Tony Zhou
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Welcome to our latest episode in Series 5 of Longitudes of Imagination. I’m Tony Zhou, a Longitude fellow at Yale University. Throughout this series, we’ve invited members of the U.S. National Marine Sanctuaries to share their experience towards the Sanctuary Soundscape Monitoring Project. SanctSound is a collaborative project between the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Navy to better understand underwater sound within the 7 national marine sanctuaries in waters off Hawaii, and the East & West coasts.

Today’s episode features conversational highlights I shared with Samara Haver, a postdoctoral scholar at the Pacific Marine Environmental Lab. You’ll learn how sounds produced by marine animals, physical processes (ie. wind, waves), and human activities are measured and assessed. Additionally, Samara kindly shares the technical skillset and personal qualities she believes great scientists possess.

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Samara Haver
I’m a postdoctoral scholar at Oregon State University. And here I work within a cooperative institute that is jointly between NOAA and the Hatfield Marine Science Center at Oregon State University. A lot of the research I do is with National Marine Sanctuaries, National Marine Fishery Service, and then the NOAA line office that I’m officially affiliated with through the university is a Pacific Marine Environmental Lab.

Tony
The theme of our podcast series is on imagination and creativity, and we’ve been exploring how scientists use their creativity and imagination in their day-to-day work. Just as a starting point, how did you get interested in marine research? And what are some of the pivotal moments when you look back at your career and education background and connect the dots to get to where you are now?

Samara
So I definitely didn’t always plan to become a scientist, and certainly not to be a marine scientist. I grew up visiting the coast in Oregon with my family, and I always loved playing in the tide pools and going to the beach, but it didn’t really connect for me that that was a job you could have, or even really being a scientist beyond, you know, sitting and looking at a microscope, that was a career. I was interested in science and so I thought the natural progression would be to study pre-medicine. I really enjoyed learning about the human brain so I ended up majoring in psychology and neuroscience. I wanted to study cognition, I was interested in how people think and perceive things. I also had an opportunity to attend a program called Sea Semester. On this program students live on board a tall ship, learn to sail the ship, and then also do individual oceanography, marine biology projects, which I chose because I just wanted to do something totally different from my major and get out of the state, see something new. I came to realize, ocean science is something that people do have careers in and that I could study. And so I wanted to bring neuroscience and marine science together. And that brought me to marine mammals. Marine mammals have really evolved cognition, really complex. After college, I eventually had an opportunity to intern at a NOAA research lab in Woods Hole. And that lab focused on using passive acoustics to study the ocean, kind of bringing together marine mammals and that cognition. It was studying animal communication and using technology to do this research, and I really liked bringing those things together. And I thought it was really cool to listen underwater. So after working in that research group for a few years, I decided that I wanted to go to grad school and continue my education. I completed a master’s degree at Oregon State University, and then I was fortunate to be awarded a fellowship and that allowed me to complete a PhD.

Tony
Wow. So I’m actually really interested in this because I’ve talked to some friends about this. I do a little bit of machine learning research. And one aspect of- I guess just to talk about conversationally, is learning how different animals in the world, including humans, communicate and encode language, and at least some of the conversations I’ve had are like, how intricate and advanced whales communicate to one another because they will be super far away. And I’m probably totally off when I say this, but they’ll send a message to one another. And they’ll get it and then they’ll meet at the exact location of somewhere. Is that true?

Samara
I’m not sure. We don’t really know what they’re saying, if you will, to each other. It could be something like that, but certainly they are communicating over super long distances. Whales, especially Baleen whales, communicate at these really low frequencies, which travel really efficiently underwater. Sound travels four times the speed it does in water as it does through the air. And then the really low frequency sounds don’t lose as much energy as they’re traveling. It’s just- they’re just pressure waves so they can travel for these really long distances. So yeah, potentially Baleen whales are communicating over many, many kilometers, depending on other things in the environment. It’s quieter and noisier.

Tony
Would you say that they communicate via code, like digital code in a way, or no, that’s different because we use words as a way of encoding our language and meaning. Don’t whales- and I’m not sure if other marine animals do this, but they use frequencies and kind of like bite-sized code?

Samara
Different species have different vocalizations. People think about dolphins whistling, and Humpback whale song, and then some species use echolocation, which is like a sonar basically, which they can use to find prey or detect other things in their environment. They are really long distance communication. Yeah, different species have different sounds, which as scientists, we’re able to listen to those and then know what species it is.

Tony
Okay. Would you mind going more in detail about the current projects that you’re working on right now?

Samara
I have a bunch of different projects, but really the unifying theme of them is trying to understand the soundscape of different environments, and understand what we call the acoustic habitat for these animals. So soundscapes are sounds from animals themselves, and fish and shrimp, any biological creatures. And then there’s also sounds from the environment, like wind and rain and ice, volcanoes, and then sounds from humans from cargo vessels, from cruise ships, from sonar, seismic air guns, anything that humans are doing, that’s adding sound into an environment. And so because a lot of marine animals rely exclusively on sound to communicate, to find food, to navigate, avoid predators, because the ocean is so dark and washes away scent, really sound is what these animals evolved to rely on. So when it’s too noisy from other sound sources, then it becomes a conservation issue for these animals, because they’re not able to basically live out their life history and survive.

Tony
I see. So the amount of sound that additional noise from outside of the environment that gets into the ocean that disrupts their way of living, and their way of life.

Samara
I mean, there’s different ways that sound can be disruptive. You know, it could just be an animal notices a sound, or we can have something which we call masking, which means that maybe one animal is trying to communicate to another animal, but it’s too noisy because there might be a vessel passing above them, or seismic air gun survey happening nearby and the signal can’t be received. Or you know, a sound is really noisy in their environment and that could potentially cause an animal to surface too quickly, or it could cause hearing damage. So there’s several ways that- it’s a spectrum of ways that additional sound can be harmful.

Samara
And what I’m particularly focused on is looking at chronic noise. So NOAA has ways, scientists have ways of measuring sound from loud sources that have a very clear stop and start point and saying, How loud is too loud, and when is this basically too much and when it might be harmful? Though when we’re talking about things like shipping noise or continuous vessel noise that goes on and on without a really clear start and end point, it’s hard to define how much that could be harmful, or even being able to say that it’s harmful at all, because you can’t really isolate it in the same way as a single loud sound.

Tony
Right. Would vessels be one of the biggest contributors to this additional sound and noise? Or are there others in the top five or top three rank?

Samara
Yeah, so it comes from all different sources. But when we study sound and environments, terrestrial or marine, we’re looking at the frequency or the pitch of the sound, and then also the intensity. And so when I’m looking at vessel noise and these chronic sources of noise and how that might impact Baleen whales, I’m focused exclusively on low frequencies, really low pitch sounds that can travel quite a distance in the ocean. So there’s also high pitch sounds that can be disruptive, but those…we’re kind of dividing up the spectrum to look at different sources.

Tony
So when you set up an experiment, what are some assumptions that you go into that experiment with?

Samara
So when we set up an experiment to actually get it rolling, basically what we’re doing is we’re taking an underwater microphone called a hydrophone and putting it in a waterproof pressurized case with a bunch of batteries and flash drive cards. And we’re leaving that in the ocean to just record that data for us. An audio file basically, which we can then go back and look at and figure out what’s going on in the environment.

Samara
First, we’re hoping that our equipment works and that we record good data. We do research ahead of time based on previous studies, based on what researchers have found in other fields of where to put these instruments. You know that this is an interesting environment important to animals where we want to listen. And then we’re also hoping that the instruments that we also put in place to help us get the hydrophones back, that those work as well. Because we put these in the ocean for sometimes up to two years.

Tony
You never bring them back up and just leave them?

Samara
Oh, no, we do, we do. Yeah. So they’re anchored to the seafloor, depending on how deep it is, they’re either sitting on the seafloor, if it’s say, less than 100 meters, or if it’s much deeper, they’re suspended in the water column. And we use a float to keep the instrument in place, but there’s no surface expression. So we can’t just reach down and pull it up the way you might with a buoy. We have these acoustic releases that when we go back to the site, we can use essentially a special instrument to talk to the releases and tell the release to unhook itself from the anchor. And then the float will bring the hydrophone back to us. They are archival, the ones that that I work with primarily, so that means we don’t get any data back until we get the instrument. So we kind of always have our fingers crossed, you know, putting it in, bringing it back, hoping that everything went well, so that we can do the next step, the research.

Tony
Have you ever lost the equipment to the ocean?

Samara
Yes, unfortunately it happens. You know, sometimes things just don’t work right. The most disappointing is when you get it back, and then there isn’t any data on it.

Tony
Is that because the instrument wasn’t able to capture it, or there just weren’t any animals that went by?

Samara
I mean, when something happens with the instrument, we don’t even have data to look at. If we get the data back and we don’t hear any animals, then that’s an interesting result. Because we’re learning something about that environment, you know, how come we didn’t hear any animals? What’s going on here?

Tony
Okay, let’s say you get the data, you’ve analyzed it. What are some conclusions- or maybe solutions, maybe that’s a better word. What are some solutions that you and your team, and maybe people in this field, have come up with to reduce the noise, because I don’t think vessels are going anywhere anytime soon. I think they’re probably just gonna be in the ocean. And it seems like with ocean research, and the way that the world wants to expand cities, there’s probably going to be more things put into the water. So what are some solutions for how to declutter and remove this noise?

Samara
So first of all, you’re exactly right. And ships are getting bigger and faster. And we know that bigger and faster ships are noisier. So sound levels from vessels are increasing. And then we also know that animals are impacted by this. And so trying to figure out how to do something about it. Some of the projects that I’m working on are with National Marine Sanctuaries, and also with the National Park Services interested in what kind of management actions might be appropriate for animal conservation. So like you said, vessels aren’t going away. But managers do have some tools, like voluntary vessel slowdowns during certain times of the year when we know that sensitive species are present, or monitoring particular areas during certain times of the year. So Glacier Bay National Park is a great example of this. During the summer months—which is the peak tourism season in southeast Alaska, it’s also when Humpback whales are they’re feeding and harbor seals are breeding there—they have a vessel quota system, which essentially restricts the number of vessels that can go in and out of the park. It’s harder in more open areas. But some of the questions that we’re asking, is looking at these environments and trying to get baselines to understand, you know, what’s going on here? What animals are here, places that aren’t as well studied as Glacier Bay, for example. And the question is, When are animals here? When do they need management actions? Or do they need management actions at all? Because if we put a hydrophone down and we listen to the environment, and sure, maybe there’s some vessel noise, but we also might hear a ton of sound from animals and it doesn’t- as far as we can tell the vessel noise isn’t overwhelming the soundscape in the same way that it might be in a more urban area, more urban soundscape, then we have a different situation. There’s only so many resources available for these types of management actions, even if it’s just the time that people have to commit towards these problems. They are trying to identify where attention should be, where resources should be directed.

Tony
Right. And so it seems like currently it is kind of in the developmental stage of coming up with where things are needed, and at what rate and what quantity. But what is the ideal hope that these experiments lead to eventually?

Samara
It’s a great question. And I am a scientist, not a policymaker, but the cool thing about sound and ocean noise, as some people would describe it, is that it’s not like other types of pollution. If you stop the sound source, it just goes away. There’s no cleanup. Obviously harm can be done, but it’s not like an oil spill where it can take decades to clean up. The sound is, it’s just energy. It just dissipates. So a lot of focus on mitigating sound is looking at vessel technologies, how to make vessels quieter, and what needs to be done to potentially retrofit older vessels and designing newer vessels that are quieter and then looking at where vessels are moving in the ocean. Are there particular shipping lanes or routes that intersect with important habitats for endangered or threatened species? So a lot of pieces of a puzzle.

Tony
Yeah, I know. It sounds very complex, but also very interesting at the same time. Do you have any unexpected results that you had that were either very motivating in a way that surprised you, in a positive way, or unexpected results maybe you had hoped or expected something and then it didn’t come out that way?

Samara
Sure. Yeah. So that has happened many times for the years that I’ve been doing this science, but an example in this case, it’d be…One of my dissertation chapters, I looked at the overall soundscape in Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary. We’d never done any recording there and trying to look at the soundscape and understand the different sound sources. Cordell Bank is right near San Francisco and Oakland, and so it’s a major shipping port, a lot of vessels going in and out delivering to those major ports. One of the parts of the project was looking for vocalizations from specific Baleen whale species to identify them in different times of the year. That area had a voluntary vessel slowdown in the winter months. And what we actually found is, by using passive acoustics to supplement existing visual observations, we found that whales were likely in the area in an extended season beyond what was already known from the visual observation. So that was a cool result because it gave National Marine Sanctuary managers and scientists and stakeholders information that whales were there during these other times of the year, and potentially looking at adapting management in response to that.

Tony
Yeah. Okay. So now just some rapid fire questions for students who are interested in marine research, whether they started already in marine research, or they started in a different field and want to get into marine research. What is some advice that you’d have for them to either continue down the course or pivot into this field?

Samara
It’s important to not only master the field that they’re interested in, but also practice writing, and public speaking, and skills to work with other people. These aren’t things that are necessarily emphasized as much in the sciences, as a lot of, you know, coding and science classes, but to be a successful scientist you also need to be able to write and talk about it.

Tony
What do you think are qualities outside of, let’s say, a professional skill set that one would have to have to be a successful scientist?

Samara
I would say determined. It’s important to not give up at roadblocks. And then they have to be passionate, because it’s really hard to convince other people to care about these things if you don’t care yourself.

Tony
Yeah. Do publications matter?

Samara
Unfortunately, yes.

Tony
Why unfortunately?

Samara
Well, because I think publications are only valuable if other people can read them, and it costs a lot of money to publish open access, and that’s a big hurdle for students who are already trying to raise money for the research projects, for their own tuition, et cetera. And there’s also a lot of emphasis on the scientific manuscripts, which aren’t necessarily written in a publicly accessible way. So yeah, it’s really important because that’s how we document the science, but it takes time away from telling other people, finding ways to communicate it in less technical ways, and also, it’s really expensive.

Tony
Yeah, absolutely. Would you recommend students to pursue a PhD if they wanted to do marine research?

Samara
If they love doing research, they should pursue a PhD because that is, that’s the whole job, is doing research. So if you love it, then it’s a fantastic opportunity.

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Tony
It was really interesting to hear how Samara transferred her background in psychology to wildlife sciences, where she now explores the acoustic habitat of marine animals. As a conservation challenge, analyzing these soundscapes to better understand how sound can disrupt an animal’s behavior is a critical step towards developing solutions to protect the ocean and marine life.

We hope you enjoyed the last episode of this series. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript.  Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Melisa Acimis
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Melisa Acimis, Longitude fellow from Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey.

Welcome to our ongoing series on imagination, where we are exploring the roles of individuals, technologies and research that is helping advance understanding in ocean science and space technology! In this series, we spoke with scientists about their work in underwater sound monitoring in our oceans.

In today’s episode we are featuring highlights from a conversation I led with John Ryan, senior research scientist at MBARI. 

As an economics student I was interested to hear about the effects of sonar on living beings. We started our conversation with his role in the field.

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John Ryan
In order to understand life in the ocean, we need to understand not just the forms of life, but also their environment, their very dynamic environment. Oceanography is an integration of multiple science disciplines: biology, chemistry, physics, even geology. All of those together allow us to understand life in the ocean.

I finished graduate studies on the east coast of the United States in a state called Rhode Island. There I learned to study physical and biological oceanography. And then it was time to take that next step after school and that is a postdoc, a postdoctoral research position. So I came to MBARI for a two-year postdoc… 24 years ago. I’m a biological oceanographer at MBARI. MBARI, by the way, stands for Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. So we’re a nonprofit research institute, affiliated with a public education center called the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and our job is to develop and apply new technologies to advance ocean science. So on any given day, I might work with autonomous robotic submarines. In fact, we’re starting an experiment tomorrow that will have three cooperating autonomous robotic submarines (it’s amazing) studying microscopic algae in the ocean, particularly the kind of algae that produce harmful algal blooms. My work could also involve listening in the ocean.

Melisa
Our main subject.

John
Yeah, studying ocean sound. For that, I do both research to understand natural sound, from ocean life—because many ocean life forms use sound in all of their essential life activities… so we can hear their lives, really—but we also study ocean noise and how human impacts can negatively affect the ocean soundscape and the lives of ocean animals that use sound.

Melisa
Great. What is your favorite thing about your work? And is there a philosophy behind your actions?

John
My favorite thing about my work is understanding the beauty and complexity of life in the ocean. I love it every day. My second favorite thing, or it’s equally favorite, I love to share the excitement of ocean discovery. I love to do education and outreach. And I get to do that in my work, which is fortunate. I won’t just engage the public in lectures, for example. We also work on public exhibits, technologies where people can walk into a free and open public education center, push buttons on an exhibit and learn about the ocean soundscape.

Melisa
What is this exhibit? Can you elaborate on that?

