Do you know where you're goin' to? To infinity and beyond!

They say you should never meet your heroes. But sometimes it is not until you meet someone that they become your hero in the first place.

And when you do meet them, be sure to ask them awkward questions about how they got to where they are - being your hero - because the paths they take can often be as surprising as they are influential in helping you find your own way in life's great adventure...

I had just such an experience this summer at my first ever international scientific conference which took place in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA. Having decided to make the most of this experience and attend a pre-conference workshop - and, what's more, having decided at the last minute to switch workshops - I found myself in the presence of one Dr. Melora Larson of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). 

There's no point in hiding the fact that, space, spacecraft and spacecraft engines being obviously cool, the fact that Larson worked for JPL made her immediately equally cool in my eyes. Or, at least, potentially - and boy, did she live up to those expectations.

Levitating helium droplets in Spacelab 3

Like Prof. Athene Donald, Larson is one of the great science communicators who manages to express her own enthusiasm for a subject and make it both interesting and comprehensible for her audience. Although unassuming in nature, it was clear from the start that Larson knew not only a lot about cryocoolers (on which the workshop was based) and low temperature space applications but the notoriously difficult low temperature Physics underlying it all. An unusual combination of someone who has both the practical outlook and abilities of an engineer, as well as the depth of understanding of a pure scientist. This is highlighted in many of her projects but perhaps most so in that of the magnetic low-gravity simulator which she not only used for high-end experimental Physics research but was also instrumental in building.

Do you like the things that life is showin' you?

This combination of hands-on skills and a thirst for knowledge can be perhaps traced back to her childhood and her early influences and ambitions. Larson clearly takes after one of her own inspirations, her father, who was both a physical chemist and a dab-hand at woodwork.

She initially wanted to be either a fire-fighter or an astronaut and, unfortunately for America's firefighting community, the astronaut dream won out. Deciding to take the academic rather than the military route to walk among the stars, Larson studied astrophysics but soon became side-tracked by pure Physics - very in-depth pure Physics. 

In studying for her PhD from the University of California (Santa Barbara) she not only added extensively to our knowledge of low temperature helium but in the process also developed two very high accuracy (resolution of 5-20 nano-Kelvin) thermometers.

Do you get what you're hopin' for?

Manoeuvering MIRI towards ISIM

But the space community need not have worried that they'd lost their budding young astronaut. After her PhD Larson was offered a postdoc position at JPL where she has risen from triumph to triumph. The breadth of projects she has worked on range from the Confined Helium Experiment (CHeX) which flew on the Space Shuttle in 1997 to the Low Temperature Microgravity Physics Facility (LTMPF), an International Space Station (ISS) project until 2004; and, currently, the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), part of the very exciting NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope project.

Larson has also been a member of the board of directors of both the Cryogenics Society of America (CSA) and the Cryogenics Engineering Conference (CEC). She has been a past CEC board president and in 2017 will take office as CSA president. 

"I need to repair my turbo boosters. Are you still using fossil fuels, or have you discovered crystallic fusion?"

So you don't need to be an astronaut to work in space. And you don't need to have a plan to find where your talents lie - or, at least, if you have a plan you don't need to follow it. But it does help to have heroes to look up to, to inspire you and to encourage you. Thanks, Melora, for being one of mine!

Thanks also Diana Ross and Buzz Lightyear for the lyrics/quotes. Whether they contain cryogenic* instrumentation or not, spaceships will always be seriously cool....

ISS over Earth

 *Note that Cryogenics is not the same as Cryonics (see here).