside.

You have created a constellation, or a collection of stars.

It's pretty fun to imagine looking at real stars so far away.

Have fun testing your stargazer.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> I hope you had fun making your stargazer.

All right, it's time to learn about our next cool career in the field of space.

This expert helped to create part of a rover that's traveling on Mars right now.

Meet my new friend, Florence.

>> Hi, my name is Florence Tan, and I'm an electrical engineer at NASA.

I've built a lot of instruments.

I call it the nose of the spacecraft.

Sniffers.

They sniff the environment, they sniff the soil samples, and they come up with what is in the soil.

I built about eight of them, and seven of them have launched to Saturn, to Mars, to the Moon, to, you know, comets, many places.

We hope to find out, are we alone in this universe, right?

Is there an Earth somewhere that will harbor life somewhere out there.

I come from Malaysia.

It's a little country in Southeast Asia.

And we had two channels, and it came on only after 5:00 PM.

But when I went to visit my cousin, I saw "Star Trek."

The first time, I was maybe fifth grade, and I thought, "My gosh.

Space, what an idea."

So I was very interested and excited about space from watching the original version of, you know, Captain Kirk, "Star Trek."

Now, of course, you see NASA.

You know, it was never reachable, to me, in my mind because I don't know how I could have come from -- you know, left from a country like Malaysia, which, you know, did not have a space program, to that of the US.

But I had good teachers.

Oh, I had very good parents, and they emphasized the math and the science.

I came to the US.

I sat next to a girl in physics who was an intern at Goddard Space Flight Center in physics, and she says, "You know, we're looking for interns."

And that's how I got my job.

My first job was through just talking to people.

The rovers on Mars now, Perseverance and Curiosity, what they have is they have different parts of it, and you know, on the mast, they have a camera, right?

So that's the eyes.

And then, they have the wheels, they have six wheels.

Those are the legs.

And the nose is another part of it.

Well, these noses sniff out what's in the air and what's in the soil, and it tells us a little bit about what happened in the past and why Mars is the way it is.

We found that Mars was indeed once wet.

It had standing water and water was drinkable, and it could have harbored life, yeah.

So that's pretty exciting.

It's cool.

You don't think that you're going to be hired to become an electrical engineer to design something to go to Saturn, but I was.

We can reach for the stars.

It's so important to know that you are part of the bigger picture, and when we put our minds to getting anywhere, we're gonna go there, we're gonna get there.

So, together, we rise.

>> I love Florence's story.

It makes me wonder what yours will be.

Well, our next expert is still starting out on his journey, but already, he's done so much in the field of space.

Meet my new friend, Jason.

>> Hello, my name is Jason Cornelius, and right now, I am a PhD student at the Penn State University in the department of aerospace engineering.

Aerospace engineering is really the study of everything that flies.

So we have airplanes, we have rockets, we have helicopters, hot air balloons, all these different things.

They all move through air and they use different methods to fly through the air, and, so, aerospace engineering is really the study of how we design these vehicles and how we make them the most efficient so that we can have planes going very quickly from San Francisco to New York, or so we could have helicopters that are lifting amounts of water to put out fires.

I was always building things, kind of always very hands-on, playing with Legos.

Neither of my parents are engineers or anything super technical like that.

I guess they thought it was pretty neat to be an engineer, and, so, they really encouraged it.

My grandfather was almost like an engineer with the railroad systems, and, so, he was also very technical minded.

And, so, he would kind of be the one that would come over and build stuff with me and do things like that.

I started getting into things like model rockets, just little tiny ones that you buy at the store.

I had an RC airplane or two, a remote control helicopter as I got a little bit older.

So I was about 12 years old, and I was in the car with my mom, and she told me this fun fact about the gold visor of an astronaut's helmet.

And I forget what she even told me about it, but afterwards, I went home -- and it was just in the early days of having computers and Internet -- and typed in trying to find about the gold visor.

And then, I saw a little link to something called aerospace engineering, and it was a Wikipedia page that had pictures of rockets and airplanes and all these different crazy things.

A big emblem of NASA.

And that was kind of the day that, at that point, I decided, I think, one, I was going to be an aerospace engineer, and then, two, maybe someday I would try to work for NASA.