John
So imagine that you walk up to a large screen, and in front of you is a beautiful image of the ocean off coastal California. And there are a series of buttons embedded in this graphic and you can push a button and then in front of you on the screen, ocean sound will come to life, but you won’t know what that sound is from, you will only see a visual representation of the sound. A line will move through that visual representation as you hear it. So you’re fully engaged with the sound. It’s a way for people to engage with the sound first, guess what it could be, and learn what it is. We built two of those so far and I have a third to go to another public education center — because where we live, there is a lot of tourism. So people come here to vacation, which also gives us a chance to reach many people with this knowledge through our exhibits.

My philosophy- I was going to be in the world of business. I did this job in business to see what it’d be like and I realized, when I’m 50 years old, I won’t be happy because I won’t have contributed anything to make the world a better place. I will have made money for a business and that can be healthy. You can support a good economy. That’s great, but I wanted to do something that would help us live in greater harmony with nature. Because all around me I saw how we were destroying nature. So I changed direction and I chose to major in biology because I thought that would be very important to living in harmony with nature because it’s the science of life. And if we understand the science of life, we can understand how to be harmonious with it.

Melisa
Great answers. I’m impressed with your idealistic way. Can you summarize the ocean sound monitoring project in a few sentences for a lay audience?

John
Yes, the importance of understanding ocean sound is that the ocean is a world of sound. It is a strange world to us, but one in which sound travels very powerfully. It travels far, and it travels fast. And what that means is, ocean life has evolved to use sound in so many ways. So just by listening, we can learn so much about ocean life, about their life activities: communication, navigation, foraging, socialization, reproduction. We can hear it. It also means that we have to be careful about the noise we introduce to the ocean, because it can cause harm.

Melisa
I read about how far sound travels underwater and I came across some key words such as sound channel, hydrophone, and by doing a little of this research I have seen SOFAR. Could you speak about the nature of sound underwater? And how that may be significant for marine life?

John
Yes, you mentioned the sound channel or the SOFAR channel. That is a location in the ocean, the location being depth, really, because it spreads out across the ocean. The sound channel extends across an ocean basin, 10,000 kilometers of the Pacific. And what it is, it’s a place where there is a minimum sound speed. And just the way sound energy travels through the ocean, that minimum in the sound speed that is determined by the physical properties of the water, traps the sound energy and allows it to travel farther than it otherwise could. So that’s a unique thing. And so that’s how we can hear sound produced at one side of an ocean basin and all the way on the other side, if that sound has a sufficient intensity, source level, and a low frequency — because low frequency sounds travel much farther than high frequency sounds.

And then you mentioned also finding the word hydrophone. Well, a hydrophone is just an underwater microphone. And what it is recording, at the very least it is recording the pressure variations that result from a sound wave just as the very process that allows us to hear sound in air. So we record those pressure oscillations that result from the sound. And we record that at a very high sample rate — in our case, we’re sampling sound pressure at more than a quarter million times per second, so a very high sample rate. And the reason we do that is because many animals in the ocean are using sound that’s far above our limit of hearing. So if we’re going to detect their sound production, their use of sound, we have to sample at a very high rate. For example, some species of dolphins or sperm whales will produce echolocation clicks (to help them find their food in a dark ocean) that have a frequency more than five times greater than our upper limit of hearing. So it’s very high frequency. We sample pressure in the ocean with a hydrophone at a very high sample rate, then we can study many sources of sound. Since we’re on the topic, there are really three categories of sound that we can study: biological sound, or biophony; sounds of the Earth, or geophony; and sounds of human activities, anthropophony. We study all of those.

Melisa
Could you elaborate on the effects of sound in the ocean on mammals?  What should be done to reduce adverse effects?

John
There are really four ways that our noise can have a negative impact on ocean animals. The first is interference with communication. It’s called masking. It’s like if you and I were trying to have this conversation, and someone was operating a jackhammer next to my chair, it would be really difficult for us to have that conversation, and in many cases, we are preventing them (marine animals) from communicating with one another. A second harmful effect of our noise is a behavioral disturbance. We can cause a population to move away from a source of noise, when in fact that population needs to be there in order to survive because their food resource is there. So we can cause them to be malnourished, for example. And then a third way that we can have a negative effect is to cause acute or chronic stress. You know how in people we can measure stress hormone levels, like cortisol and such, and we can feel that stress. We know stress has many negative effects on our lives, in our bodies. We’ve learned that our noise also has caused stress in marine mammals. The last effect is that if a sound is so loud, so intense, it could actually damage body tissues. So it could destroy their hearing, temporarily or permanently, it can harm their hearing. And there are even indirect effects. For example, one of the deepest diving mammals, the beaked whale, it lives (forages) so deep in the ocean, and there have been these very dramatic occurrences of beaked whales washing up on the beach and dying. And the reason they died is because they experienced very loud sound, very loud sonar. The sound didn’t cause their death (directly), but they panicked. They swam to the surface very fast. And if you go from a very deep depth at high pressure to the surface at low pressure too quickly, air bubbles come out of solution in your bloodstream, and it causes terrible things.

Melisa
As part of our imagination theme, we are interested to learn if there is room for imagination in your line of work. If so, could you speak about that and share an example of your approach to coming up with or developing new ideas?

John
Imagination, as you know, is important in everything humanity can do. And it’s very true in science. Let’s talk about two areas: research and education. For research, it’s very important to imagine what it must be like for the life of a species that you’re studying. So for example, imagine weighing 150 metric tons, but feeling weightless. And imagine speaking with only your voice, no technology, and being heard by your friend 100 kilometers away. Imagine needing to eat tons of krill (shrimp) every day in order to survive. (This describes the life of a blue whale.) This imagination gives us a sense of what it’s like for the species that we want to understand and protect. And some of these species (like blue whales) are still endangered. They’re still listed as endangered because their populations were decimated by commercial whaling. So we have to imagine what it is like for that species to survive, and better yet thrive, to recover from the harm that was done by commercial whaling. And then imagination immediately comes in when you enter the world of data. You know, one hydrophone, one little tiny hydrophone, collects two terabytes of data in a single month, 24 terabytes in a year. One little instrument. And so here you are, you’ve got this year of data, a mountain of data; what do you do with it? How do you begin to sift through all that data to find the sounds produced by different species? And each species can produce different sounds. How do you sift through that to understand what species are living here in this region, in this biologically rich, bio-diverse habitat? Who’s here? When are they here? What are they doing? It takes a lot of imagination to apply analytical tools to a mountain of data and to come out with understanding. Lots of imagination. I guess what I’d also say is that we’re never just working with sound data. We get other types of information from satellites that orbit the Earth and look down at the environment and tell us, how is it changing from year to year, from day to day? And how did the animals respond to that?

And then I think, very briefly, that it takes a lot of imagination to translate from the language of science into the language that everyone understands. Science is full of its terminology and its complexities. But your job when you are taking that information into education is to use your imagination to create communication that people not only understand, but in a way that allows them to connect with ocean life. If people don’t have any awareness, science can bring them awareness. But if people don’t feel any connection, why should they care about that (species or topic)? Well, then it’s hard for them to understand why we should work for conservation to protect these beautiful ocean environments and species. There is imagination and learning to help people connect.

Melisa
Could you tell us one thing you would change in your career life? What would you say to your younger self?

John
What would I change in my career life? I think I would have taken the pressure off myself at a younger age, because as a young professional scientist I was a little bit, how do I put it, anxious or nervous that I was never doing enough. That my work was not good enough.

Melisa
You’re a perfectionist.

John
Yes. Thank you. You are right. And in that way, I think I caused a little bit of suffering for myself needlessly. That also caused me to not communicate as well as I could have about what I want to do with my career, how I value my contributions. Instead, I looked to other people to assure me that I was contributing enough. I think what I would have said to my younger self is: Relax, have confidence that this path that you chose is right for you and that people value your contributions and enjoy your work. Don’t worry so much about what you’re doing. Just focus on making a meaningful contribution, and that’s enough.

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Melisa
Talking to John Ryan was illuminating. Since his way of thought of ocean and biology is so holistic, I realize that every action I make gives a birth to new consequences over animals in the ocean, especially our noise pollution turning to pressure on these animals. Also, he likes educating people to make a connection between these species and us so that we have a motivation to save the planet and have empathy.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

Jacqueline Buskop
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Jacqueline Buskop, a Longitude fellow from Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Welcome to our ongoing series on imagination, where we are exploring the roles of individuals, technologies and research that is helping advance understanding in ocean science and space technology! In this series, we spoke with members of the SanctSound project that is managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Navy. It is a project to better understand underwater sounds within the U.S. national marine sanctuaries.

In today’s episode we are featuring highlights from a conversation I led with Eden Zang, research specialist at the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary, located on the island of Maui. She is a contractor through a company called Lynker Technologies since 2018.

As an environmental science student, I was curious about the deployment of underwater technology and its recovery in a harsh seawater environment. We started our conversation with a discussion of the SanctSound project and how her work in the Hawaiian Islands is different from other marine sanctuaries.

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Eden Zang
The Office of National Marine Sanctuaries has sanctuaries all over the US, from Florida all the way to American Samoa. We fall right in the middle of the Pacific. So we’re like underwater national parks, and at the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale Sanctuary we are a single species sanctuary, which is unique that we focus on the humpback whale and their habitat here in the Hawaiian Islands. One particular project that I’ve been involved in since 2018 is a project that’s called SanctSound. This project focuses on understanding and characterizing the soundscapes, which is basically every sound that is in an environment, but the categorizing this so that we have these baseline understandings of what’s going on in our sanctuaries. This involves seven different sanctuaries around the US, as well as one Marine National Monument here in the Pacific.

Jacqueline
Wow, that’s really cool. How does your work at this sanctuary differ from the other sanctuaries or other locations?

Eden
Our sanctuary is focused on a single species, the humpback whale, specifically the North Pacific population of humpback whales, whereas another sanctuary might focus on iconic reefs or more of an ecosystem-based management. Previously I have focused on different marine mammals, different animals in the marine environment, including invertebrates all the way up to this charismatic megafauna. So it’s been really great to hone in on this and really get to know the species. They’re really an interesting one, sometimes people can say, oh, you know, we know a lot about humpback whales, or they’re pretty common or whatever. But you know, I think they’re pretty mysterious species, and we’re always learning something new. It’s kind of like, the more you know, the less you know.

Jacqueline
I noticed visiting the sanctuary’s website, there’s a blurb on the front page about the intersection of ocean stewardship and Hawaiian culture. Since you’re in such a unique location, could you describe what it means to be an ocean steward and how the sanctuary coexists with indigenous Hawaiian heritage?

Eden
Yes, that’s a great question. We’re working to protect not only ocean resources, areas of important scientific study, but also these important heritage and cultural sites. And here in the Hawaiian Islands, we do have a very unique situation where we do have up in the Marine National Monument very significant cultural sites, here in the main Hawaiian Islands as well. So it’s really important that we not only reach out to indigenous people to understand the history and but also understand the stewardship that their ancestors and they currently are doing to work to protect the resources. So there’s a lot to be learned from indigenous cultures, not only from a historical point, but also understanding the land and the ocean, and here in Hawaii that’s all connected. You know, there’s a very big connection between what we call mauka, which is the mountain, to makai, which is the ocean.

Jacqueline
Indigenous cultures are such a huge part of the Hawaiian Islands and hold a significant impact. You could say the same for geological impacts to the island too. The Hawaiian Islands are a volcanic hotspot chain, and the marine sanctuary is close to the summit of a massive undersea volcanic mountain range. Eden, has volcanism affected your work in Hawaii since you’ve been there?

Eden
Yeah, that’s really interesting, because while we focus on other aspects in our research department, one of the main things that we do focus on is underwater acoustics. One of the biggest things and that introduces sound into any marine environment is what we call geophony. So naturally occurring sounds, which often are seismic events or can be volcanic events, and so that is something that can be heard on our recorders here. So fortunately, none of our recorders have ever been covered by underwater explosions. That would be pretty deep. But we’re on the other side of the island there. But other than just having it introduced into the soundscape hasn’t affected it too much.

Jacqueline
Obviously the whales are one of those players in the soundscape. What else do you guys hear in those recordings?

Eden
When we look at a soundscape, there’s three main things that we’re listening to. We’re listening to the geophony, like I mentioned, so naturally occurring sounds, either from seismic events or things like that, which also includes physical processes like rain, winds, waves, and then the biophony. So that’s where the humpback whales fall into. So you’re hearing different whale species, different dolphin species, different fish that do make sound in the underwater environment. And then of course humans. We are in the marine environment as well and we’re introducing sounds. We have things like boat noise, vessel noise, you know, scuba bubbles, all of those different things we can hear in our underwater recorders.

Jacqueline
Could you summarize your current role and how you overcome any challenges?

Eden
I’m mostly focused on fieldwork and data analysis. Fieldwork is just basically categorized as going out and doing the data collection. So a lot of our data collection includes going out on our vessel, which is called the research vessel Kohala. We do local work around the island of Maui, and we do things like vessel surveys to count humpback whales. We do deployments to deploy our underwater acoustic mooring packages. Then once we get all of that data back, we are analyzing that data and interpreting it and figuring out what it all means. I would definitely say of course, fieldwork is pretty fun. And it is one of my favorite things to do because you get to see these animals in their natural environment and just observe, that’s what we’re doing out there. We’re not trying to alter their behavior at all, but we’re trying to just observe and understand what they’re doing. And I think it’s just such a unique thing to be able to watch these animals. And they’re so unique from any other place that I’ve seen humpback whales. Hawaii is just very different in the way- the numbers of them, the density of these animals, and so to be able to see it in such high numbers is really, really exciting and really cool. And it never gets old.

Jacqueline
You mentioned that technology and data analysis are a huge part of what you do. How has your relationship with technology and data analysis changed throughout the years?

Eden
It’s really interesting because there are different opportunities out there, especially with machine learning. That’s something that I don’t know a whole lot about, but other people do and have reached out to us. And so one particular partnership is with Google. They were working with another office of NOAA, another line office. They were looking at doing an automatic analysis detector of humpback whales in a particular area where it’s not as high-density as the Hawaiian Islands. But what was really interesting is we were able to then work with Google, train the model to then work on our data, which has a really high density in animals. So that’s been really interesting to be able to work with external folks to lean on their expertise to help us in our jobs.

Jacqueline
Very cool. Machine learning has all sorts of applications and I feel like every day I learn about a new one. So applications to cetology, which for our listeners is the study of whales, dolphins, and porpoises.

Could you tell me a little bit about how the technology is deployed so you can collect data?

Eden
For our acoustic mooring packages, what we do is we send down an instrument on a temporary anchor. And it’s then attached to an acoustic release, which is then attached to some line with the acoustic recorder on that, and then a float, a very heavy-duty float. So it has a lot of tension and it allows the package to sit vertically in the water column. And we can deploy these for up to six months, eight months at a time. And, in fact, in some of our deployments, they’re out there for a year. They’re not necessarily recording that long, but we don’t have the ability to go recover them because of the remoteness of the location, which is in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. But when we do recover them, what we do is we send a signal to the acoustic release, and then it just unscrews. And that float that has all that tension on that, once it unscrews, it just pops to the surface, and then we’re able to recover it. So we do actually have to physically recover these instruments to get the data from them. These acoustic recorders, they’re really handy because you can program them to record at different duty cycles. For the SanctSound project we were actually recording continuously, so 24/7. But for other areas like the national marine monument, we wanted to extend our recording time as much as possible. We had that on a 50% duty cycle. So recording 15 minutes every 30 minutes. So we were able to get quite a long period of recording, I think from October to- some of them were May, June timeframe.

Jacqueline
Have you ever had any difficulties recovering some of the tech from the water?

Eden
Oh, I would like to say no, but we have. It’s always scary when you send down several thousand dollars’ worth of equipment to the bottom of the ocean and cross your fingers that you get it back. Some things that can interfere with the recovery of an instrument can be biofouling. So if it gets biofouled, which is just organisms growing on different parts of the release, if it biofouls it enough, it won’t allow it to release. So that has happened before. Of course, sharks live in the ocean. And so sometimes sharks are very curious about our acoustic mooring packages. We suspect some of ours that have not been able to be recovered might have been chewed on a little bit by a shark and the float might have released from it. And so we can still talk to our moorings, we know they’re there, but we can’t get them back up, so in that case we might be able to schedule some technical divers to recover those. Sometimes the technology and everything isn’t as great as you want it to be to be able to recover it, but most of the time it works.

Jacqueline
From the data that you recover, do you plan to create an action plan?

Eden
So SanctSound, one of the big priorities for that was to create a repository for all of this data. Now that we have wrapped up this four years of data collection, anybody in the public can go to our website and look, and if they’re interested in particular sounds in their area, different data products, they can really go in there and delve in and explore what we discovered. So moving forward, we do want to continue some of that effort. And we’ll continue to archive our data nationally so that it is publicly accessible to other scientists, members of the public, whoever wants to access it. So not only was it interesting for us, and we had a purpose of characterizing the soundscapes in these regions, but we also want to make sure that it’s publicly accessible, and so that it’s out there for everyone to use.

Jacqueline
Accessibility is so important. I love the concept of democratization of science, and making it easily accessible for people who are outside of the fields to learn a little bit more.

