Louis Noel
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Louis Noel, a recent graduate from Rice University and Longitude fellow.

Our series focusing on the James Webb Space Telescope connected us with scientists, engineers, and program managers. Along the way we discovered there are public outreach positions at NASA. We were curious about these roles and what their day-to-day activities entailed, like how they managed communicating complex engineering missions to lay audiences.

I had an opportunity to speak with Peter Sooy, Public Outreach Director at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. It was fascinating to hear about the NASA public events around the world and discovering that Peter was the outreach lead for both the Webb Telescope and the Roman Telescope that is next in line. His interesting insights and engaging stories made this episode a must to include into the JWST series as a Sound Bytes Extra.

We started our conversation with Peter telling me what a typical day looks like for him in his role.

Enjoy listening!

[music]

Peter Sooy
My job is to lead the public outreach for two missions at Goddard. So, it’s the James Webb Space Telescope and the Roman space telescope. On a typical day, I’m finding new events for these telescopes to participate in, to connect with the wider public. So, there’s a lot of planning that goes into that, emailing, planning out events leading up to them and then actually running the event. I was just in Baltimore on Friday, running an event at the library there to celebrate the Webb first anniversary of science. First anniversary was July 12th. I had the event on July 14. I planned it for a few months. We took over this whole three storey library, had five different activities, two talks. The library was great. We talked all about Webb to folks in inner city, downtown Baltimore. It was great.

Louis
That’s fascinating. Sounds like a really rewarding, sort of a lot of work, but ultimately pays off in these sorts of fun events.

Peter
There’s just like a lot of office jobs. I do a lot of emails, a lot of calls, a lot of Zooms, but it is cool to see an event go from start to finish in two months and see the work that goes into it, and then actually have the product of the event at the end. So, it is rewarding in that way. You’re right.

Louis
Great. Well, I’d like you to walk us through your journey to your current position as public outreach lead. What key experiences played a significant role in guiding you to the role?

Peter
So, I’ll start, I’ll go all the way back. I went to the University of Maryland College Park, got a degree in journalism, and I was interested in sports. So, I was like, oh, I’ll do sports writing. My degree is in print journalism, so it tells you how old I am, I guess. And then when I graduated, I went into the Navy, where the Navy needed nuclear submarine officers. I did that for about 18 months. It was not a tremendous fit, but I was able to try my hand at engineering. It didn’t go so well. I didn’t love it. I got out of the Navy. And I got into engineering, again, working in natural gas drilling. I worked in rural Pennsylvania, the mountains of Pennsylvania, drilling for natural gas, again, engineering. I did better this time, but again, wasn’t best fit for me. Then I took a job at NASA Goddard in an administrative role. And then kind of parlayed that into working on the communication side on the outreach side, connecting with the public about NASA, what NASA was up to at Goddard in Maryland. And fast forward, now I work for these two flagship NASA astrophysics missions. It’s kind of the best crossover, where I have a background in writing, about talking about things with the general public. And then I tried my hand, like I said, in engineering, so it’s kind of the best of both worlds where I talk about engineering, but don’t have to actually roll my sleeves up and do the engineering. So, it’s a nice compromise of what I enjoy and what I enjoy talking about. And I’ve really enjoyed sharing the successes and accomplishments of Webb and more recently Roman, with the public.

Louis
Yeah, really looking forward to the Roman Space Telescope. What are the main goals of NASA’s public outreach programs? And how do they align with the broader mission of NASA?

Peter
This is a great question. Simply put, the goal of NASA public outreach is to share and inform the public, share with the public about what NASA is doing. That’s the simplest way. And the broader mission of NASA is, you know, different depending on who you ask, but to explore, to learn, to understand our place in the universe. In some way of saying that, so it kind of fit a little bit hand in glove where a lot of times, the scientists and engineers at NASA are doing this mission of exploring, of developing of getting us into space and outreach is part of the whole communications goal of sharing with the public in a clear and concise manner. What they’re doing is really out of this world, cheesy to say, but out of this world engineering and science, how to explain it and communicate it as broadly as possible to the eighth grade reading level.