Right now, I'm actually involved with NASA Pathways Program.

And, so, the NASA Pathways is a student program where they get students at various levels throughout their education -- so it could even be as early as high school, all the way up through college and graduate degrees -- and you kind of get into this rotation program where you spend time working at school and studying, and then, in the summer, for example, maybe you go to a NASA center and you work there for a few weeks over the summer.

I get to go to the NASA Ames Research Center, which is just next to Silicon Valley in California.

Work out there for a couple weeks with them, and then, whenever I'm done here with my PhD, I'll go out there to California and start working full-time as a NASA engineer.

My day-to-day schedule, I would say, is pretty busy.

So I work on the Dragonfly program, where we're designing and building an octocopter vehicle that were actually going to put on a rocket and launch it into space to explore one of the moons around Saturn.

And, so, day-to-day, this is mostly what I do.

I spend a little bit of time in class learning different things about rotorcraft engineering and aerospace engineering.

But most of the time, it's just really working on the design, and then, how we're actually going to build this thing to fly it in space.

We're going to send this helicopter to the moon Titan.

So out of all the moons, all the planets, everything that we know of within our solar system, this one particular moon that we're going to go to is the most similar to Earth.

So if you go there, you could see rivers, you could see lakes, you could see, you know, rain coming down and all these different things.

And, so, we're going there kind of with the hopes that this moon has what would be required for life to grow and to live and be sustained on the moon.

And, so, my job is really just to make the thing fly.

I would say it's pretty crazy, honestly, to think that I'm here as a student at Penn State and I'm working on this program.

Most graduate students who work on a project may be by yourself or with one or two other students and your advisor.

So the team is well over 100 people, and most of them are actually full-time engineers.

Some of them are faculty members at universities.

And, so, it's a very large team of a lot of very talented individuals, and then, here I am -- they're just letting a student at university be a part of that, so I'm pretty excited about it.

>> I don't know about you, but I'm learning so much about careers that are possible in the field of space exploration.

Well, next, we're heading to Virginia, where our expert uses tools in space to learn more about the weather here on Earth.

Meet our new friend, Kristopher.

>> Hi, my name is Kristopher Bedka.

I'm a research scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

I study the Earth's weather and climate using data from satellites, from aircraft, and from ground-based sensors.

Specifically, my area of interests are studying severe thunderstorms, those that make damaging winds, tornadoes, or hail.

As a kid, I was always super interested in, like, the most extreme days.

If it were negative 20 degrees outside, I wanted to go outside and feel exactly what that felt like.

If it was super hot, same thing.

Whenever there was a really severe thunderstorm outside, I was just staring out the window and being very excited when the TV started blaring with the warning.

So, from an early age, I was always very interested in weather.

So, my parents noticed that my favorite channel, as a kid, was The Weather Channel, rather than cartoons or sporting events.

At that point, my parents knew that I was hooked on weather.

And then, when it came time in high school to kind of think about career choices, I was looking at the different options.

It's like, "No, I don't want to be a lawyer.

No, I don't want to be an accountant."

It's like, "Meteorologist?

Wow, that's actually a job.

And there are other realms of meteorology that don't involve being the TV weather person.

I can do cool stuff behind the scenes and come up with great findings that will maybe change the world.

So, at that point, I decided to pursue that career choice.

There is a research lab at the University of Wisconsin that is basically where satellite meteorology was first developed back in the 1960s and '70s.

Scientists back then came up with the concepts of putting cameras in space to see the weather and clouds move across the world.

And, so, they provided very kind of shaky views, kind of chunky images kind of like you would imagine with a very old-fashioned camera back in the 1800s.

But us, with computer technology and all sorts of other technological advances, allowed our satellites to become more and more detailed and precise.

That is basically right downstairs from where I went to school was this research laboratory, and, so, I got a job right out of school, and I've been doing this now for about 20 years.

So, nowadays, I use state-of-the-art satellite imagery to study all of the detailed processes going on in thunderstorms and trying to learn what ones are going to be severe versus just regular, boring rainstorms.

The vast majority of the Earth is covered in ocean or water, and, so, we can only have so many sensors on land at any given time.