Eden
Yeah, and it’s actually a great resource for grad students. I mention that, you know, for Longitude, since you do work with current students and students that have just graduated. If you don’t have resources for a project, but you’re very interested in a question regarding underwater noise, you can use this data and we can share the resources. There’s no use in recreating the wheel. If we have the data and you have the questions there, then you might as well use it. The ultimate goal in my eyes is that we’re protecting these areas, we’re learning more about these areas. We’re informing management. We’re informing the public. There’s no reason to, like you said, hold it close to the chest. It’s out there for everybody.

Jacqueline
What form is the data in?

Eden
So the data right and now is- you can get it in the raw format of just wav files. So it’s easily accessible that way, you can just download it and get it from the website that way or from the National Archive. And then also we have some other products that we worked on. So revisiting our discussion regarding technology, there was some effort for this project as well to standardize processing of the data. And so folks were able to create programs that helped us automate our analysis a little bit better. So for instance, a dolphin detector picking up whistles in the data set that we can then manually verify, or a vessel detector. There’s different products that came out of this that are publicly accessible as well. So lots on there to explore and to utilize.

Jacqueline
So Eden, I was curious, being from Arizona, what drew you to the field of Marine Science and to work specifically with humpback whales?

Eden
It’s really interesting, because it’s really come full circle for me. I was in Arizona working in nonprofit fundraising. I was established there. But I’ve always had this curiosity about the marine environment and about animals specifically. I don’t know what it was, but one time I was watching a documentary on the killer whales of New Zealand, and how they use cultural dissemination of hunting practices, and I was just so fascinated with it. And I kind of thought, now’s the time that if I’m really curious about this for me to go and explore this. And so I started to do some research. And I said, you know, Hawaii looks like a very interesting place. There’s the humpback whale song, a lot of animal behavior questions wrapped up in that. So I packed my bags, came with two suitcases and didn’t know anybody. And said, I give myself six months to try to make this happen.

My background is actually in communication. It’s not in science. So when I got out here, I started interning and volunteering wherever I could and taking any job that was involved in marine science. I didn’t start out with humpback whales. I actually started out working at our local aquarium, working with fish and invertebrates. But again, I said anything that was ever involved in marine science I would take. It took a while for me to get back full circle. So the humpback whales are what drew me to Hawaii, but I didn’t actually start to get to work with them specifically in a scientific role until 2018. So it was a lot of persistence and hard work to get there, and lots of jobs to be able to come full circle.

Jacqueline
I do have to ask, Eden, do you have a favorite humpback whale that frequents the sanctuary?

Eden
Oh, I can’t play favorites, right. And you know what, to be honest, there are so many that visit our waters. So I don’t necessarily have a particular favorite. But you know, one of my favorite things to do is take Fluke ID shots, and that’s how we actually identify individual whales. The fluke is the tail of the animal, so the underside is basically like a fingerprint. And so we can take a picture of that, and then it would be interesting- then we can go back into our catalog and then say, oh, you know, we saw, so and so, I won’t give them a name—Frank, let’s say, or something like that—and see that we’ve seen them year over year. So that is something that different researchers have focused on in the past. Another introduction of technology that has really helped researchers in the field is something called Happy Whale. It’s a database that you can then submit all of your Fluke IDs, and then it matches kind of using facial recognition, but for the fluke, to see where the matches are. So you can see if you know where your whale has been spotted by not only yourself, but other researchers or other members of the community. Anybody, if you’re out on a whale watch, can take a picture of a fluke and submit it to Happy Whale, then you can see where and if anybody has ever seen your whale before. So pretty cool.

Jacqueline
I wonder if anyone has reconstructed their tracks from location to location?

Eden
Yeah, actually Happy Whale will do that. And I also get alerts when a whale that I’ve submitted previously is seen again, I’ll get an alert to say oh, you know, it’s been spotted up in Alaska now, or it’s been spotted over in Mexico. And so it’s really interesting to have that history. So I always get excited when I see an email from Happy Whale in my inbox.

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Jacqueline
Growing up, whales had a special place in my heart because of their familial nature and charisma. Speaking with Eden Zang gave insight into one of the most unique ways to study these charismatic creatures: soundscape ecology. She revealed the three main things that acoustic researchers listen to–geophony, biophony, and anthropophony, and explained the ups and downs of collecting this data in the field.

What I found to be most important is that the SanctSound project revolves around accessibility. The data collected by the SanctSound researchers is publicly available on their interactive portal, so anyone with an interest in acoustic data from varying marine environments can listen to our oceans.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript.  Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

Laurel Chen 
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Laurel Chen, Longitude fellow from Rice University.

Welcome to our Longitudes of Imagination series where we are exploring the roles of individuals, technologies and research that is helping advance understanding in ocean science and space technology!

In this series, we spoke with the members of the SanctSound project that is managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Navy. It is a project to better understand underwater sounds within the U.S. national marine sanctuaries.

In today’s episode we are featuring highlights from a conversation I led with Ms. Lindsey Peavey Reeves, a West Coast Region Sanctuary Soundscape Monitoring Project Coordinator at National Marine Sanctuary Foundation in California.

As a fellow and biomedical engineer by training, I was interested to hear about the synergistic intersection between our work, which is grounded by high technicality. But I was also interested in hearing about what the SanctSound project was, and the impacts the humans and infrastructure had on the ocean. We started our conversation with a deeper dive into her current position, as well as what her role entailed.       

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Lindsey Peavey Reeves
I am the sanctuary soundscape monitoring coordinator for the west coast of the United States. I work for the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, which is housed under NOAA, and I am on staff at the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation. It’s a little complicated, but it’s through an MOU, a financial agreement that this government office has with the Sanctuary Foundation, which is hugely beneficial in lots of ways. One of those ways is that they can hire staff to do these specialized roles, take on these specialized roles, which is what I’m doing on the west coast. So I’m based in Santa Barbara, California, but I work really closely with all of the five sanctuaries on the west coast of the US, from the Canadian border, the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, down through California. So we have the greater Farallones sanctuary, the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary, Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, and then Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary. I work really closely with those five sanctuaries to monitor underwater sound in and around the sanctuary. We work with a really large network of partners to accomplish this, because it’s a really large undertaking. It’s hard for us to do it solely as one organization. So we work across a lot of different organizations. We had over 50 individuals that were a part of that project, over 20 different organizations, so that’s kind of the magnitude when I’m talking about partnerships. It’s quite large, both on the coming up with the resources to make it happen, but also the implementation of it as well.

But what do I do in particular? Mostly it is coordination. So I do jump on boats a lot, and do a lot of the field work myself. As I said, I’m based in Santa Barbara, California, so Channel Islands is in my backyard and easy for me to access and to help out with fieldwork. But some of those sanctuaries I mentioned are quite far away. And so what I do is work with the staff and the partners that are in those local areas and we coordinate the vessel time, getting all the gear in the right place at the right time in and out of the water, and just making sure that we’re trying to collect data as continuously as possible.

I also work with a team of analysts that are also scattered all around the west coast, and even beyond that. They are really focused on working with the data once it comes out of the water. We have all of these standardized procedures that we use across the entire national network of our sound monitoring project. Our west coast team of analysts uses those procedures to process the data and come up with standardized data products. So things like sound levels over time where we might tease out a specific sound source that we’re interested in, like humpback whale calls or fish chorusing, snapping shrimp sounds, things like that. I do a lot of the coordination of the fieldwork, data collection, and then the data processing. And then we also have this parallel process that we feed our data products in. That’s the archive of the raw data and the data products. And this is what makes this project really impactful because we have open access to our methods, but also our results.

One of the most challenging but rewarding things that I do is bridging the science that we’re producing to the management applications and how we’re actually going to solve some of these conservation problems. Some of that is producing peer reviewed publications or contributing to them, working with the academic community, and then some of that is really just working with our staff at the state and federal levels to try to better manage our marine protected areas and our protected resources.

Laurel
Thank you so much for that really comprehensive rundown, Lindsey. I was hearing you talk, I was just… I felt so empowered by how broad your work and this organization reaches. It seems to be not only science-related, but there’s a lot of social and governance-related things with it as well. So to me, that makes me really happy. I studied engineering in college but I really- this year was the only year where I actually got to branch out, take a few more humanities courses. It’s makes me really happy to hear what you are working on right now, and this bigger position and role really brings a lot of people together, a lot of people in different specialties to really create this richer understanding of something. And it’s open-access as well, which is something that I really think was super cool, because now everyone can access it if they want to learn more about not just SanctSound, but also the other projects that you’ve been working on too. So that’s super cool. You touched on this a little bit, but I was actually really curious to hear what you loved most about the SanctSound project.

Lindsey
Yeah, sure. One of the things I love about soundscape monitoring just as a discipline is that it’s holistic. You actually gave a good description of how it’s holistic, like our approach to it, with needing to work with people and building relationships and trust and expertise, as I’ve said, but from a scientific aspect I love that it’s holistic in that we’re looking at entire ecosystems and how they’re functioning. In our case, we’re doing stationary monitoring mostly, and so we’re looking really intensely at one place but over time. You know, we’re listening to all of the different sounds that are happening in concert. The biological sounds, fish, snapping shrimp, whales, all of the fun critters that we think about when we think of marine ecosystems, but also the biophysical sound that we might not think are noisy, but they actually can be quite noisy at times, like tides and currents, wind and waves, earthquakes, things like that. Hurricanes. So we’re listening to all of those things happening at the same time: rain storms passing by at the same time that dolphins are chatting it up. And then also anthropogenic sounds. So all of the things that humans are doing, all the human activities that are happening in these coastal areas, in our case in these national marine sanctuaries. We do have some remote ones, but on the west coast we have quite a few that have strongholds in the coastal regions. So we have military activities happening, we have vessel traffic, whether it’s large commercial tankers or fishing vessels, or recreational vessels, dive boats, things like that. Kayaks. I mean, all kinds of ways that we are accessing these spaces now. And so we’re able to listen to all of those things happening at the same time. I think that’s really powerful. And one of the things that I like most about this project, because we can really tease apart each one of those things individually, because we do have such amazing, really smart people working on this project that can do things like artificial intelligence, and use these automated techniques to draw out specific sound sources, if we just want to listen to killer whales, we can do that. So if an event happens, we can detect that, and so we can detect a disturbance to the ecosystem. I just love that we have that capability and that power in this holistic sampling approach.

I also think that underwater sound in general is very relatable to people. We use sound. Most people who are able to hear really value that sense, and they really relate to how important it is for an underwater organism to thrive and to really succeed in reproduction and communication and their social activities. So I think we have a real benefit with underwater sound and being able to translate what we’re learning and why it’s important to people. So I love that.

Laurel
Switching gears, how did you develop interest in this field, whether it be marine science or just soundscaping? What was your pathway that you traversed from point A all the way to today?

Lindsey
How much time do we have? [laughter] When I was in school, one of my basketball coaches was a science teacher. And she was one of my mentors. She suggested that I do some science camps over the summer. I was mostly doing sports camps. I was like, oh, that sounds fun, I’ll do something a little different. So she’s really the one who got me into this Marine Science Camp in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. It’s called Science at Sea. You might be familiar with this organization, because now they’ve grown and they do college programs, and experiential learning programs, which was sort of my first experience doing that hands-on type of learning. I spent 10 days on the campus and then we spent 10 days on a schooner, a type of sailboat, putting everything that we had just learned in the classroom into practice. And so that was my first really like, Aha moment. There was a female oceanographer who was leading that part of our program, her name was Cheryl Peach. I’ll never forget her because I was always like, wait, you can get paid to explore the ocean and learn new things and go places people have never been before, and pull things up out of the ocean and just see what’s under there? It was just so like, Well, I want to do this, of course I want to do this. It was really empowering for me to see this professor being the person in charge on this boat and everyone following her lead. And so I was just like, I want to do that. This sounds cool. So that was my first time that I fell in love with marine science as a career. I really never lost that love for the whole science of the ocean and exploration. And so I pursued that in college.

After school, I moved to California. I didn’t know anybody, didn’t have a job at the time, but I moved to San Diego. I thought I wanted to pursue marine conservation but I wasn’t sure. Got some really awesome experience working in grassroots conservation, Community Conservation, and met some amazing people, from fishermen to community members to these amazing marine conservationists that are traveling the world. And that’s when I first started working with the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration. From then I went to Duke University and studied coastal environmental management. And that’s actually where I first started learning about bioacoustics. I got to jump on some Antarctic research programs where they were going down for two months at a time on these research vessels, and I was brought on to the project because I had spent so much time at sea at that point. I had a lot of experience doing visual observations, being able to spot different types of wildlife, whether turtles, birds, mammals, and then identify them. And that’s just one way that you can start doing population assessments. That’s why I was brought onto the project, but once I was there I was just a sponge and wanted to do everything. I started working with some of my colleagues on that project who were in bioacoustics. And so I really just dove headfirst and learned the ropes from them, and then just kind of fell in love with bioacoustics as well.

Laurel
Thank you so much. That was such a whirlwind but I really appreciate- you really trace this through everything and I think you were also able to do such a really cool project like Antarctica. That’s crazy! Segueing more into SanctSound as a project now, firstly I was wondering if you could summarize things in a few sentences to a layperson, and then also what would be your big take home message, or what is this driving significance of the project?

Lindsey
So SanctSound began in 2017, but we didn’t start actually putting sound recorders underwater until 2018 and 2019 in our sanctuary system in the United States. What the project aims to do is to monitor in as many locations as we can. In our case, we were able to monitor in 30 different stationary monitoring locations across the sanctuary system. So in US waters and territories, trying to establish baseline understanding of underwater soundscapes. We’re looking at the holistic soundscape, so all of these sounds that are happening at the same time. In our case, since we’re listening in 30 stationary locations, we want to establish baseline understanding in those locations. What’s the average sound levels? How noisy or quiet? Is it usually in the fall, in the spring, in the summer, in the winter? And what are the specific noise inputs that are common there? So maybe it’s common to have lots of biophysical sounds, lots of storms passing through, or different tidal flows, things like that. We want to understand the biologics that are normally there. And in some cases we have different animals that are migratory, so they might be present during some parts of the year and not during others. We want to understand what are those typical patterns of biological activity that we can record with our underwater microphones called hydrophones.

We are also at the same time recording temperature. So we are trying to understand the environmental conditions as well. And then again, we’re trying to understand what are the human inputs of sound? Because we want to have an understanding of, okay, what’s the current level of what we might consider noise pollution, what’s the current vessel activity, and some of our monitoring sites, they’re very near ports and busy harbors. And so we would expect to have the steady stream of vessel activity that we can record. We can also monitor vessels in other ways too, so we can integrate all of these different types of data that are coming in. And then we want to also understand more of the transient sounds, things that are only happening periodically, like maybe military testing that’s happening underwater. That’s the holistic sampling that we’re doing with SanctSound, and we’re trying to establish those baselines. So across a three year period in this case, we want to understand what is the typical or the average soundscape in these locations, particularly so we can understand disturbance, so if there’s an event that happens that would disrupt that average soundscape, we want to be able to understand that. 

I’ll give you a great example that everyone will be able to relate to, and that’s the COVID 19 pandemic. You know, COVID affected literally everything in our lives, but especially ship traffic. It rocked the international economy and it really influenced how goods were being moved by ships across these large waterways. We had an acoustic signature of that disruption in our records. We were able to record the reduction in noise input from vessels at these locations that typically would have the higher inputs of the vessel traffic noise.

Laurel
I think the example that you gave with COVID-19, I guess I learned today that COVID-19 did impact us, but also in another way towards sea life, ocean life. So that was super cool. I actually didn’t think of that being such an impactful use case, all of these soundscaping applications.

Lindsey
Yeah, COVID was quite a bummer for humans, but marine life has gotten a little reprieve. They’ve gotten a reprieve from the noise pollution.

Laurel
Yeah, for sure. Based on your experience with working in this field, or just in ocean science in general, what do you think really propels innovation in this field?

Lindsey
I think that it’s just- we have a lot of problems that we have to solve, and I think some of the problems are really big. It really requires a lot of creative and talented and smart people to come together to think outside of the box to come up with innovative ways to approach problems. We have a lot of what you would call “wicked problems” that don’t seem like they have a straightforward solution, or even any solution at all. But there really are ways to get win-win solutions. You know, maybe It’s not going to be one part of the puzzle is winning the whole game, it’s gonna be like a complete success story, but there’s ways that we can improve livelihoods and conservation status of species and people’s connection with the ocean, the climate situation, there’s ways that we can improve all of these things at the same time. That I think is what really inspires innovation, because it is a necessity. Yeah, we’d need to think outside of the box and approach things from a different angle.

Laurel
Absolutely. And I’m hoping that my generation hopefully has some good ideas in regards to all those issues, or the wicked issues, too, that you’ve mentioned. So I have lots of hope.

Lindsey
That innovation stuff we just talked about is what gives me a lot of hope, because I think we do have so many tools now that we can draw from to come up with those solutions to these wicked problems. I think that putting a lot of effort into sustainability is what really is interesting to me. So I do try to couch a lot of the things that I work on in my job, and in my role, into a larger vision of sustainability. And I know a lot of my peers do as well. So we are always on the same wavelength in that- but I’m always trying to think into the future, and how is this going to work towards this common sustainability goal that I think we have across sectors. Of course, economies want to be sustained just as much as we want to sustain ocean life and the health of our ecosystems. And so we have commonalities there. We have common ground. That’s been really motivating for me. Just always want to be working towards making things better for the next generation.

