Jackie Townsend

There’s more than one way to end up at NASA, and the route may not always be direct. Jackie Townsend says, “I really like talking to kids who are not straight A students because my path was not typical. But it shows that when you find something you love and apply yourself, you can do anything.”

Jackie didn’t realize she was passionate about space until her second attempt at college. “When I was young, I had an avid interest in space,” she says. “I read a lot of science fiction, but I didn’t know that I was any good at math or science at the time. When I went to college I actually studied psychology, and I hated everything about it.”

Realizing the subject wasn’t for her, Jackie left school after a year and took various jobs – first as a farm hand, then a secretary, and later a retail worker.

“In that time I learned three things about myself. The first is that I need a challenge to keep myself occupied and out of trouble,” she says. “Second, I realized I wanted to work on something that contributes to humanity’s future and helps make the world a better place.”

And third, she realized she had always held herself back from trying her hardest due to a fear of failure. So after a few years off, she went back to college to pursue a degree in the most difficult subject she’d enjoyed, physics. This time she completed the program.

“What I learned by doing that was that when I apply myself and it really matters, it may take me some time but there’s really nothing that I can’t do,” Jackie says. “No obstacle can really stop me unless I allow it to.”

Jackie graduated with honors from the University of Maryland-College Park. While completing her bachelor degree, she learned about NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She participated in a Pathways internship while going through school and was hired straight out of college as a materials engineer in Goddard’s Materials Engineering Branch. Her work involved studying how the space environment affects different materials.

Several years into her career, astronauts went up for the second Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission. They discovered cracks in the thermal blankets designed to shield delicate instruments from the extreme temperatures in space. Jackie’s boss was tasked with figuring out what was going on and what to do about it. Her boss agreed to help as long as he could bring along a protégé: Jackie.

“That allowed my career to take off,” she says. Jackie led the effort to determine the cause of the cracks. “We had to duplicate the failure mechanism on the ground and figure out if Hubble needed new blankets. It kind of revolutionized our understanding of the low-Earth orbit environment so we could make better designs in the future.” Because of her expertise, Jackie later helped with early studies of materials for the James Webb Space Telescope’s sunshield.

Jackie worked three Hubble servicing missions over 10 years.  For the last mission, she moved out of engineering and into technical management. Jackie managed Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument while it was being integrated and tested at Goddard. Then she transitioned into program level work, overseeing project managers who were doing early mission concept studies.

“After each Hubble servicing mission, as I sorted through piles and e-mails, I always found myself amazed at the caliber of work that had been extracted from me,” she says. “It was an honor to be part of that stellar team, but I earned my place, and we did amazing things that I didn’t know I had in me.”

In 2012, Jackie left astrophysics for something completely different – weather programs. She was still at NASA, but now she worked with other agencies like NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to build satellites that provide the data for our weather forecasts.

One highlight of her weather work was visiting a satellite ground station in Svalbard – an archipelago inside the Arctic Circle with more polar bears than people. She also visited the “Troll Station” in Antarctica – a facility run by the Norwegian Polar Institute that also serves as a ground station for dozens of polar-orbiting satellites.

After several years of great experiences, Jackie decided to bring all these lessons back to astrophysics. She worked at NASA Headquarters to organize a new program office designed specifically for flagship missions. While she was there, she helped lay the groundwork for an upcoming NASA flagship mission: the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

Now, she works as Roman’s deputy project manager, where she particularly enjoys the opportunities to engage with stakeholders at NASA Headquarters and the science community as well as the teams building the Roman flight hardware at Goddard and around the United States.

Jackie is excited about the Roman mission because it’s going to observe the universe in ways that haven’t been possible before. That means the planning and observing processes will be very different, too.

“For Hubble and Webb, scientists compete for every minute of telescope time to determine where to point the observatory and what to look at,” she says. Then the data goes exclusively to the team that proposed the observation for a year before it’s made public.

“But Roman isn’t a point and shoot,” she says. “It’s a survey instrument.”

The Roman mission was selected to study dark energy – a mysterious pressure that’s speeding up the universe’s expansion. Doing so requires enormous volumes of data. Scientists have to know how fast tens of thousands of galaxies at different distances are receding.

Then they can compare how fast galaxies are moving apart now with how fast they were moving in earlier cosmic eras. To get that data, Roman will use its large field of view to observe and record big swaths of the sky. This survey will enable groundbreaking science in a broad range of astrophysics topics, for instance, the fundamental physics of the universe, the origin and evolution of our Milky Way galaxy, and understanding how often or rarely planets orbit other stars.

“To get all that information, Roman’s well-choreographed survey will record what’s happening in much of the night sky and go back to the same locations several times, creating time-lapse videos,” Jackie says. Those types of observations will enable a tremendous amount of additional scientific investigations. The data will be public right away so many different science investigations can take place simultaneously using the same enormous datasets.

“I find it wonderful and empowering to think that everyone from a kindergarten kid to a Nobel laureate will have the same access to data to do whatever great science they have in mind,” Jackie says. “And that’s why we’re already engaging with the science community in an open process to define what those surveys are going to look like. Even as the hardware comes together right now, we’re defining how Roman will observe the universe in a way that enables the most exciting science possible.”

In the meantime, Jackie continues to find joy in the journey and “drops of awesome” in her current career stage. She says her husband and two children make it all that much easier.

By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.