And, so, in order to observe the vast oceans or the polar regions, we need satellites to be able to be consistently orbiting the Earth to be able to get that bird's-eye view, we'll say, of the planet.

We're trying to come up with ways to automatically identify -- using very sophisticated pattern recognition computer software -- identify the parts of the storms and which storms are going to be the ones that are most hazardous for folks on the ground and also folks flying in commercial aircraft.

Eventually, we do want to try to take that global.

Over much of the world that's still developing, that are not quite as prosperous as the United States and Europe, there's not as many ground-based sensors, so the satellites really provide some of the only views in certain regions.

And, so, being able to do this automated storm recognition from satellite can really provide a lot of valuable warning lead time and help save lives and property.

I think my young self would be proud of what I've become.

I never envisioned that working at NASA as a researcher was a possibility when I was a kid.

I've worked very hard and taken -- had some luck and also, through my hard work, been able to take some opportunities that have helped me move along in my career, and, so, I'm happy with what I've done, and I'm excited about the future.

My message to kids watching these days is just keep pushing forward because there's so many opportunities out there coming up.

>> Well, let's keep pushing with our next activity.

Let's head back over to Anthony to see what our friends are up to this time.

>> Hey, kids, soon we are going to meet somebody whose job it is to design actual space suits.

What do you think that job would be like?

Space suits have to be comfortable for astronauts and keep them safe, too.

If it was your job to design a space suit, what would it look like?

What color would it be?

Grab a piece of paper and draw your design.

Have fun using your imagination.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> I hope you had fun designing your space suit, and keep it handy, 'cause we're going to use it again in just a few minutes.

Right now it's time to meet someone who works on space suits in real life.

Meet my new friend, Tessa.

>> Hi, my name is Tessa Rundle, and I work at NASA's Johnson Space Center, and I am a space suit engineer.

♪♪ So, specifically, I work on the portable life support system, which is the backpack part of the suit that you see when astronauts go out and do spacewalks or EVAs.

That is the part of the suit that keeps them alive, basically.

So, for our next generation space suit, I am in charge of a couple of small but pretty important components within the suit.

And, basically, it is my job to make sure that they are going to function as we need them to when the space suit is used.

When I was young, I was actually a lot more interested in the arts than I was in space or science in general.

I really just kind of loved expressing myself and performing, and I actually started college as a music major.

So it wasn't until I got to college and finally could take an astronomy class and a physics class -- and I had really great teachers for those classes -- that I fully became enamored and decided that that is the career that I wanted to go into.

It was really those kind of farfetched facts about space that I had never really thought about before, these kind of crazy concepts of distance and time and how all of that is interconnected in space.

That was really fascinating to me.

And that's how I got into it.

I just knew that I needed to learn more.

After I decided that I wanted a career to do with human space exploration, I just started to take on as many opportunities as I could.

I was actually on a research trip here to Johnson Space Center when I was in college, and I saw a space suit exhibit, a display of space suits.

They have suits that are replicas of the suits that were actually used to walk on the Moon.

Again, just the notion that that space suit is the only thing keeping them alive and the only kind of vehicle they have to get around, it was just really cool.

I never really thought that being an engineer that worked on space suits was a career that somebody could have until I saw that and started thinking about it.

And then, from there, I looked into internships working on space suits and just kind of tried to tailor my internships and my education around things that I thought would help me in a career if I wanted to work on designing space suits, and that's kind of how I ended up where I am now.

What I think is the coolest thing about space suits is that it's basically a mini one-person spaceship.

A space suit has to perform all of the functions necessary to keep a person alive.

So this goes from protecting them from the outside environment.

So keeping them warm or keeping them cold, depending on the destination, keeping in the pressure because, in the vacuum of space, humans need to create our own pressure with the space suit to allow our lungs to function for us to breathe.

The space suits that we have now that we use on the International Space Station have been used in their current configuration for about 20 years now.

We haven't needed to change it besides some minor changes over the years, but now a lot of the technologies are getting harder to replace and harder to perform maintenance on, so it's time for a lot of upgrades.

Overall, the main things that we want to include are more mobility and easier to maintain.

So, some days, I'm in the lab doing hands-on work testing the components, some days, I'm in meetings with other experts in the field of electronics or materials to make sure that my components are going to meet their requirements and do what we need them to.