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Laurel
Talking with Lindsey, I realized how far her work reached, from the Channel Islands in Santa Barbara, California, to the sanctuaries all along the Pacific West Coast, stretching even up to Canada. I was amazed to hear that ocean fieldwork amassed large amounts of data that were open access, which is hard to find these days. When Lindsey told me about how holistic soundscape monitoring was, from “snapping shrimp,” to biophysical sounds like wind and waves, tides and currents, to even sounds of human vessel activity, I became inspired by how applicable all this data is to humans. I also found it quite interesting that the COVID-19 pandemic even impacted the ocean, due to lower ship traffic, generating acoustic signatures for future soundscapers. As Lindsey mentioned, “we use sound,” and it’s “very relatable to people.” Harnessing technology to be able to translate underwater sound to the public, makes me hopeful that we can pay it forward for the next generation of explorers!

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript.  Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

Jesse Annan van der Meulen
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Jesse Annan van der Meulen, Longitude fellow from Rice University.

Welcome to our Longitudes of Imagination series, where we are exploring the roles of individuals, technologies and research that is helping advance understanding in ocean science and space technology!

In this series, we spoke with the members of the SanctSound project that is managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Navy. It is a project to better understand underwater sounds within the U.S. national marine sanctuaries.

In today’s episode we are featuring highlights from a conversation I led with Dr. Leila Hatch, research ecologist at NOAA.

As a fellow, I was especially interested to hear about how we are only on the verge of recording and understanding underwater soundscapes, and how much insight this is already bringing us into the world of animals below the sea as well as human impact on this soundscape. We started our conversation with a broader introduction to NOAA and how Dr. Hatch is positioned within this agency.

.

Leila Hatch

I work for the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is nicknamed NOAA. And in the United States, people tend to- like if I asked my neighbors what NOAA is, they say that’s where you get your National Weather Service data from. So every day when they look up whether it’s going to be cloudy, right, that’s how they think of NOAA. But of course, all the way through to if they live in a place where there’s a big hurricane, they think, who’s going to predict whether the storm is going to hit me, NOAA. And if they work offshore and they’re a fisherman, and they want to know if I go out today, am I going to get absolutely slammed by waves, they look at our oceanographic data and NOAA, right. So there is a- NOAA sits in our Department of Commerce which, once we start talking about all these more environmentally focused things—that is what I do—will start to be kind of questionable. Our National Parks Service is in the Department of the Interior. We do all kinds of protection of animals that are in these wildlife spaces, that’s all over in our Department of the Interior. And so folks think, well, logically all the stuff you do to protect sea animals, that should be over there too. But no, it’s in Department of Commerce. And that’s because it emerged initially from being the place that managed fisheries. And that was a business, right? That is commerce.

Inside NOAA, we have what’s called the wet side and the dry side. The dry side we consider to be all our weather services and satellites, and all of that information I talked about that’s associated with predicting climate, which is huge right now. And predicting and helping people with information about the environment, they need to make decisions. And then the wet side involves managing endangered species that live in the ocean, managing all the fisheries and making sure that those are sustainable. And then I work for the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, which is the analogous part that protects the places in the country that have been designated as special to protect everything that lives there.

Jesse
It’s a great explanation. How did you become involved in the SanctSound project specifically, and what is your role in it, and also more broadly, in NOAA?

Leila
I have been studying the effects of underwater sound—sound that is produced by people and the things we do offshore, and the effects that has on marine life—through my doctoral work and then on into my career. NOAA does not have responsibilities to reduce noise, just to go out there and control human sources of noise. I work in the parts of the agency that focus on the spaces, the places that are important to animals and marine life. So what I do for NOAA at an agency level, I partner with a few colleagues and we manage what’s called our agency level NOAA ocean noise strategy, which we developed and published in 2006, which is a way of wrapping our arms around the very many authorities we have across fisheries and areas and habitats and species. And collectively we’re seeking to reduce the effects of underwater noise on those species.

We have a very sort of synthetic science plan that underlies that, that is to better understand how animals are using sound to begin with, because the more we understand all of those uses, the better we can get at what it is animals need us to mitigate or reduce that is harmful. And we have a very broad monitoring strategy, which is to push us beyond monitoring this place in this way and then over here in this place, and this way. Some of which is sometimes needed, if you’re gonna build a wind farm right over there, or whatever it is, but broadly at its core, NOAA over decades needed a way of monitoring the way noise actually behaves, which is very large scale. So we produced a science plan that has this array of sensors underwater that are monitoring for a very long time. And we argued at the time that we put together the strategy that really sanctuaries should even have a finer resolution information that goes on. Again, this is long term monitoring that is focused in sanctuaries, and is underscoring how important the sound is to animals from a really wide range of taxonomic groups in these places. So we made that recommendation in 2016. That project was then funded in collaboration with the US Navy and myself, and the US Navy led from then on the sanctuary soundscape monitoring project. And that project is nicknamed SanctSound. It went from 2017 to this past spring, just about a month ago, when we finally pushed those products out.

Jesse
Wow. So just you basically just finished up with the project.

Leila
We did. It was a time-limited project. And our goal now is to definitely not stop, there’s still going to be monitoring going forward and in this national coordinated way.

Jesse
Okay. You have a ton of data to look at, analyze and…

Leila
300 terabytes.

Jesse
Wow, it’s hard to imagine how much that is.

Leila
Yeah, I tried to figure this out. You can fit 50 High Definition movies in one terabyte. So this is 300 terabytes. A very, very large part of this project was figuring that out. It was a really big push to just coordinate a data collection approach. But in terms of innovation, which is data management, how to get all of that data in one place in a way that you could compare it, and it would be there and anyone can download it and all of that.

Jesse
Okay. So you’ve briefly mentioned already that sound pollution is harmful to animals. Could you give a specific example of ways in which sound can harm animals in the sea?

Leila
The project underscored that there are several ways that recording underwater helps you better protect animals. And one of the really big ones is it helps you understand the interaction between humans sources of noise and the sound that animals need. We have several stories that we wrote, first of all little web stories that are all correlated on the portal that get into these different kinds of effects. 

Leila
I’ll give you an example off the coast of Massachusetts, here in the Northeast, in a place where a lot of low frequency animals use sound, predictably, during really important life functions every year. There are several stocks of endangered baleen whales that come here, and white whales, for example, there’s around 300 animals left. Every spring during their foraging time they often have their young with them. And they use their calls in order to keep a connection between mothers and calves. When the background noise gets increased by a lot of vessel presence, which we have in Stellwagen Bank, the radius, the distances over which they’re able to hear one another, are decreased. So inside the bay, you’ve made the hum a little bit louder for those animals that absolutely need to be here to feed on these copepod blooms that come in the spring, if you really think about what they are- the largest animals on earth feed on things that are some of the smallest on the planet in the ocean. So the only way that math works is that they evolved over a time period where those resources were predictably very high concentrations, and that they could basically hit a grocery store, right, that they knew where that grocery store was going to be, they could use the entire ocean basin as their place to look for grocery stores, but they needed to be able to find them. And they needed to be able to exploit them in a huge way in order to get the fat resources that they would need for the fasting periods that take place and the other parts of their life history. So all of that means that the magic of whales that migrate at those scales are the ability to find those resources. And if they start to become less predictable due to the effects of climate, the ability to exchange information with each other about where they are over very large scales, and the ability to keep track of other members of their population in general over very large scales, the ability to navigate using cues about the underwater environment. All of those are hugely based on their use of sound.

Jesse
I see. So for them sound is really the most important sense they have, is what it sounds like from what you’re saying. You know sight, I think, is the most important for us, but it’s not like that for animals in the ocean, that sounds like it …

Leila
That’s exactly right. And it’s a scale thing. So not only does the sound travel four times faster underwater than it does in air, so it’s more efficient as a means of communicating over very large scales. What’s very difficult about the doing this impact work is that we can theoretically assess the distance over which animals can project a signal under different noise conditions, but we can’t prove often that those full extents, those signals were always being used. We just know that we are encroaching on those full extents significantly, really reducing them in large steps. But it’s to do the science to really be able to prove that blue whale A is talking to Blue Whale B in a way that is providing information that is helping them make their living in the ocean. That’s tricky stuff. So we are often left with documenting the loss at scales that we know are relevant to the population, but that’s one of our trickier bits. Because there’s still a lot of magic to how whales show up where they need to show up to exploit these resources.

Jesse
So there are still many unknowns as well. Now you said that you’re an evolutionary biologist by training, how did you even get into this field? It’s a pretty specific field of study.

Leila
Very specific field of study. I think one of the easier things is easier parts of it, because I come from a landlocked, small town. I grew up in a rural place, and very active outdoors, very interested in animals, and on a farm and with a lot of animals. And that got combined with- my father is a musicologist. I loved music and hearing, always. And then it was a college town. A man moved there to work at the Cornell laboratory of Ornithology, which, that’s birds. However, he was supposed to run the bioacoustics research program. And that program became a place that I got really interested in working in in high school, and that I worked on for a long time, went away and did college, and then came back and did my PhD work as part of that bioacoustics research program, but also part of the broader university’s evolutionary biology program, because specifically I was interested in, can we use sound to track how whole populations of animals are related to one another, across the entire northern hemisphere? And if we know better how they’re related to another we’ll do a much better job managing them. At that time I was working on whales, and the International Whaling Commission is where they have to make decisions about how many of these animals are there in different groups over huge scales? And how are they related to one another? And what happens if you know we need to have a whale hunt over here? Is it really going to affect just this little population, because they’re sort of one thing to themselves, or are they interbreeding with this huge group over here? I was interested in how acoustics could give us a signature of that. That was also because I got really interested in policy and how we make decisions about the environment. I then left and worked in Washington DC in our Congress at the House of Representatives through a fellowship program. And then after that, I wanted to do this work working for government.

Jesse
It’s always so surprising what people end up doing. Would you have thought you’d be doing something like you do today maybe 30 years ago?

Leila
Yeah, you know, I mentor and talk to a lot of people now who are developing their careers and I honestly think mine is problematically linear. You know, for the oddness of what I do, I think it’s actually hard sometimes when I’m talking to people to answer that question, which is, yes, 30 years ago, I knew exactly what I would be doing. It looked like this, which is weird, right? I think a lot of people who I work with now have- because I now have a very broad portfolio actually, in terms of how I apply what I do. I work on how- where should we go with wind farms, or I work on, you know, is there something we could be doing on the vessel space? Can we work internationally better, and vessel noise control, making them quieter? So the day to day work I do right now is very general. But if you look at the path, it all does sort of go in a line, there’s not a whole lot of tangents. I think many people’s careers have lots of tangents. And they’re interesting, right?

Jesse
It is beautiful to hear examples of paths that are a bit more linear even though they are so… it’s such a special path that you took.

Leila
Thank you. You’re right. There’s a lot of luck that goes into linearity. But there’s also a lot of luck that goes into looking back and realize the path wasn’t clear, but you’re interested in where you got.

Jesse
Yeah, I’d also love to ask you if you have any visions for the future of the SanctSound project, or underwater sound research in general?

Leila
Oh, yes, I do. And it’s wonderful because when we started this project, again, it was a recommendation to go really deeply into what sanctuaries could mean for the next frontier. People should be able to go to their sanctuaries, listen to these places, download the information. The idea that we could really be a portal to people’s understanding of these places, either just from their experience or all the way to the science. That was that initial conception of access. Another way of understanding the beauty of these places and becoming more deeply invested in them.

Four years later, the program has had to marry that to all the other priorities of holding on to these places. And they had never had a standardized monitoring system. Period. Of anything. Taking on in the last year to consider what a transition will look like and to support it as much as we can. So I’m really pleased, I think we really do have a commitment to gather this information on a lot of our places and start to consider how it allows us to answer system-wide questions as well as being able to compare things apples to apples, so that you might say, if I have limited resources, where’s my threat the greatest? Or where’s the feasibility of an effect that I could have the greatest, and just trying to make those allocation decisions linked to a more comparable resource? So those are some of my dreams, keeping it going.

For me, my visions always are, how can we really affect human behavior? It’s such a funny thing to be an ecologist. But really, when you’re an ecologist, if you really are a conservation biologist, ultimately you’re an anthropologist more than anything else, because the effect we’re looking to have is on people and how they behave. For me, the next frontier will be continuing to work on the quieting front, and to embed it in emission control in general.

Jesse
So are you going to continue to work with certain partners, because I know that SanctSound- I read that they had quite a few partners listed as well in the project. Are they are very important?

Leila
They’re hugely important. To a certain degree, the list of partners we had in SanctSound, although it does include my colleagues at the US Navy, for example, the vast majority of them were partners in this: get the data out of the water all the way through the pipeline, get the data to people and analyze it along the way. So a lot of folks in the academic and data management space. Those will continue to be essential partners in the question asking and essential partners in data collection. But there’s a whole other suite of partners that are in place now but are likely to keep growing, that are in the other agencies and industry space, and other stakeholders who are non academic but who have a very clear vision for how the ocean should look in the future, as well as those who are not industrial but who are protective. So it’s those partnerships that are likely to be the ones that grow.

Jesse
So, I did prepare a little rapid fire five questions. They’re very easy, they’re not so serious.

Leila
Rapid fire means I have to keep myself short? I can do that.

Jesse
Yeah. What is your favorite marine animal?

Leila
Wales.

Jesse
What’s your favorite underwater sound?

Leila
Bearded seals.

Jesse
Bearded seals? Oh…what kind of sounds do they make?

Leila
Have you seen Star Wars? They used a lot of bearded seal sounds in Star Wars.

[sounds of bearded seals]

Jesse
Cool! What’s your least favorite underwater sound?

Leila
Probably air guns. I’m really not a fan of air guns.

Jesse
Makes sense. What’s your favorite ocean themed movie?

Leila
Finding Nemo? I have little kids. Oh, the octopus movie that just came out in the last couple of years. I am supposed to say Sonic Sea because I’m in it. I’ll say Sonic Sea too just so NRDC doesn’t get mad.

Jesse
Ok. Cool. Wow, you did a great job with the rapid fire.

Leila
I tried. I tried.

.

Jesse
So first of all, I’d like to thank Dr. Hatch for the insights she shared with us today. And after listening to her, I just felt inspired to tell a short story of my own that feels connected to this. Last summer, I was able to go to French Polynesia to do research in the fields of marine biology and ecology. And I experienced myself how many interesting things are happening in the ocean that we would never think of. There’s just so many intricacies going on, for example, the topic that I studied with Dr. Carsten Grupstra is the impact of feces of fish that live on coral reefs on coral reef health. And as many people pointed out to me when I told them about what I was doing, this is kind of a weird topic and you might think, oh, do we need to study this? Or is this important? And actually, we’re finding out that things like this, such weird and interesting things that are going on in the ocean and such weird interactions, can actually help us understand what’s going on underwater so much better. And the SanctSound project that Dr. Hatch was such a key player in, has also opened up so many new visions on the understanding of how animals communicate underwater, what kind of sounds we’re noticing underwater. It opened up a whole new world of understanding, really. And not only is this going to be able to help us better understand animals that live underwater, but it’s also going to help us understand how to better protect them. Sometimes we even learn things about humanity. So I just think that it’s really amazing how a project like this can lead to so many new insights on so many new areas. And I want to thank Dr. Hatch for doing the work that she does.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Jacqueline Buskop
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.  

For our new series prepare to dive in the ocean with us! We are continuing our Longitudes of Imagination conversations, and this time we are exploring underwater sound monitoring at the U.S. National Marine Sanctuaries.

I am Jacqueline Buskop, Longitude fellow and a recent graduate of Rice University with a masters in environmental analysis.

Alongside Longitude fellows Laurel Chen, Jesse van der Meulen, Melisa Acimis and Tony Zhou, we were thrilled to interview Lindsey Peavey Reeves, Leila Hatch, John Ryan, Samara Haver, and Eden Zang from the SanctSound project.  

Are you ready for a sneak peek of the upcoming episodes?  Leila Hatch, the project leader at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Lindsey Peavey Reeves, soundscape monitoring coordinator for the west coast marine sanctuaries, start with an introduction to how SanctSound project originated.

Leila Hatch
Broadly at its core, NOAA over decades, needed a way of monitoring the way noise actually behaves, which is very large scale. So we produced a science plan that has this array of sensors underwater that are monitoring for a very long time. And we argued at the time that we put together the strategy that really sanctuary should even have a finer resolution information that goes on, again, is long term monitoring that is focused in sanctuaries, and is underscoring how important the sound is to animals from a really wide range of taxonomic groups in these places. So we made that recommendation and in 2016, that project was then funded in collaboration with the US Navy and myself and the US Navy led from then on the sanctuary soundscape monitoring project. And that project is nicknamed SanctSound.

Lindsey Peavey Reeves
So SanctSound began in 2017 but we didn’t start actually putting sound recorders underwater until 2018 and 2019 in our sanctuary system in the United States. What the project aims to do is to monitor in as many locations as we can. And so in our case, we were able to monitor in 30 different stationary monitoring locations across the sanctuary system in US waters and territories, trying to establish baseline understanding of underwater soundscapes. We’re looking at the holistic soundscape. So all of the sounds that are happening at the same time.