Louis
Yeah, that was a great answer to a very broad question. What are other types of communications or outreach programs at NASA? How are they similar and different to your role?

Peter
There’s a whole office of like, general communication, news stories, you put out help run, like our social media presence, like the NASA Goddard, or Facebook, Twitter, Instagram pages, which is a ton of work. There are millions of followers there. So those are some of the communications programs at Goddard. And then a lot of missions have outreach as well. So, it’s a sliding scale, like if a mission is kind of just getting off the ground and just getting started, they really don’t have a robust outreach presence, because they’re just trying to get the mission started.

Step one is to have the plan for what you’re going to build, what it’s going to study how it’s going to get into space. And then once that’s kind of established, and there’s a good schedule, and everything’s moving along, then you can say, oh, we want the public to learn about this, let’s get a outreach team organized. A lot of times, there’s not a dedicated person whose full-time job is to work on outreach for this mission. Like I said, I work pretty much half on Roman half on Webb. So, these two really large missions have half of me. A lot of times, there’s like an average person that does like handle all Heliophysics, like everything about the sun, everything about the moon. So that’s a lot of different missions under their portfolio, and they come up with outreach plans to support those missions as best they can.

Louis
I see, yeah, that’s something I wouldn’t have expected.

Peter
It’s nice to meet people and talk to them, and them be friendly and open and receptive to what NASA is up to. So, it’s kind of like a morale booster for me. And it lets me know that this it’s being well received.

Louis
Yeah. And I think it’s especially important for children or young adults, because these are the people that are going to be inspired to work on, hopefully this next generation of science. When you’re designing these outreach programs, do you generally try to skew any of the content or language towards a younger audience? Or do you? Is it for the adult population?

Peter
If I have a specific event, as I’m planning the presence, I will keep in mind the audience. So I’m trying to think off the top of my head, just saying in general, I’ve been on Webb for five years now. And one of the initiatives that I’ve kind of bulked up, if you will, is Webb going to dark sky events at national parks. National parks around the country are in different locations, which is what we try to do. It’s doesn’t cost money to go for us. It’s, you know, another government entity, so it’s welcoming to us, and it gets a lot of people. So that’s where we’ll go and when I go to these events, I’m typically aiming towards elementary schoolers, so young kids, and then their family that’s there will also learn from it. And a lot of the times that’s what I aim the talking points at. We have really extensive talking points for all our missions that kind of cover every topic that could come up. So, in a media interview with a large network, you could have a complicated question and some of the talking points will cover that and all the way down to just top level. If you have 20 seconds to talk to an eight-year-old, what are you going to hit on? We try to share that information so people can be ready when they do their outreach, but the style of how you interact with somebody is kind of different for everybody. Like I said, I have a journalism background. So, I kind of just try to do like the lead of a story like who, what, when, where, why is what I try to tell people. But I schedule engineers and scientists to work the outreach as well. I always tell them like talk what you know. So, if you’re building this telescope, talk to a kid about what you’re working on? How do you build something for space? Make it something you’re passionate about.

Louis
Interesting. Sounds like you have engineers and scientists that help staff these. Could you tell me a little bit about maybe some of the materials that you bring to some of these programs?

Peter
We have kind of like the go to popular materials that we create. So it’s like, stickers like decals, what it’s called, like a sticker, a bookmark, a poster, and a lithograph. And most of these, most of these have information on the back of them. It’s like an eye-catching sticker. But on the back of it, it says, you know, Webb is a joint mission with 14 countries and 29 states. It teaches you something and then it gives you something you want to take home. Like if you just give someone an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper, they might not want to keep it or show it off or tell their buddy about it. And each one of these products has different amounts of information. The litho is the one that’s like the deeper dive where it’s a sheet of paper with four paragraphs about the mission. So, if someone’s really interested, they can read and then at the bottom, it has our website, or social media just so they can keep diving deeper and deeper. So those are kind of like the usual suspects of materials to create for missions to share what they’re up to, why they matter, what their goals are. But a lot of times, we can get creative as well once we have kind of the basics handled.