We want to, in the next few years, be able to demonstrate our suit on the International Space Station.

And then, ultimately, the goal will be to replace the suits that are on the International Space Station with upgraded ones.

Every day, waking up and going to my job, I still feel just as excited as the first day that I came to NASA as an intern.

In a lot of ways, I feel like I have have already accomplished a lot of what I wanted to just by being able to directly contribute to human space exploration and working in a job that I like, but I think that every time we achieve a goal, we need to set new ones.

I would really like to see the space suits that I work on, components that I work on, fly and do their job in space.

I think that would be awesome.

And then, just kind of moving on to the next frontier.

I would like to move on to designing space suits for Mars.

I think a young me would definitely be excited and proud.

Just the fact that I love getting up every day and going to work and everyday I'm equally as excited about what I'm doing.

I think that young me would be very happy about that.

Well, I bet one day you'll be waking up, excited to go to work, too, but for now, grab your space suit design one more time because we're going to head back over to Anthony and our friends for some more fun.

>> Hey, kids.

What did you think about the space suit engineer job?

Did you think it was cool?

Now that you know a little more about what a space suit needs to do, take another look at the space suit you designed.

Would you make any changes to your suit?

Talk about your ideas with your grown-up or make the changes on your design.

One of the coolest things about science is that it's okay to make mistakes.

In fact, it's kind of important.

Mistakes help us gather data about what works, what doesn't, and how we can do better.

Great scientists never give up.

Keep up your work discovering new things about space.

Who knows what you could help the whole world learn.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Well, making space suits definitely seems to be an important and exciting job.

What about working with rovers that are exploring other planets?

Does that sound fun to you?

Because that's another job, and my friend, Mitch, does it every day.

>> Hi, my name is Mitch Schulte, and I am a program scientist, a planetary scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC.

♪♪ So, my job is pretty great.

I get to send things to other planets so that we can explore them in great detail and learn all about the science of these other worlds.

Mostly I'm in charge of the science for the Perseverance rover, which we just landed on Mars back in February, and it's now driving across the surface, looking at all the great rocks and trying to find evidence of past life in Mars' rock record.

I was three years old when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first humans to walk on the Moon, which was just so fascinating.

You know, I was pretty young.

I was only three, but I do remember, over the next couple of years, as we kept sending astronauts to the Moon, getting really interested in that and just falling in love with the idea of getting on a rocket and going someplace else.

So, in college, I wanted to learn everything, so I took all kinds of different classes, and I started deciding to take geology classes.

Studying those rocks, figuring out how they formed, what the conditions were when they formed, what they tell you about what was happening way back in time.

And the animals that you see recorded in those rocks, the fossils that they left behind, tell you a story about what that place was like so long ago.

And it really makes you start to think that there's so much that we don't know, but if you look hard enough and you apply the right methods to do it, you can learn a great story.

This job came open at NASA headquarters to be a program scientist in the Mars exploration program, you know, get to send things to Mars.

So I applied for that job and I was lucky enough to get it.

Part of the reason we're sending the Perseverance rover is the idea that maybe life exists or existed somewhere else other than Earth.

And that's really sort of a fundamental kind of human thing to want to know.

This mission, Perseverance rover, is the very first step in what we're calling Mars Sample Return.

So it'll be the first time that we've ever brought samples back from another planet.

We did bring samples back from the Moon, but that's really sort of part of the Earth-Moon system.

So the rover has actually taken its first two samples, and they're stored on board the rover, and we're working on plans right now to build missions to go get those samples and others as we collect them during the mission, to bring them back to Earth.

And hopefully we'll find some things that look like they might have been left behind by life, as well.

To be clear, we're not talking about dinosaur bones or clam shells or anything like that.

[ Chuckles ] We're talking about chemical signatures in the rock, or if we're very, very lucky, we're talking about what we call microfossils, or very, very small fossils, which are sort of shapes and other kind of textures that you see in the rock that are the result of these very small organisms living there.

It's great fun to go to work every day because seeing the images come down from the rover is really exciting and understanding all the data, listening to the science teams talk about different ideas about might would have happened, what's responsible for the deposits that we see, what the images are showing us, what the data from the instruments are telling us.