Jacqueline
What are all the sounds in the ocean, you may wonder. Samara Haver, a postdoctoral scholar at the Pacific Marine Environmental Lab speaks about them.

Samara Haver
Soundscapes are sounds from animals themselves and fish and shrimp, any biological creatures. And then there’s also sounds from the environment like wind and rain and ice, volcanoes, and then sounds from humans from cargo vessels from cruise ships from sonar, seismic air guns, anything that humans are doing that’s, that’s adding sound into an environment. And so because a lot of marine animals rely exclusively on sound, to communicate, to find food, to navigate, avoid predators, because the ocean is so dark and washes away scent, really sound is what these animals evolved to rely on. So when it’s too noisy from other sound sources, then it becomes a conservation issue for these animals because they’re not able to, to basically live out their life history and survive.

Jacqueline
Turns out, the nature of sound under water is much different than in the air. In one study it has been noted that sounds that originated at the Antarctic were heard all the way in the Bermudas!

John Ryan from Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute speaks to Melisa about the role of sound in ocean life.

John Ryan
The importance of understanding ocean sound is that the ocean is a world of sound. It is a strange world to us, but one in which sound travels very powerfully, and travels far and it travels fast. And what that means is, ocean life has evolved to use sound in so many ways. So just by listening, we can learn so much about ocean life, about their life activities, communication, navigation, foraging, socialization, reproduction, we can hear it, it also means that we have to be careful about the noise we introduce to the ocean, because it can cause harm.

Melisa Acimis
Could you elaborate on the effects of sound in the ocean on mammals?

John Ryan
There are really four ways that our noise can have a negative impact on ocean animals. The first is interference with communication. It’s called masking. It’s like if you and I were trying to have this conversation, and someone was operating a jackhammer next to my chair, it would be really difficult for us to have that conversation and that in many cases, we are preventing them from communicating with one another. A second way, a second harmful effect of our noise is a behavioral disturbance like we can cause a population to move away from a source of noise, when in fact that population needs to be there in order to survive because their food resource is there. So we can cause them to be malnourished, for example. And then a third way that we can have a negative effect is to cause acute or chronic stress.

Jacqueline
Having just completed my environmental analysis studies at Rice, I was curious about what the Marine Sanctuaries had to offer in expanding our understanding of the soundscapes and how the recordings at each sanctuary differed. I spoke to Eden Zang from the Hawaiian Islands and then Lindsey expanded on the network they built.

Eden Zang
The Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, has sanctuaries all over the US from Florida all the way to American Samoa, we fall right in the middle of the Pacific. So we’re like underwater national parks, and at the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale Sanctuary, we are a single species sanctuary, which is unique, that we focus on the humpback whale and their habitat here in the Hawaiian Islands. This project focused on understanding and characterizing the soundscapes, which is basically you know, every sound that is kind of in an environment, but categorizing this so that we have these baseline understandings of what’s going on in our sanctuaries.

Lindsey Peavey Reeves
We work with a really large network of partners to accomplish this, because it’s a really large undertaking, so it’s hard for us to do it solely as one organization. So we work across a lot of different organizations. We had over 50 individuals that were a part of the projects, over 20 different organizations. So that’s kind of the magnitude when I’m talking about partnerships. It’s quite large, both on the coming up with the resources to make it happen, but also the implementation of it as well. And then I also work with a team of analysts that are also scattered all around the west coast and even beyond that, that are really focused on working with the data once it comes out of the water.

Jacqueline
The SanctSound project gathered 300 tetrabytes of data from almost 4 years of recording. As Eden shares, collecting the data was only the first phase of the action plan.

Eden Zang
So SanctSound, one of the big priorities for that was to create and you know, a repository for all of this data. Now that we have wrapped up this four years of data collection, anybody in the public can go to our website and look, and if they’re interested in particular sounds in their area, different data products, they can really go in there and delve in and explore what we discovered. So moving forward, we do want to continue some of that effort, and will continue to archive our data nationally, and so that it is publicly accessible to other scientists, members of the public, whoever wants to access it. So you know, not only was it interesting for us, and we had a purpose of characterizing the soundscapes in these regions, but we also want to make sure that it’s publicly accessible, and so that it’s out there for everyone to use.

Jacqueline
Accessibility of the data to the public makes this project even more interesting. John speaks about the role of imagination when studying the life of marine species, and also when trying to make sense of the data.

John Ryan
…imagination immediately comes in when you enter the world of data. It takes a lot of imagination to apply analytical tools to a mountain of data and to come out with understanding. I guess what I’d say is that we are never just working with sound data. We get other types of information from satellites that orbit the Earth and look down at the environment and tell us how is it changing from year to year, from day to day? And how did the animals respond to that?

And then I think very briefly, that it takes a lot of imagination to translate from the language of science into the language that everyone understands. Science is full of its terminology and its complexities. But your job when you are taking that information into education, is to use your imagination to create communication that people not only understand, but in a way that allows them to connect with ocean life.

Jacqueline
What is the hope for the future from the soundscape research? Tony and Samara speak about it.

Tony Zhou
Let’s say you get the data, you’ve analyzed it, what are some conclusions or maybe solutions, that maybe that’s a better word. What are some solutions that you’ve and your team, and maybe people in this field have come up with to reduce the noise because I don’t think vessels are going anywhere anytime soon. Like, I think they’re probably just gonna, you know, be in the ocean. And it seems like with ocean research, and the way that the world wants to expand cities, there’s probably going to be more things put into the water. So what are some solutions for how to like, declutter and remove this noise?

Samara Haver
First of all, you are exactly right. Ships are getting bigger and faster and we know that bigger and faster ships are noisier. So sound levels from vessels are increasing. And then we also know that animals are impacted by this. And so trying to figure out how to do something about it. Some of the projects that I’m working on are with national marine sanctuaries, and also with the National Park Service’s are interested in what kind of management actions might be appropriate for animal conservation. So like you said, vessels aren’t going away. But managers do have some tools like a voluntary vessel slowdowns, during certain times of the year when we know that sensitive species are present, or monitoring particular areas during certain times of the year.

Tony Zhou
But what is the ideal hope that these experiments kind of lead to eventually?

Samara Haver
… the cool thing about sound and ocean noise, as some people would describe it is that it’s not like other types of pollution. You know, if you just stop the sound source, it just goes away. There’s no cleanup, obviously, harm can be done. But it’s not like an oil spill where it can take, you know, decades to clean up the sound, it’s just this energy just dissipates. So a lot of focus on mitigating sound is looking at vessel technologies, how to make vessels quieter, and what needs to be done to potentially retrofit older vessels and designing newer vessels that are quieter and then looking at where vessels are moving in the ocean, or their particular shipping lanes or routes that intersect with important habitats for endangered or threatened species.

Jacqueline
Discovering the variety of sounds in the ocean and listening to them through the SanctSound portal has been an eye opener for all of us.  You can find the link (https://sanctsound.ioos.us) for it on our show notes and on Longitude.site.

Join us for the upcoming episodes to hear more about SanctSound and the roles of individuals who are turning ideas into action.

You can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Subscribe to Longitude Sound Bytes on your podcast platform to make sure you don’t miss the stories and experiences we’ve prepared. You can also visit our website at Longitude.Site, for more information and content.

 

 

Jade McAdams
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Jade McAdams Longitude fellow from Rice University. Welcome to our Longitudes of Imagination series where we are exploring the roles of individuals, technologies and research that are helping advance understanding! We spoke with the members of NASA’s Gateway program, which is working on building a small space station that will be in orbit around the Moon. It will come together with the international partnerships that have been established on the International Space Station.

In today’s episode we are featuring highlights from a conversation I led with Jon Olansen the HALO Manager for the Gateway program at NASA.

As a mechanical engineering major, I was interested to hear about the integration of the different components of the Gateway project, and the decision making process behind certain design components, especially in a project with such an impact. We started our conversation with an explanation of the Gateway project and its take home significance.
.

Jon Olansen
Most people are familiar with the International Space Station. The ISS is in low Earth orbit. It’s been crewed for over 20 straight years. Gateway is taking lessons learned from that and moving NASA and our international partners out into cislunar space. So we’re actually building a small space station that will be in orbit around the moon. We’ll put that in place with participation, like I said, from NASA, from our partners here within the US, as well as international partners. The first elements we’re launching include a power and propulsion element that is being run out of Glenn Research Center as part of NASA, and Maxar is the prime contractor to develop that. The habitation and logistics outpost, the HALO, is the proximate module that we have responsibility for here at JSC. That’s the first habitable module that will have crew enter in this space station and it’s being built by Northrop Grumman. And then those two elements are actually being integrated on the ground. They’re being put together, and they’ll be launched together on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket here in three years or so. Those will be the first elements of that Gateway Station. After that, we’ll add elements, from ESA for example. ESA is providing a second habitat with some components on the environmental control system provided by JAXA. So we have multinational participation there. The Canadian Space Agency is providing the components for a robotic arm, similar to what they’ve done for the International Space Station. And we have some of those components from all of those partners that also fly on our HALO module, and on the power and propulsion element. So we have a lot of that participation around the world to put this station in orbit.

Our purpose for putting this station in orbit around the moon is really to enable a sustained presence for exploration of cislunar space. It allows for the opportunity for crews to access orbit around the moon, and then from there be able to get to points on the surface of the moon for exploration. It also advances our knowledge of operating away from low earth orbit. That is all things we need to learn in order to move out even beyond cislunar space.

Jade
Awesome. That was a great answer. So I have a few follow up questions just based on that. One question is, with your experiences building this in collaboration with ESA, CSA, JAXA, stuff like that, what do you find to be some of the challenges with working internationally in terms of cooperation and deciding who’s going to do what part of the project, just making sure everything runs smoothly? Do you have experience on that end?

Jon
Absolutely, that’s a great question. I will have to say, really, for decades, there’s been a strong push to have international cooperation and participation in civil space exploration. And so we get to benefit from a lot of that effort. There are still negotiations that have to happen. There’s still the decisions of who’s providing what, who’s developing which parts, who’s operating which parts, but the ability to actually have those conversations, the relationships have now existed for years. And the International Space Station is really a great example of international cooperation for something significantly complex. But it’s a great endeavor, right? And it really brings those countries together. So we really- I know you’re asking for what are the challenges associated with it. There are still challenges in working with any other entity and making sure that the communication is proper and well understood, there’s a common understanding of what people are doing. That’s regardless of whether it’s international or not that you have to go do those things. But because of the partnerships that we’ve built and curated over the years with the ISS, we really are starting in a very good place. And it’s been relatively straightforward for us to build on those relationships and get Gateway in good stead.

Jade
Awesome, well I’m glad to hear that it’s been going smoothly so far. So now moving in a little bit more about your current role. You work as the HALO manager, so I’d love to just hear a little bit more about what that entails, and unique challenges with that position, but also your favorite parts about it.

Jon
Absolutely, and there are a lot of favorite parts so this might take a while. First I’ll give you the scope of the office and what we do. Part of what we’re trying to do with Gateway is be a relatively lean organization and really rely on the developers to bring their experience base, their expertise, and put the effort in needed to get the elements, the modules that we need for Gateway to be successful. There still is a lot of insight and oversight required as a government employee, right, to ensure that we’re getting the right things and that we’re giving them the right requirements. So we have a lot of that work to do. But we’re doing it with a relatively small, nimble, agile team to make sure that we can really grow and adapt to what the Gateway outpost really needs to be. So that sets the framework. We have multiple specific jobs that we’re responsible for. I talked about the initial element launch here in a few years, right, the integrated HALO and PPE. But within our office here, we have responsibility for the development of the module itself, the HALO module. That’s the habitable element that crews will enter, and that’s Northrop Grumman. Like I said, the design and development aspects of it are heavily influenced, though, by what we need for an overall space station. And that’s where we have the office here to make sure that we’re getting what we need. And Northrop is doing a really great job in doing the design and development work there. We’re also responsible for integrating the two elements, the HALO and the PPE. We have the responsibility for integrating those two things together on the ground, making sure that they’re compatible with each other, that we demonstrate that they work together before we launch. And then we have responsibility for actually integrating those with the launch vehicle. So we’ll work with our partners out at the Launch Services Program in Florida and SpaceX to make sure we can then integrate that stacked spacecraft onto the SpaceX Falcon Heavy for launch. So it’ll take us about a year after we launch before we actually get on station around the moon. That’s all part of the plan. So we have that responsibility. The other responsibility that we have beyond those even, is in order to operate the Gateway Station we need an overall software architecture that has increasing levels of autonomy within it to be able to operate the station. One of the differences with the Gateway versus ISS is it’s not going to be crewed year round. ISS had people living on it for over 20 years. For Gateway, it’s going to be a mission at a time. That mission could be up to 30 days, 60 days, possibly. But a large portion of the year is going to be un-crewed. We’re still going to be doing science, we’re still going to have those activities going on, but it’s all going to be autonomous. And so we have an overarching software that basically maintains the whole vehicle and operates the vehicle. We still have ground control that will do some stuff, but that’s part of what we’re balancing. And my office is responsible for the design and development of that software suite as well for that first launch. So we have that breadth of capacity that we’re working to at this point in time.

So if you think about that breadth, there are a lot of challenges that go into pulling all that together. One of the tough things is how we work things on a schedule. Spaceflight takes time to develop items. There’s definitely a balance to strike between rushing and making poor decisions versus making good decisions, but maintaining some urgency to make progress. And that’s one of the biggest challenges, is trying to balance those aspects of design and development, to have the right risk posture to make the right amount of progress and make sure you’re making good decisions along the way.

Favorite things. I got to start with just fabulous people that we have across the country that work on this. You pick any of the contractors that are supporting, the vendors that are supporting, the NASA centers where people are working, and then all the international companies providing too, it’s fabulous to be able to work with such competent, passionate people about what they do, and that makes me enjoy coming to work every day.

Jade
A common thread I’ve noticed, because I’ve done a few of these Longitude interviews for the podcast now, is that everybody who is involved in a project of- not similar magnitude, but just something new and creative, in a sense really likes the people they’re working with and values their team more than anything. So it’s nice to hear that.

One of the things that you mentioned was the autonomous aspect of making sure that software will allow Gateway to operate without people on it 24/7. So what’s the unique design challenge that’s associated with creating something that has that capability?

Jon
So that’s a great question. Just from the technology itself there are challenges. There’s advances in that technology that try to make sure that the breadth of capability can be incorporated into that software, and it can become more and more autonomous. We’ve had software operating things for a long time, and within that, pieces of it will be automated. That’s not the same as autonomous, right? When you add in some of the decision-making aspects associated with that, it becomes significantly more complex as you go. So the technology piece by itself is challenging. And part of the reason we’re doing it the way we’re doing it, and the balance between the onboard capabilities and the ground capabilities, is really the opportunity to evolve those over time with the Gateway so that we can launch in one state, and we can update as we go. We can make Gateway more and more autonomous as we learn more about it and its operations. So we have that capability. And we’re doing that on purpose. So that we can take advantage of advancing the technology while minimizing the actual risks that we’re taking at any point in time for the station itself. So we’re working that balance, but that technology itself is a challenge. But now take that and operate it or try to implement it with so many different entities doing their own design and development with their own fundamental software capabilities for each different element that’s showing up. You’ve got Maxar providing their element with their capabilities, and Northrop’s providing the HALO with their capabilities, and then the international partners and their contractors are providing their elements. And all of it has to end up talking together and having a consistent flow down of management philosophy, fault response, all of those things have to be integrated across those multiple entities. So it really takes that technological challenge and extrapolates it quite a bit, not quite exponentially, but quite a bit in order to really address the multiple parties then that have to participate in it.

Jade
Awesome. Following up on that, it seems like there are quite a few challenges or things that you need to account for when you’re doing something with this much breadth. What is your general problem-solving process? If you face a hurdle and you’re not exactly sure how to get over it right away, what is the first thing that you do? And then everything after that, just curious to know a little bit more about your process.

Jon
That’s great. Decision-making is a key in working in this arena. I am a firm believer in really pushing the authority for making decisions down to the same level of the responsibility for doing the work. So that’s the first thing, is to try to have those things balanced so that decisions are getting made at the right place at the right time. That to me is a really important part of maintaining a pace of progress, is having decision-making at the right place by the right people, the right level within the organization. So that’s the first step. You have to create that culture. You have to create that environment that enables people to be the decision makers at every level, own their responsibility and understand that they have the authority to make those decisions. So that’s step one. It’s all about the culture there.

Step two is a very straightforward start in talking about decisions. It starts with risk posture. It starts with, what is my expectation for risk overall? Spaceflight will never be zero risk. So that’s one of the things that’s understood when you fly in space, but that doesn’t mean, well, there’s going to be risks anyway, what’s one more? You can’t have that attitude. It’s really got to be an understanding of what is your risk posture, and then figuring out how- whatever the issue is that’s being brought, how it fits within that risk posture. And the decision-making process you follow really depends on where that calculus comes out, right? Where is that risk posture relative to the problem that you’re dealing with? Do you need to take time and do more analysis to better understand that problem, or is this something that regardless of which decision you make, it’s not going to change your risk posture? Both are acceptable decisions, and you simply need to make a decision and move on. So all of those are- in my mind, it really boils down to starting with risk posture, and then addressing the individual item within that perspective.