All of that's just really fun to be a part of every day.

My biggest hope, though, is that, you know, the kids that are watching this might be some of those scientists who get to open those tubes and actually look at those samples because we're going to need people who, you know, really understand the next generation of scientific instruments that we can use to really ask those rocks some really hard questions.

My advice to kids would be, whatever it is you're interested in, don't let anybody tell you not to think about that or not to look into that because you never know where things are going to take you.

>> I love that advice, to go after what you're interested in.

Our last expert did just that when he picked a career.

He always loved planes and, today, he's working on making super fast ones.

Meet my new friend, Lance.

>> My name is Lance Foster, and I'm a NASA aerospace engineer.

Mainly, my job is about helping us to develop and test new kinds of aircraft or to make the aircraft that we have better or capable of doing new things.

Specifically, I work in what's called hypersonics.

And hypersonics means stuff that goes really fast.

So I work in a group where we're trying to make really fast planes.

When I was a kid, I was really into comic books and sci-fi things.

So I was into, like, superheroes and spaceships and jets and lasers and people with powers and flying in the sky.

So I was really into that, and I used to draw a lot, so I thought that I was going to illustrate comic books for a living.

I always had a vivid imagination.

I was always into math, and I definitely was into science things.

I don't think I looked at them as much as science things, just stuff that I thought that was cool.

Like, I thought fast planes were cool.

My parents were very supportive, very encouraging.

They were very supportive of just of my curiosity.

And I always participated in a lot of activities as a kid.

So I was always drawing, but I was in the Chicago Children's Choir, I played a little sports.

I was on math team.

I think curiosity is the key.

My sophomore, junior year of high school, my guidance counselor said to me, "Lance, you know, you have really good math and science scores.

Did you ever think of being an engineer?"

So this wasn't even a thing I was aware existed until I was, I guess, a bigger kid.

I majored in mechanical engineering.

During the summers, I got to do internships at different NASA sites where I got to work with NASA engineers doing actual aerospace research and got to see what the job is like in person.

The place I'm at now, NASA Glenn in Cleveland, I had interned there, so I -- during my college years, I got to see a lot of NASA while I was still in school.

I went to a career fair and I ran into somebody who looked at my résumé, and he knew of a specific position that my skills were a good match for when he was looking at my résumé.

They selected me, and you know, they gave me my start date, and the rest is history.

I work in a group where we're trying to make really fast planes.

But when we're trying to do something new, we don't always know exactly how we're going to do it, so, usually, we've got a few different ideas going.

Some ideas are to use planes that fly really fast just to, like, deliver packages.

So we could fly from New York to London in as short as an hour and a half.

We could get all the way to the other side of the planet, which is really fast.

But, also some ideas, maybe if we could make a plane like that that flies really fast, we could use that to escape Earth orbit so we could fly fast enough that we could get out of the atmosphere and get to space, to near-Earth orbit.

When we're developing new technology, it always opens up new avenues.

Like, if we have the ability to fly really fast, we can do different things with it.

We can fly really fast to give people stuff on Earth.

We can fly really fast to get things off of Earth, like to the space station or something.

People do stints of six months on the space station, but maybe, if we could get people supplies and things more regularly, maybe you could stay longer.

Maybe if we had a super-fast plane that we could get up there, we could regularly send stuff back and forth.

I think, as a kid, or even as a grown-up, you're really looking for that thing that's so exciting to you that you just want to geek out and learn everything about that.

You just want to know all about it and all the ins and outs.

And I would say to any kid, just run towards curiosity.

Don't be ashamed if the thing you think is interesting, you don't find a lot of other people who think that's interesting.

We're all individual people, and a secret -- everybody has stuff that they're interested in that, like, other people aren't into it.

Like what you like and be curious about what you're curious about and learn all you can about it.

What's funny -- when you're a kid, everybody asks you what you want to do, what you want to be when you grow up?

And when I was a kid, I thought that you would get grown and that would be done and ta-da, I have arrived.

I've become what I -- I grew up and became what I was going to be when I grew up and we're done.

As a grown-up, you find out that that process never stops.

Right now, I'm anxiously trying to help us make hypersonic planes, and I expect to be trying to make hypersonic planes for the next few years.