Jade
Yeah, that was a great answer. I loved hearing that you empower the people who have the responsibility to actually make those decisions for themselves, Obviously I’m going to be a fresh grad, and it’s nice to know that maybe I’ll be able to make some decisions in my own career early on. So I loved that. I have so many more questions, but I don’t want to take up too much of your time. One question that I actually have to get answered is, I’d love to hear a little bit more about your journey to- what has led you to be the HALO manager and your career path, projects you’ve worked on, things that have inspired you along the way, and, how you ended up here?

Jon
So my story is, I moved around a lot because that’s what I wanted to do. I had an interest in space from a very early age. Yes, I was one of those who said, I want to be an astronaut when I grow up. To me, I set that as a goal…as a guide. It provided a path. I had a lot of interest in engineering. I specifically chose a school that had aerospace engineering. I got my Bachelor’s and Master’s at Notre Dame. Bachelor’s in aerospace, Master’s then in mechanical, and then I was fortunate enough to be able to come down here to the Johnson Space Center and I started off working in Mission Control. So I was a flight controller for the space shuttle program for seven years. And then I left, took a leave of absence and went to Rice. That’s where I got my PhD, and that was in biomechanical engineering, and then came back to work here at JSC. I worked in the crew office. Because of the bio background I had gotten there, I actually worked on biomedical payloads that were going up to the space station early on when it was first flying. So I was in the astronaut office, working on those as an engineer. At that time, I was actually a contractor working for United Space Alliance, and I had the opportunity to switch to NASA. I worked in the Safety and Mission Assurance area. I worked that for a couple of years, then I worked at headquarters on how to transition assets from space shuttle to the future constellation and Orion programs and what that would look like. And after doing all of those things, I came back to JSC and I worked in our engineering department. And there I was also very fortunate. I had the opportunity to lead a project called Morpheus. That was the Morpheus lander project. It was a research and development project where we used lean development practices to very quickly and cheaply build a flight capability that we could use [to test] technologies that we wanted to advance for future human spaceflight. So we were all about advancing technologies, but we were able to build our own vehicle. I was able to lead that team to put the vehicle together. We flew that vehicle 63 times, and we crashed one and we got that on videos that are out there, and we turned that story into one of perseverance, learning, of growth, and here’s how lean development can actually help you rapidly design, develop and build. We parlayed that into building the crew module for Orion’s ascent abort 2 flight test. So a bunch of that same team moved into that project. And we actually built a replica of the Orion crew module, but with our own avionics, our own software, our own control schemes, to demonstrate that the launch abort system would work to fly crew. We really needed that test to be successful in order for Orion to move forward with putting crew on board. So that actually launched successfully, executed successfully. I was the test director for the launch. And so it was those experiences, it’s all that background that brought me to this point.

Jade
It sounds like you’ve done a little bit of everything. I’m going to finish out by asking, since you have done so much, if there is one thing that you would give as a piece of advice to college students, or fresh out of grad school, young professionals, what would that piece of advice be?

Jon
For me, the biggest thing in my own career, and looking back what I got out of college, was learning how to learn. There’s a basis, absolutely, the engineering basis is really important. There are so many experts in so many different areas trying to run larger projects and programs, I simply can’t know everything in all of those avenues. But I’ve got to be able to learn enough to make smart decisions and be able to balance risk. That’s today’s job. But every job along the way has all been about learning. So that’s the fundamental piece of advice…is enjoy learning, figure out how to make that your path going forward so that you learn how to learn and you put your emphasis on that. You listen to other people. And that’s where your confidence really should come from is, as you gain experience and you’ve learned from others, that you’re confident in making your own decisions and moving forward…but never feel like you know it all. There’s always more to learn.

Jade
That is definitely something that I will be taking with me as I graduate. And I do feel that college has taught me how- more so than engineering itself, problem solving, learning how to adapt. So what do you foresee as being the direction and forward progress that we can make after Gateway, after Artemis? What is your next vision for space exploration?

Jon
So that’s also a good question. A number of folks from the agency- I know Pam Melroy, our deputy administrator, gave a presentation last week at the National Space Symposium about the the blueprint for the future. And that’s a key message right there, the blueprint, Gateway is a way for us to advance technologies and to learn how to operate, as I was describing earlier, out in cislunar space, but it serves as that blueprint for future exploration. So if you’re going to go to Mars, you’re going to think about what orbiting station do I need to have that I can then from there gain access to the surface, right? Those are opportunities then for you to think about, and everything you’ve learned here on Gateway, and how then from Gateway, you’ve had the human landing system and been able to get down to the surface and what the crews have learned from those experiences. You can take those lessons, and you continue to advance that blueprint every step of the way. So Mars is then that next piece, and then beyond from there, but it’s all about- you’re creating a blueprint that you’re able to replicate and advance.
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Jade
Something that stuck out to me during my conversation with Jon was how much he empowers those around him to take on responsibility and grow as individuals and engineers. Throughout his career, Jon has been a part of many important and difficult projects, such as Morpheus, and yet he has always made sure to grow and learn from his team’s challenges to ultimately find success. Now, as HALO manager, Jon tries to create the culture where people feel as though they can make their own decisions and take the responsibility for them.

He also emphasizes learning to learn. Jon believes that adapting, listening to others, and being a problem solver is where your confidence as a leader should come from. I think hearing from Jon that it is important to never feel like you know it all and always continue to learn is a valuable piece of advice that we can all take to heart.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Quint Smits
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Quint Smits Longitude fellow from Tilburg university. Welcome to our Longitudes of Imagination series where we are exploring the roles of individuals, technologies and research that is helping advance understanding!

We spoke with the members of NASA’s Gateway program, which is working on building a small space station that will be in orbit around the Moon. It will come together with the international partnerships that have been established on the International Space Station.

In today’s episode we are featuring highlights from a conversation I led with Julia Badger. She is the Systems Manager for the Vehicle Systems Manager function on the spacecraft. That is VSM for short, which is the highest-level command and control software system that will be on board the Gateway spacecraft.      

We started our conversation about her education first.

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Julia Badger
I have three degrees in mechanical engineering. I got my bachelor’s degree at Purdue University and my masters and PhD at California Institute of Technology.

Quint
When did you first develop interest in the field of mechanical engineering and aerospace?

Julia
I think I was in I think seventh grade when I saw the movie Apollo 13. I thought that that was just a really cool thing to devote your career to, so that made me want to work in in space. But then I did a project with robotics, I think when I was in 10^th grade or so. And at that point, I knew that automation and robotics is where I wanted to go next, and so that is what shaped my decisions,. I decided mechanical engineering because mechanical engineers can pretty much do anything.

Quint
Could you summarize the Gateway project in a few sentences for the lay audience?

Julia
Gateway is going to be a space station that will be in orbit around the moon. It’s meant to be, if you will, a gateway to further human exploration, both assisting human operations on the moon surface as well as future exploration of Mars.

Quint
And why is it so important to get a presence on and around the moon?

Julia
We think that the moon is a really great opportunity to learn how humans can live in places that are very hostile to them, that aren’t Earth. So the space station is is great, it’s definitely pushed our knowledge on how to have humans constantly be living in space. But because it’s so close, we basically can talk to it all the time. And we do. And the logistics types of flights, like being able to make sure the supplies are there. It’s not easy, but relatively easily. If you have to plan for a much bigger rocket and a lot less mass much further away, it takes a lot longer to get there. As you get further out, it’s harder to have real time communications. It’s harder to have any communication in some ways. So as we do that, the moon is kind of the next safest place to do that in the sense that it’s a bit further away. But it’s kind of that next step in understanding how we would do the comm, how we would do operations, how would we would do logistics management. And then our real goal is to go see Mars. There could have been life there. There are formations there. There was obviously a much different place a long time ago. The robots that are on Mars are great, but they’re a lot slower than a human would be if they were there to do that science, so the moon is a really important step to be able to get to our ultimate goal.

Quint
And what part of the Gateway project are you exactly involved in?

Julia
So the idea with Gateway is that people are going to live on Gateway probably one or two months per year. It will be corresponding with the lunar surface missions in support of that. And when Gateway is flying, there’s going to be probably four or five other things in space going on that need operations support. So the operational paradigm that we’re shifting to from ISS, which is 24/7 – 365 operational support on the ground and crew living on board, to the periodic crew, and about eight hours a week of ground support time, through its lifetime. So all of the commands and things that the ground support have to do with the International Space Station right now still have to happen on the Gateway, it’s not a terribly different system overall, and what it needs to do. But now all those commands need to be generated and executed onboard. And so the vehicle system manager, which is the system I’m responsible for, is going to be that system. It’s brand new in the way that we are building it and the types of functions that we’ll be doing. And my team is responsible for the requirements, the interface definitions and the overall- what’s it going to do, how’s it going to interface back in, and then verifying it at the end of the day before it flies.

Quint
What kinds of inter-vehicular robotics are needed at the station?

Julia
Inter-vehicular robotics are a very interesting thing to have on board. One, it could absolutely replace the human support for maintenance when humans are not there for doing logistics management and moving things from here and there. or from repair, from recovery types of options where you may have to switch out a board and that sort of thing. As of right now, we are planning on having systems that are redundant enough to be okay between crewed visits. But I think as the Gateway ages and we hit lifetimes of a lot of our operational avionics and other types of equipment on board, there’s going to be a strong need to have the ability to do some of these repair and recovery options when people are not there. And so right now we are scarring, if you will, the Gateway to support that, we’re making smart choices about our hatches, about bolt holes for a structure that the IVR can attach to to be able to impart loads on other parts of the structure. For example, putting in a processor, you need to be able to transfer those loads through the structure to put it in. So we’re doing that. We’re adding visual indicators to help an IVR system be able to navigate and understand its position in the Gateway. A lot of little things like that, that are not terribly mass intensive right now, but will go a very long way to helping us integrate those inter-vehicular robotic systems when we do get them there.

Quint
I also saw you worked on a project called Robonauts. Is that too mass intensive for this part of the project?

Julia
Robonaut was a lab experiment that we undertook with—Robonaut 2 in particular—with General Motors, I think it started back in 2008. The idea was to build a humanoid robot that could use the same sorts of tools as humans could, that could work safely in the same workspace as humans, but actually do some real work. GM wanted the Robonaut 2 for the same exact reasons, they wanted it to be on the line, to do things that were ergonomically hard for humans to do but needed a little bit more support, like pulling wires through a water deflector inside of a car door, which is a flexible material, it’s very hard with the rigid robots that they have on their lines now. And so that project was awesome. We did come up with a great robot that did that. It had a chance to fly into space and so we put it on the International Space Station for a few years and had it do experiments up there. We learned an awful lot about it, essentially, the fact that the mobile manipulation aspect of Robonaut as it gains legs and was able to do more of the move around types of tasks. We learned that this was a very important thing to have. We took away from the Robonaut project, essentially, was how many appendages would be a good number to have if you don’t want to have too many because of mass, but you do want to have enough for redundancy and load imparting and reduction of complexity. We had some thoughts about end effectors. We learned an awful lot integrating with ISS on what types of things- what we would want our space station to look like, in order to support something like a manipulator, like a Robonaut and that sort of thing. But to answer your first question, it is absolutely too big for the space that Gateway would have. And I think we all knew that even when it flew the first time. But since it was really built for the lab, and then kind of transferred into this experiment space, I think we all knew that and just kind of rolled with it, and learned from it anyway. So the next set of robots for Gateway will be much smaller.

Quint
What do you love so much about projects?

Julia
So I feel that what I do in particular is essentially bringing human spaceflight into a whole new era. So if we’re successful, what we’ve done with Gateway and allowing Gateway to largely handle itself- we do have a requirement for 21 days of autonomy from ground control for Gateway, which is based on Mars’ Concept of Operations in the sense that there’s a solar conjunction where the sun’s in between Mars and the earth. And so we physically can’t talk to Mars without much bigger support networks, to make that happen. And so Gateway is a step on that direction. So if we’re successful, we enable a huge part of what is needed to be able to send humans to Mars. And I think that’s a great goal for anyone to have for their career, to be able to say that they were part of that.

Quint
And what made you fall in love with NASA?

Julia
NASA has big problems. I like the big problems. The other thing I really like is that there’s almost no small problems. We do have small problems in the sense of, you know, we need to get this system in there. But that system has to integrate from a much bigger perspective of how we would put that in a spacecraft, and the complexities of the interactions of all of that takes a systems engineer. It’s more than one, more than what can fit in one person’s brain. That’s very interesting to me, too, is that it’s a very integrated, difficult, worldwide type of a project that we typically undertake. Particularly for the human spaceflight part of NASA.

Quint
When you do approach some issues, how do you come up with a solution?

Julia
That’s a great question. There’s no one way to go about doing that. From my standpoint, I’ve always thought that it takes it takes a team, it takes a village to make these things happen. But you don’t want to have necessarily too many cooks in the kitchen, if you will. You don’t want all the hands to be on deck for every problem. And so it takes a good team leader to organize a work plan. I’m a big fan of Tiger Teams, where you pick a select group of folks to spend some time diving deep into what that problem is and trying to figure out the ways to solve it. You obviously need to be involved in integrating and understanding the requirements, the interfaces, the constraints you have, and those are all things that you have to get straight in your head upfront. And then after that has happened, the designs are things that kind of fall out from that, from my perspective. It takes work, but that’s the fun part, is that once you’ve got all of that in there, and then you start coming up with the ideas and banging them against your constraints and requirements and making sure that it fits in the right box that you formed for yourself with all of those things. And then you have to implement, I think that’s a main part for me is that no design is complete until we’ve tried it out, we’ve tested it. It doesn’t have to be beautiful or perfect. I like to tell my kids that cardboard’s good enough. You might have a grand plan and you want us to cut all this wood and plastic and screw it together. But if you can’t show me out of cardboard first, it’s not going to fly. So that’s one of the things we do even from a software perspective, is that we don’t have to do it perfectly. But let’s get it in there and test it out. And after that, then I think you can really start solving that problem and getting it done the right way.

Quint
When it comes to the International cooperation. How does this all come together? Because I know the Canada Arm three is going to be on the ESA, is providing some communication. How does that come about?

Julia
It’s a really valuable part of Gateway in that we do have a lot of international cooperation. Even when we’re talking about the International habitat, or i-hab, there’s parts that are being delivered for the i-hab that are coming from Japan, from the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA. Obviously, the Gateway external robotics—we call it GERS system from Canada—is also a really cool part of it in the sense that they’re taking what they’ve learned over the last couple of big robots in space that they’ve had. And they said, you know, we’ve got to make this a lot more autonomous to fit what Gateway wants. And so their robots are going to have a tremendous more capabilities from an autonomy standpoint than they’ve had in the past. And then, from my standpoint, because my system is kind of in charge of the command and control and the fault management and resource management across the vehicle, when, for example, the robotic arm is stepping from our HALO module to the i-hab module VSM is the thing that’s coordinating all of that happening across those three modules. And so we are very active in working with the folks, the international module providers, to make sure that all of this is going to fit in. So how we do that is we have in our requirements document essentially an overall architecture of how this autonomy is formed. And while the VSM sits at the top of that, each one of these modules coming from all over the US, Europe, and Canada, all of those places, they all have to fit to the same architectural requirements. And so it’s very neat to me to see the things that we’ve come up with, these requirements being implemented all around the world and all of these different places. We have incredibly smart and dedicated people in ESA and CSA that we’ve been working with, that they get it and they get in there, they ask amazing questions and their perspectives are different than ours here. I get different questions from ESA every single time I put a document out for review than I would get here, and I expect it from them, right, I know that they’re going to look at it a different way. So I think it’s very valuable overall to the program, and I know personally has made my system better in having them there.

Quint
What does your day-to-day look like working on these projects?

Julia
There’s a lot of meetings. I have about a 20 person team that works just on my side. But we work with a lot of other teams as part of Gateway and international teams. Essentially, for each week we try to push coordination or a section of an ICD document or something down the road. And so it’s a very agile process that we’re trying to basically iterate on the design as much as possible. Obviously we have to freeze requirements at some point. We did that earlier. But now it’s kind of, as we’ve done that, pushing the design down the road again and trying to come back to issues as they arise and make that happen. And so there’s a lot of meetings, but from my standpoint, I do a lot of coordinating on these tiger teams, and then deep dives for designs. I have I think four of those going right now. And I’m trying to make sure I keep pushing people forward on the work that they do on that.

Quint
And when did you transition from being an engineer to the more manager type?

Julia
I wrote code up until I think 2018 – 2019. So it was fairly recently.

Quint
Do you want to do a lightning round?

Julia
Oh, what’s a lightning round?

Quint
It’s gonna be a few easy [questions]. You’ll see, you’ll see. What is the favorite project you worked on?

Julia
All of my projects are my favorite.

Quint
Okay, what is your favorite space project of all time?