But I'm still trying to figure out what I'll be when I grow up, too.

Even though I have got gray hair, I'm still not sure yet.

>> See, you can always grow and learn, even as adults.

Well, we've all learned so much about what we've explored in space so far, but what's next?

Let's head back over to our experts to learn more and why they say there's a place for everyone in space exploration, including you, if you want it.

>> As humans, we're always looking to explore.

>> I think that we are at a very unique time in history, where we have the tools, the knowledge, the interest, and the passion to be able to not only return to the Moon, but also go on to exploring Mars for the first time, as well.

>> Our ultimate goal is to put astronauts on the surface of Mars.

It's a lot farther away from the Moon.

It takes several months to get there.

There are communication delays between Earth and astronauts on Mars that we'll have to overcome.

And we'll have to figure out how to live in space for a long period of time.

>> So I think that we will need a lot of people in order to do this, and we will need a lot of people in many different roles.

>> But what's really surprised me is just how diverse the set of backgrounds is that is so critical to enable exploration of the solar system.

I work with scientists, of course, but a whole different bunch of different types of scientists, like, you know, geologists, biologists, et cetera.

But I also work with engineers and artists and people who majored in business in college.

It really does take a huge set of diverse backgrounds to enable space exploration.

>> Technology is allowing us to do things that people have never done, and I think a lot of the jobs of the future, not only kids don't know they exist.

I think a lot of the jobs of the future are jobs that don't exist yet, and they will exist as kids grow up, as we figure out other things to do and other things we need to do.

>> We all bring our own special skill sets.

Everybody is different.

Everybody comes from a different background and has different things that they're good at and they're not so good at.

But that's what a team is, right, is combining different skill sets to form kind of the perfect example of what can get the job done.

And you need all types of races because everybody's upbringing, even if you don't think so, can affect the way you think, the way you can approach a project, and having different viewpoints actually helps a lot.

>> The best teams that I've ever worked on have had the most diversity, and I think that, if you are trying to solve an out-of-the-box problem and everybody is coming in wanting to approach the problem the same way, you're going to have less opportunities for success.

>> It really does take all types, and I really hope you come join us.

>> Well, I wonder if you will join them in the field of aerospace.

It's an exciting thought, but maybe you're wondering, "How will I get there?"

Let's head back over to our experts to hear how they did it.

>> I definitely did not have a really easy journey from childhood to where I am here now as a scientist at NASA.

I definitely struggled in school in a few key subjects.

Math was not my favorite subject.

[ Laughs ] I really struggled with math for a number of years.

>> I will say, for the record, that I was not the world's best college student.

>> The first time I applied to NASA, I just never heard back.

I applied a few more times, and it was like the third or fourth time that they even answered me.

>> If we gave up every time something didn't work with our space suit, we would obviously not have a new space suit.

>> Failure is not a bad thing, and sometimes it hurts really bad, but one thing that I think that engineering has taught me is that failure means that you're moving forward.

It's not a bad thing, necessarily.

The thing that you have to keep doing is just getting back up.

You get knocked down, you just get back up and you keep trying.

>> You need to make mistakes, but you need to learn how to learn from those mistakes and move forward and use that knowledge that you gained to come up with a better solution in the future.

>> You don't just say, "Ah, I can't do it."

You want to put your shoulder to the wheel and push because you can get better, always.

>> You can do it, and you can accomplish it, and sometimes it's going to be hard, but it's going to be worth it.

>> When you know you want to do something, you kind of just have to go and try to do it.

So, even if the odds are stacked against you, very, very against you, you should always try and go after it.

>> It's not always easy, and I totally understand and I identify with that, but you can do it if you stick with it.

>> You will get where you want to go if you persist and you persevere.

>> We can reach for the stars.

It's so important to know that you are part of the bigger picture, and when we put our minds to getting anywhere, we're gonna go there, we're gonna get there.

So, together, we rise.

♪♪ >> "We can reach for the stars," and "together, we rise."

I love those messages.

I hope you continue to reach for the stars.

I'd like to thank you and your family for joining us for "Family Night: Space."

Please continue to grow and learn together.

Have a great night.

>> Support for "Family Night: Space" comes from the Pennsylvania Department of Education and viewers like you.

Thank you.

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