Julia
Right now Gateway, I think we’re taking this to the next level. It’s awesome.

Quint
What is your favorite place on Earth?

Julia
My house?

Quint
And do you have a piece of life advice? Advice for students?

Julia
Work hard, have a growth mentality. Don’t ever think that something is beyond your reach. It’s just something you need to figure out the right way to work hard for.

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Quint
Thanks to Julia for agreeing to the interview. In six or seven years I will be looking up to the Moon and be reminded of the conversation I had with her, and heard about putting boots on the Moon again.
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We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Tony Zhou
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hello listeners! Welcome to our latest episode in Series 4 of Longitudes of Imagination. I’m Tony Zhou, a Longitude fellow at Yale University. Throughout this series, we’ve invited members of NASA’s Gateway program to share their experience and contributions of empowering humans to become an interplanetary species. From international relations and policy to engineering and operations, you’ll learn how NASA has teamed up with its international partners — the Canadian Space Agency, European Space Agency, and Japanese Space Agency to set the stage for deep space exploration.

Today’s episode features conversational highlights I shared with Sean Fuller, the international partner manager for the Gateway program. Having built a 24-year career at NASA, Sean now manages the programmatic and technical integration of Gateway’s international partnerships.

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Sean Fuller
My current role, I’m the international partner manager for the Gateway program. And so what that means is both the technical and programmatic integration of our international partners on Gateway. And so those are the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency and the Japanese Space Agency.

We’re taking a partnership that started with ISS and moving that ahead into what we call Cislunar space with a Gateway, a small station around the Moon. And so my job is those partner elements, as they’re contributing different elements, both modules, in Canada’s case, a robotic arm. ESA has a couple of modules with Japanese components within it for life support and a Japanese resupply vehicle. So it’s both the technical integration of it, how do we get these modules all working together across the Gateway as they meet up in space—very similar to ISS, you attach them in space—but then also the programmatic side of it. The agreements that get into that, how are we going to operate on a day-to-day basis? How do we make our engineering decisions when it’s an integrated vehicle, so everybody has their pieces to it, but they all have to work together and tie together. And so that integration across the deck all falls under my purview and the job I’m doing today.

Tony
I had a chance to read some of the work that you’ve done on this agreement that you talked about, so one of the questions that I had is on collaboration, and working with teams of this size, because you’re also mediating nations as well. How do you go about coming to agreements? Because I’m sure everybody wants a little bit of piece of the pie? And so how do you negotiate in a way where everyone comes out a winner?

Sean
Yeah, absolutely, and I’ll tell you one of the great advantages, I think, of Gateway in our partnership, is it’s not a new partnership. If I go back and look at the Canada case, it actually started with a robotic arm on the shuttle. We started some of our European collaboration as well as Japanese collaboration, in the shuttle program and they grew into the ISS program. And that now 24-year history of ISS, it will be October this year 24 years since the first piece was put into orbit. And so we’ve been working hand in hand with these teams for that amount of timeframe. In fact, a lot of my colleagues from around the world, we started in ISS partnerships and built beyond that. So I say that to say we’ve come to a very common vernacular and understanding of the capabilities and the desires and the goals of each. And that’s really into the foundation of what are our goals are at NASA in the US, in Europe with ESA, in Canada with the Canadian Space Agency, and then in Japan, and how do we dove tail all those together, as we look at human exploration and going beyond low Earth orbit, there’s a lot of similarities there.

There’s a lot of interest in going back to the Moon in the NASA case, or going to the Moon for the first time in our partners’ cases. What we can do there, but then also looking at that not as a destination, but as part of the journey on to Mars.

And so if we all take a step back and look at it, one of the ways you do that is you look at the common goals. We have a lot of common goals, or maybe different ways to get to it. I always try to boil it down to the technical or best answer—many times there’s more than one answer, but the best answer—and then drive it from that direction. I find working with our colleagues around the world through all these years, we know each other very well. There absolutely is – sometimes there’s give and take, but I think that happens in any kind of relationship that you have. But we all know what we’re achieving for at the end, and that’s expanding human exploration. That’s the operations we’re going to do on and near the Moon and also expanding it to Mars. So we always keep that as our focus and understand it is not always a direct path to get there. There’s zigs and zags in the road. We each have not only our technical capabilities and challenges, but in a venture of this size, you have budgetary and political challenges that come along as well, and so we look to really capitalize off each other. You know, Gateway and even ISS was born out of that capability. Certainly, could any one nation probably do this on their own? Maybe not all, but a lot of them could. But is that the best route to go? And is there the funding to do that? And of course, that’s not the case. How do we maximize our resources so that the benefits in the end, each one invests some, but you all gain the benefits and the research at the end.

Tony
Yeah, I mean, it’s really wonderful to hear you say that, because in one of your previous articles that I’ve read, you actually touch on this where you say—and I’m just going to quickly quote you here—is just because someone has a different way of doing things, it doesn’t make them wrong. And there’s more than one path to do things. You just touched on that, and you know, there’s probably much more detail to that. You also touched on the cost of things, and having watched some videos, correct me if I’m wrong, the space shuttle that will shoot into space is going to cost around 2.5 billion because it might be disposable, rather than continuing to reuse the rocket.

Sean
Yeah, it’s different. We’re seeing that SpaceX is in the industry work on the reusability in low Earth orbit made tremendous, great strides in that. As we look at going to the Moon, it takes a significant more amount of energy to do that. When you return something and land it, you’re using some of that rocket fuel literally to bring it back down to earth and not being used to put a mass in orbit.

We look to fly Orion along with, as we call it, co-manifested payloads, which is the Gateway elements. So that one rocket is not only launching a crew, but it’s also launching a 10 metric ton module, take it out to and build up Gateway. And so it’s different environments to do that. So again, there’s different paths to it. But as we look at that and look at the way to maximize it, we really need to focus on that. You know, we flew expendable, I’ll say rockets, for low Earth orbit for many, many decades. And really it’s coming to maturity here in the last less than a decade of that reusability that we see today. I certainly envision that as we continue the exploration and continue developments in those areas that in the future, there will be more components of deep space rockets that will end up being reusable as well. Just today, we’re not at that efficiency level for it, and then so for a large part, you’re getting the maximum use out of it to get the most mass you can out to, in our case, in Moon orbit.

Tony
Yeah. So from your long tenure with NASA, and you are a part of, I believe the Expedition One. What are some lessons that you’ve learned just from starting right immediately, having graduated college, until working now, and the input that you give in each new project?

Sean
Yeah, with each new project I say bring your history and knowledge base for it, but don’t let that pollute the future as well in looking at it. So you’ve got a great background, a great knowledge from it, but you can apply the new lessons and the new ways into a future project. I had the fortunate advantage, I’ll say, when I started working at the Johnson Space Center in ’96, that a year later, because we were learning how to do ISS, ISS hadn’t started flying yet, we had to think on the Shuttle Mir program, we had US astronauts on Mir and saw that as our learning ground to get that base of knowledge into ISS. I was very early exposed into that international partnership and working with them. And so from each one of those, you take those lessons.

The early days of ISS, it was a partnership across the board that we had not operated in that realm on a day-to-day basis with each other. So one of the things I talk about is a comparison, as we evolve ISS and that partnership to Gateway, we have a volume. It’s about 11 volumes of what we call the implementation for ISS, how all the pieces are going to work together between our partners. It’s not just the hardware on orbit, but how, for example, we’re going to do scheduling of the crew day, how we’re going to plan logistics on a logistics flight. In the Gateway, now we’ve got 20-24 years, like I said, of experience. Took all those lessons learned and said, we’re going to take nine volumes of I’m sure well over 1000 pages, we could condense it down to one very concise 50-60 page type document, because we all built on that history we had in the past. We’ve taken a lot of lessons learned, you know, things that we did on ISS that we said, golly, if we had the opportunity to do it again, we might do this a little different. Well, fortunately we have the opportunity to do it again. And in the early days of the Gateway partnership, before we actually formalized our agreements, that’s one of the things we all sat down and said, Okay, we know what the ISS agreements are. If we could do it differently, which we now can, how would we do that differently? And again, we found talking of partnership, some very common things in here that we can maximize. Again, building on those lessons learned for the future. So myself personally, kind of as you go through it, each time you get new opportunities, you certainly don’t forget the past, you build upon the past. And I also tell folks, if you’re going to change something, it behooves you to know why you’re going to change. Change for the sake of change is not necessarily a good thing. But learn from the past, learn from the histories, and if there’s a better way to go try to address something, certainly do that. And I’ve had a lot of those opportunities for better or worse over the years because of my continued involvement in different aspects of the international partnership.

Tony
And so how would you gauge? Because it seems like you’re also talking about elements of decision making. And so are there components or times where maybe you would lean to more risk taking, or are there times where your decision making is a bit more conservative? And so how do you gauge how you handle decision making at a level where I think there’s a lot on the line?

Sean
Yeah, you are right. There’s a lot on the line, there’s not a lot on the line just for myself or for NASA. Well, NASA may be the largest partner in Gateway, for example, all of our other partners have a very vested interest as well. And they have risk involved in it too. And so leveraging on that, everybody in each area, each person brings in a different perspective. And so when you’re balancing all that, not only am I pulling upon our team, our broad team, but also our international team to it as well. Let’s make sure we understand all the different elements that are out there because sometimes I may not see, for example, a decision made on the NASA side and how it impacts my European colleagues. So let’s make sure we have that information out on the table, and then balance that risk amongst us. I’ll tell you, I think you’ll find that doing that, having a very open conversation with everybody, really helps the whole team to understand the different aspects to it, and understand the decision that’s made to get there. Understanding everybody’s pros and cons, that kind of helps you look at it from a big picture. Sometimes I may make a decision that in my silo, just the NASA part, is different than one if I look at the whole partnership and what’s best for the partnership. So pulling in all those pieces is very key. It’s also key to understand the major levers on our partner side because we find that they have similar ones to us from a risk and also from a financial standpoint, but understanding that because you can get wrapped up into the politics, if you will, it’s gonna cost me more than you and whatnot. If you boil it down to the best technical decision, that usually helps lead you to the best answer as well.

Tony
Right. Yeah. That’s very insightful. You know how you said there is a lot of different partners that are vested and interested in this. I think recently UCLA announced their first space medicine fellowship. So there are also a lot of different fields now wanting and becoming more interested in space. How would you give advice to students that may be not necessarily coming from an engineering background, but want to be involved in space? And how to navigate into this field?

Sean
Yeah, there’s a lot of great opportunities out there in that research community. You know, we’ve learned a lot of things on ISS in different areas that we had no idea about. And a lot of fields that are finding the advantage when you take away gravity into things you can do. Medicine is certainly one of them. Structures on materials, in the chemistry realm, that’s another area of things that we’re learning every day on ISS, and we’re learning about future vehicles as well as the things you can do in space. And so I would just say, open your horizons to it. You know, I would imagine, I know myself, when I went through my degree program in engineering. I was an engineering physics major. The thought of eliminating gravity from the equation probably didn’t cross our mind very much. That’s a very powerful thing, when you can eliminate gravity from it, and now what can you do with that, and so I would tell folks in in multiple fields just have a very broad and open mind. It can really, really open up opportunities here, operating in space, we’re seeing it on a daily basis. In fact, right now we have a four crew from the Axiom one mission on ISS. Nonprofessional, if you will, astronauts from the astronaut corps, operating on ISS, doing research that’s opening up a commercial field there for it. So I think you’re gonna see a great expanse in that of opportunities there, and a lot of great returns from it as well, in the future.

Tony
Based on the research, do you think research that’s done in space will impact and advance research done on earth? Or the other way around? Or do you think both will try to complement one another?

Sean
Yeah, I think it feeds both, right. We’ve done some tremendous research, especially in the realm of life sciences research, DNA sequencing on orbit, again, different aspects that we couldn’t do in a lab on the earth, and then that feeds into – so you close that knowledge gap there. And it feeds into the next level of research or manufacturing or development down on the earth, but then it can iterate back up into the on orbit phase, as well as the next step. So I really think that those two feed off of each other. Sometimes you learn the lessons in space, because let’s face it, it’s not cheap, it’s getting cheaper, but it’s not cheap to put stuff into space. And so you kind of learn, and we’ve learned new manufacturing methods by doing that, sure, you could manufacture it in space, but you’ve actually learned it. And now you can apply it on Earth and produce that medicine or the manufacturing on Earth. So I really think that they feed off of each other. And we’ll see that continue in the future.

Tony
With the Gateway program, there are two questions that I have. One is what are some goals and objectives that you want to accomplish over the next course of the while to further the success of the Gateway program, and then two, throughout this program, what are some unexpected things that have caught you by surprise?

Sean
So in terms of, where do I want to see, we’re building hardware now. We’re manufacturing it in Torino, Italy, and out in California with our first two elements are coming together, the pieces to the initial structure and then the pressurized shell. That’s what’s happening out in Italy. It’ll be shipped to the US the latter part of this year. We’ll continue that outfitting, getting the hardware on orbit, assembling an operating Gateway obviously that there is a big milestone for it. We’ll have the first elements in the latter portion of 2024. That will launch in orbit and then adding on beyond that. So I’m very much looking forward to that. It’s going to bring us a different realm of space exploration. Of course, we had the Apollo program in the late 60s and 70s which did great, that showed, hey, we can get to the Moon, we know a lot more about the Moon from that. We get the crew back home. That was really a scouting mission, if you will. Now that we’ve got that, our technologies have matured, our capabilities have matured. Now we’re going out to, if you will, settle in and have a more sustained, as we call it, presence, and so Gateway doing that, enabling the landers to come to Gateway, pick up the crew go down to the surface, bring the crew back to Gateway and use it later again, to go down to the surface for the next group. You know, that’s going to be a great moment, when you really see that, that human exploration now in space has expanded beyond low Earth orbit. And now our cutting edge is out in the Moon vicinity. And we’re using that to get ready for the future. And so I’m going to relish the day when a first crew enters Gateway, you know, that’s going to be a great accomplishment. And then when the next crew comes, and they go down to the lunar surface, and they’re coming back from the lunar surface, that’s gonna be a great thing that’s really taking all these pieces and building that sustainability. And we see that for that repeatability, affordability and sustainability that is going to provide.

So, things along the way that surprised me, one of the great things that I do see in Gateway, in this partnership and with even within NASAs, is you come across a challenge, a block, if you will, but you open it up and a team comes in and attacks it. And before you know it, you’ve got a great solution. And next thing you know, it was that was just a small speed bump in the road, it wasn’t a block along the way.

You know, as we look at things, and one thing comes to mind is refueling and how we’re going to do refueling for Gateway. Well our European partners stepped up on that and said, Hey, we got some things here we’ve been working on that we didn’t know about, that they’ve been working on, and kind of put our technical capabilities together, closed that gap. Okay, that’s great, we got that solved, now let’s move on to the next one. And so we’ve been doing a lot of great things with that.

I’ve seen a lot of interest grow around the world, in potential new partners in the future. And that’s always good to see. Because that again, it shows not only our initial partnership, but it’s expanding it to more than the overall fever, if you will, around the globe of doing this, of doing the expansion and humans returning to the Moon. Being a part of that as not we as one nation, but we as a humanity expand to the Moon, but also like I’ve said, many different nations certainly have their sights on how can we work this together, expand beyond the Moon and get to Mars. And so I think you’ll see a lot of interest in that and seeing nations from around the world that enthusiasm and interest of being a piece of this, being a piece of Artemis, and expanding beyond is always very refreshing.

Tony
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there definitely is a very human element to this. And there is this heightened sense of, I would say, more importance or urgency around the world. I think a lot of – like we previously talked about, a lot of industries even from fashion, I think that Netflix just like released the recent documentary for a return to space to kind of get more public attention. How do you, when you’re not working, when you’re done with work, bring yourself back down to earth and just enjoy the human parts of non-work?

Sean
They say, you’re fortunate if you have a job that you go to work and enjoy and I certainly do have that. You know, you come home, and there’s pieces of that that come with you too. That is part of that joy. I’ll tell you as a family, we enjoy seeing the space station flyover. I’ve got pictures of my daughters, I’ve got two younger daughters – well, they’re high school now, but when they were much younger, holding them in my arms and pointing to the sky and seeing the space station fly over. So seeing that, our partnership, it expands beyond that to friendship as well. I have travels over to Europe and the folks that we work hard with during the days, but then the nice chance and evenings just to share our family stories and enjoy the time. It’s a lot of fun, you find yourself walking through an airport and you don’t realize it, but your backpack has got your NASA tag on it, because that’s what you use in your travel, and people stop you and ask about it. So you see that all the time. And I don’t think it’s something you ever turn off. But it’s partly because you enjoy it and enjoy being a part of it.

Tony
That’s really incredible. And I think that’s part of why space is such an interesting field for everyone. Because it’s not only advancing tech, but we’re talking about a lot of different issues of humanity, how we can unite as one in a way, and not be in conflict with one another. I think this was super interesting, and really grateful. And thank you for your time.

Sean
Appreciate it, Tony. As you could tell, I am always happy to talk about it. And you know, it’s gonna give us a lot of great opportunities out there. I think it really tells you that humans have a curiosity, what’s beyond the next hill, what’s beyond that next mountain, that was part of our exploration in the US and discovering the new lands to the west, and we’re doing it now. But it’s not on Earth. It’s above Earth. And it’s going farther. It’s going to go to Mars and really expanding human knowledge. And, as you said, it really is bringing folks together for that. And that’s what’s so key.

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Tony
We hope you enjoyed these highlights as much as we did! Personally, I’m incredibly excited for Gateway and NASA’s future projects. With its many international & commercial contributors, Gateway has evolved into a global effort to expand humanity to the moon, and beyond. We humans are innately curious creatures, and to echo what Sean said earlier, “deep space is this opportunity to see what’s beyond the next hill, the next mountain.” Gateway’s success will be a significant moment in history demonstrating how nations united to find solutions for aerospace engineering, habitation, and logistics.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and in the comments, or write to us at podcast@Longitude.site. We would love to hear from you. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

Jaena Kim
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes bringing innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Jaena Kim, Longitude Fellow and law student from the University of Ottawa. You’re just in time to embark on the 4^th series of Longitudes of Imagination with some of the most incredible masterminds behind the NASA Gateway Program. The Gateway is building a space station that provides vital support for long-term human presence on the Moon and as a staging point for future deep space exploration, such as sending the first astronauts to Mars.

Keep launching in to this episode for conversation highlights with Emma Lehnhardt, the Program Planning and Control Manager for NASA’s Gateway Program, and her expert insight on how pursuing outer space missions beyond our planet has actually unified in many ways, humanity on Earth.

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Emma Lehnhardt
My name is Emma Lehnhardt. I work at the NASA Johnson Space Center on the Gateway program, which will be a small human tended Space Station in orbit around the moon. My job is basically the Business Operations Manager of the program. I directly support our program manager, Dan Hartman, and provide all the business services across the program that keep the trains on the tracks. Everything that’s not engineering or developing the systems necessary for spaceflight kind of falls into my shop. And technically, my title is program planning and control manager.

Jaena
Could you summarize- I know you just summarized the Gateway project, but the Gateway project is also part of a bigger project, the Artemis project. Would you mind summarizing that in a couple sentences for our audience?

Emma
Absolutely. So the Artemis campaign is an initiative of NASA to return to the moon, to land the first woman and first person of color on the moon, and also to establish all of the capabilities that we need to explore the moon and set us up for further exploration beyond. Artemis is in Greek mythology, the twin sister of Apollo. So it seemed very poetic and a great name for our return to the moon in this generation.

Jaena
Before I dive a bit into the details of what you do on a day to day basis, could you just explain to us what the significance of space exploration is, and how helpful that space research and everything that happens in space can actually be transferred down to help the people down on Earth?

Emma
Absolutely. So space is and has always been inspirational across the world. And particularly with everything that NASA has been doing over the past 20 plus years in low Earth orbit. It symbolizes the way humanity can come together with the international partnerships that we’ve established on the International Space Station. It encourages and inspires students around the world to pursue STEM degrees, science, technology, engineering, and math. And it also expands our human reach and our economic sphere of influence outside of the earth. So that’s one of the reasons I’m so excited about Gateway. I see it as some of those first steps towards kind of a Star Trek future or what we can envision in the TV show The Expanse.

Jaena
I love that you talked about the science fiction, I think it was a TV series, but also your expanse within NASA. So your journey with NASA has been really incredible. I believe you interned there during your studies. And then later on in your career, you quickly advanced into your role today. Were there any integral or memorable moments that really got you to the position, notably one of leadership, a woman in leadership, which we’re still fighting to see on a more equal platform, especially in STEM and in STEAM? If there were, is there any advice that you could share with all of our listeners, regardless of gender? And one memorable moment?

Emma
So yeah, let me start a little bit with my story. So I’ve always been a space nerd, have always loved space. And I originally thought that I wanted to study astronomy. But honestly, the math for me was very challenging. And I ended up unfortunately believing that I was just bad at it. And I changed my field of study. I still maintained a minor in astronomy when I was in undergrad, but I majored in politics. And that combination of politics and astronomy really set me up well for a space policy degree, which is what I got my master’s in. And then I was able to go to the International Space University, where I learned even more about the International Space community and what it means to do truly international interdisciplinary work in our space fields. I ended up, after those two programs of study, as a consultant to NASA, to the Air Force, to DARPA, which is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Sci-Fi branch of the Department of Defense in the United States, and also consulting to private industry. And then I ended up becoming a direct employee of the government, a civil servant at NASA headquarters. I was there for about 10 years working on strategic planning, and also the budget of NASA. When I was at NASA headquarters, I had felt this whole time that I could contribute to the mission. But, you know, when I introduce myself to people, I often say, Yes, Hi, I’m Emma, I work at NASA, but I’m not an astronaut. I’m not a rocket scientist. I’m not an engineer. So you’re almost introducing yourself in the negative, right. But my contributions really were important. And one of my key memories, which is what you asked me for, was, I was doing some work implementing a law at NASA, which wasn’t the sexiest or most fun thing to do. It’s called the Government Performance Results Act Modernization Act, or GPRAMA. I was going through the results of our implementation of a strategic assessment of all of our objectives at the agency, and our Associate Administrator at the time—and I actually presented that work to the White House—he pulled out of his pocket a slide that I had prepared for him with the results of the analysis. And I looked over at him in the meeting, and he had handwritten notes all over it, which were very apparently written over multiple periods of time and useful for him as a cheat sheet. This felt like something that we were doing in DC to just take care of it and let real people do the real work out there, but here is the Associate Administrator of NASA really using this work to understand the work of the agency and to communicate our work to the White House. That was such a cool moment for me. And I ended up talking to him about that a little bit later on. And he said, Emma, you have to understand that essentially what you are doing when you are implementing policies, when you’re working on budget or the PP and C work of the agency, really is systems engineering in another vein. And that was a transformational moment for me and the way I think about my work today.

Jaena
I love that. I can really resonate with that because prior to my law degree, I majored in classical flute performance. And as a musician, I knew that I always wanted to do something that created a social impact and social change, as I am a child of immigrants where, you know, my parents really sacrificed a lot. And I saw the Canadian society really embrace us and help us integrate. And so I knew I wanted to give back. But as a musician, I kind of felt confined to the stage. And it felt like a one sided relationship with my audience. And so when I looked around to see what else I could share, maybe that also had kind of a performance aspect, I naturally inclined towards law. And so I really see the parallel there where we’re able to really help with something that we’re passionate about. But it may not be what people necessarily think, what artists do or what NASA does, and I think really highlights, which is a great segue, I know that you really helped in the program’s implementation and approach under agency space flight policies. And that was something that stood out to me as a last unit. Could I ask you for a brief explanation on it, and the importance of taking policy into consideration when doing really, really big missions, especially something such as long-term space exploration?

Emma
Absolutely. So yes, that in particular is a document at NASA called NPR 71 20.5. NPR stands for NASA Procedural Requirements. And this book can be thought of as the Bible at NASA for how you implement spaceflight programs and projects, particularly human spaceflight programs and projects at NASA. One of the interesting things about my job is that we are building a next generation space station, right? The Gateway is a successor in a way, it will be much smaller than the International Space Station, but leverages a lot of the work and processes and program implementation that we’ve done on the International Space Station, but the International Space Station predated this NPR 71 20.5. So when that program was initially established, they did not have to comply or really even think about these higher level NASA procedures. I’m a little bit jealous in a way because they didn’t have to go through the pain that we did. But that was the interesting thing about starting up Gateway as a program, was okay, now we have to think about a large program with lots of pieces and individual projects underneath it that are tightly coupled, that will be developed and deployed incrementally, one at a time or over time. And how does that type of a program fit within a NASA procedural requirement that is in many ways written for individual missions? So that that was what we wrestled with. And I think we came up with some good, maybe not ingenious, but effective and streamlining measures to implement those high level policies and procedures for Gateway.

Jaena
So I know at the beginning you explained what you do. And I can’t remember if it was in this interview or another one, you explained that your role was kind of like the CFO and the COO. So I also know that the Gateway Project is an international project. Do you work with international partners? If so, have you faced differing cultural or language barriers? And how do you unite such a diverse group?

Emma
Oh, that’s a great question. Yeah. Similar to the International Space Station Program, yes, we are a multilateral program, we established Memoranda of Understanding with the Canadian Space Agency, the European Space Agency, and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, the space agency of the government of Japan. We established those at the end of calendar year 2020, but really our international partners have been a part of our program from the beginning, even some of the very initial ideas of what a Gateway could be. And today, with the establishment of those MOUs and how we operate the program, the partners are integral members of our program. So they are with us every step of the way, in all of our program level boards, which are the meetings where we make technical and programmatic decisions. There have not been, in my experience, any cultural barriers to overcome. I think we are all coming into this understanding that we and our governments believe that this is an important mission to accomplish, and something that we can do together with both international and commercial partners. But there have been some interesting logistical issues to work out when you are working with NASA centers all across the country, contractors all across the country, and partners all over the world, honestly, just setting up meetings with perfect time zones, and understanding what happens when daylight savings occurs in United States, for example, one of those interesting logistical challenges to overcome and just something you always have to have in the forefront of your mind. Thinking in multiple time zones all the time. The other one possibly of interest for you from a legal perspective is export control. So export control for us is definitely a challenge in the program. Because our international partners are, like I said, with us every step of the way. That means they’re with us when we’re having technical conversations all the time. So everything is an export and needs to be export controlled. Within the program, we are looking for efficiencies and ways that this won’t bog us down too much so we can continue moving an agile pace. But it is something that just has to be accommodated.

Jaena
So I know you mentioned an aggressive timeline. And I know that was a big part of the push to get people on the moon by 2024. And I believe you also talked about somewhere else that you really had to change the architecture of how the team worked to meet this timeline. Does this mean that if you’re working with fewer people, did this result in a heavier workload, and how do you balance something that’s pressing and so important, but also not burning out so that you’re able to deliver the finest quality of work right to the end?

Emma
That is the exact question that’s been on my mind quite a bit, particularly during the pandemic. We are indeed a much smaller team than many traditional program and project sizes of teams at NASA. Within my own team, for example, we are pretty lean. And that means you have people wearing multiple hats, doing two or in some cases three jobs, that may be the same type of job at the program level and the project level, or that may be entirely different jobs. Our export control lead for the program, for example, who works for me, is also the resources and risk integrator for one of our control account managers, a systems engineering and integration office. So she is constantly overloaded. And that’s true for almost every member of our team. On the one hand, there are benefits there with so many people taking on critical roles and not having too many cooks in the kitchen, we’re able to move very quickly and drive to decisions quickly. But burnout is absolutely a concern. So right now it’s all about trying to find the right amount of balance across the team, and where do we really need to add resources to offload people before they get burned out. But it’s a difficult thing, honestly, even for myself, because we pour our hearts and souls into these programs and projects because we believe in them so much. And it is easy to find yourself just continuing to work nights and weekends because you want to accomplish this amazing thing. So you also have to- every individual is responsible for monitoring what they’re doing and raising your hand when they need help.

Jaena
Do you think with a pandemic, you know, a lot of us have to quarantine oftentimes in our own rooms, in periods of time we’ve never been confined to before. And I can’t imagine that would be much more different than traveling on a spacecraft for six to nine months to get to Mars. Did the pandemic serve any helpful learning opportunities for the people at NASA or maybe even individually that really brought in this extra layer of imagination that you could implement and make the Gateway project better out of such an unfortunate global event?

Emma
Absolutely, there were some distinct benefits that we saw internal to the Gateway program. So I mentioned that we are a multicenter program. The program office resides at the Johnson Space Center. Our power propulsion element is managed out of the Glenn Research Center in Ohio. Our Deep Space logistics project is managed by the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. We have team members at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, for example. And we saw pretty quickly that when you move from a center of gravity of many of the program leadership members in a conference room at JSC face-to-face, and all of the other center members on the phone without video connectivity, that once we were in the pandemic environment, and everybody was on equal footing virtually with cameras, we actually developed better relationships across the center teams. And you know, we’re all in the same virtual room as opposed to some of us being in the room and everyone else being on the phone. So now that we’re moving back into a hybrid environment, it’s going to be all about maintaining that frame of mind, because we want to maintain those connections that we built as a virtual team. And I think that’s going to be all about just keeping that forefront in your mind and pursuing information technology solutions that will help us just like cameras and conference rooms. It sounds simple. It’s something that we have not had previously at NASA really across the board. And we’ll be pursuing that for our program.

Jaena
Yay. Something I know that you do on your free time is you’re an advanced open water scuba diver. And our last Longitude of Imagination series was with the Schmidt Ocean Institute. With this back and forth between ocean and space, I think us, Longitude fellows, are learning that there is some sort of connection there. The same sort of people who are interested in space often have an interest in the ocean. People who work at NASA as are open water scuba divers. Was there any particular reason that drew you to this hobby? Do you think it helps you become a better leader in the workplace that you have something that’s- not that I’m tying you down to space all day, every day-

Emma
All day every day. [laughter] I am a little tied to space all day every day, especially being married to a fellow space nerd. But yes, there was a specific reason. So I have pretty significant motion sickness issue. So I personally never had the thought in my head that I could be a scuba diver. My husband is an emergency physician by training, and he is someone who has always wanted to be an astronaut. So he pursued multiple things like becoming a private pilot, joining the Canadian military, and scuba diving in the pursuit of developing himself to be a better potential candidate to be an astronaut someday. When he started his scuba diving training, I decided to join him because we decided to try motion sickness medication that comes in the form of a patch that you wear behind your ear. And luckily for me, that worked, and I was able to complete the training. And it’s now something that we try to do when we travel all over the world. I very much love it. But more on a day to day basis, the thing that I find that grounds me and helps me in my day to day work and balancing in my life is exercise. So running, spinning, weightlifting, yoga, I do a little bit of everything and try to do at least something every day. And that has been very helpful.

Jaena
Just being mindful of our time. I have two wrap up questions. The first I would like to start with, I almost think there was this myth, which I think is slowly being dispelled, that science was not a very creative field, it was very square and rigid, and that maybe science and creativity, being imaginative in science, did not mesh. But arguably, I would say science is inherently creative. Someone would have imagined themselves flying out to the moon one day, which is what you guys at NASA made happen. And so could you speak a little bit about the role of imagination in in science?

Emma
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it’s not cut and dry at all. The most important thing in my opinion for anyone pursuing or working in scientific and mathematical fields is a curious mind. “What if” is the driving question to so much that we do, and I think you’re right, it is helpful to be able to imagine this future so that you can execute it and bring it to life. And for me, okay, so I have terrible motion sickness, I am never going to be an astronaut. But it is helpful in my daily life to think about what it would be like to live on the Gateway Space Station in microgravity in a deep space environment for a two-week period with only one other fellow crew member, for example. Being able to picture that so clearly in your mind helps you to bring it to life.

Jaena
That was really beautiful. The last question I have for you, kind of broad and maybe cheesy, but as someone who works, that’s such big budgets and such amazing people, and you being an inspirational female leader that I even look up to, how do you define success?

Emma
All right, I’m gonna get real personal with you here. As you can see on the video, here I am, I’m blushing pretty significantly today. I don’t know if that’s because I’ve been under the weather this week. But it’s something that I’ve dealt with my entire life and that I have always been ashamed of, to be honest with you. But I am in this moment defining success in that I have been able to stay connected with you, I have been able to answer your questions from my heart and from my head without a trigger of a fight or flight response, knowing seeing in the camera that I am turning red, that that for me is very much a significant successful moment. And something that I’ve been trying to celebrate every time I see it happening that I’m able to just get past it. Just keep going. No one’s gonna judge you because you’re blushing, right? So, but you know, here I am. I’ve achieved quite a bit in my career so far. I’m almost 40 years old. And I think it’s important for women in leadership positions to acknowledge that even when you have achieved your bar of success, however you measure that, there is still a tendency for negative self-talk. And you have to confront that and work on it every single day. And I think it’s important for us all to acknowledge that that occurs and it’s a challenge and something you have to work at.

Jaena
If it helps, the podcast is video free. So they have to believe you when you say you blush, I would say you look very beautiful and very normal. Thank you for sharing such an intimate story. I think it really is important and I think a great takeaway for our listeners, that success is really personal. And I really love that you kept us grounded with your piece of advice and I will definitely be taking that forward.

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Jaena
Preparing to interview Emma who has not only led NASA Headquarters’ $20 billion dollar budget formulation process but helped implement history-worthy space policy that will protect both this generation and the innumerable ones to come, had me more nervous than when I performed for 15,000 people!

I hope this episode inspires our listeners who’ve struggled to transform their passions into a career. Emma’s dream of working in astronomy wasn’t realized by becoming a NASA astronaut or rocket scientist. Instead, she forged her own path by imagining ways to imbue her strengths into the field of astronomy and becoming an irreplaceable team member of NASA.

For me? Litigation has become my alternative to performing – the court stage and common law repertoire allows me to still pursue what I love and help those around me.

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Does space exploration strike you with awe? Or its infinite possibilities instil you with wonder? We’d love to hear your thoughts! Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and visit Longitude.site for this episode transcript. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.