Some of the cool things we’ve done with Webb, because Webb has been around and fully established, like we came up with paper models that we can share with people so they could print at home to make their own Webb. A lot of times Webb, it’s so big, it had to fold it into its rocket and then in space it deployed. So, the analogy, it’s like origami, so we worked with the origami master to make the primary mirror so you can fold it to make this primary mirror that looks pretty cool. You have to have a certain amount [talent]… I tried to make it. It doesn’t look as good as the origami masters. But it’s like if someone out there is really into origami, it’s kind of like the cool crossing of art and engineering and technology. We try to share our material to bring in new audiences, bringing new people that might not have normally or off the bat be interested in it. But then they see that connection. They’re like, oh, wow, I want to learn more about this.

Louis
Definitely. That sounds really effective. And like a perfect example of a way that an outreach initiative is successful. Can you discuss any upcoming projects or missions that you’re particularly excited to share with the public? Maybe, you know, JWST is at the one year, but Nancy Grace has yet to launch.

Peter
Yeah, so the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is sure, that’s 100%. That’s kind of the next big thing. So Webb is doing incredible work. I’m excited to introduce people to Roman. Most people I meet at events will just have not heard of Roman yet, which is fine. It’s hard. There’s like I said, there’s a lot of stuff going on in the world. At NASA. It’s hard to keep up with all the missions. But yeah, Roman is being built currently at Goddard. And it’s going to launch by May 2027. And it’s going to have a lot of similarities to Webb, but a lot of differences that will complement each other to further astrophysics and our understanding of the universe. So, it’ll be at the same orbit as Webb. So, it’s going to be a million miles away orbiting the Sun at L2 as the orbit is called. A similar wavelength. It’ll be near infrared, where Webb is near and mid infrared. So similar wavelength, same orbit. But where Webb and Hubble look at a very narrow field of view look very deep, Roman is going to have a field of view that’s between 100 to 200 times wider than Hubble and Webb. So, it’s gonna look very wide, and at the same resolution as Hubble, so it will be able to, to map the universe like we never had before, in a way that would take, you know, Hubble and Webb 1000s of years to take all those images and stick stitch them together. So, it’s a, you know, fisheye lens on the universe to learn more about dark energy, dark matter and exoplanets. Roman will help us see more rogue Earth’s than we ever would have been able to if we use ground-based observatories. Those are exoplanets that are more close to Earth size, so there might be chances to find some signs of life there.

Louis
That’s so cool. What advice would you give to someone interested in a career in science and engineering communications? Maybe particularly in space and astronomy?

Peter
Sure, I get this question a ton because it is rather an interesting job. I would say if they’re younger, to try anyway they can to get their foot in the door. So, it’d be an internship or talking to people in that career just to learn as much knowledge as they can, and then try to do it. So, the practical thing I always tell people is that if you’re looking for jobs, try and major in something that will help you get there. So, science, technology, but if you want to work in communications, journalism, communications, public relations, are all good ideas, and then taking internships throughout college. And then once you get out, you really have to look. This little tidbit I tell people is that a lot of the workforce at the federal government are contractors, so it’s not civil servants. It’s about like 30% 25% are civil servants, the rest are contractors. So, you have to kind of dig and find where the communications contracts are and apply and get your foot in the door and apply, apply, apply. It’s not a straight path. It’s not an easy quest. You just have to keep plugging away.

Louis
That’s great advice. What’s something surprising and unexpected that you’ve experienced as a public outreach lead?

Peter
I’ve definitely been surprised. The interest in space kind of goes beyond languages. So, like, I’ve had the chance to work events where it’s an international audience of kids and they don’t speak English, but they still enjoy. And they connect with the content, so much so that it is very surprising.

Like I connected with a classroom outside Venice, Italy. These kids were in first grade, so they’re still learning. They don’t really know much English. They all drew pictures about what Webb saw and they were learning in their school about Webb. And I just connected with the teacher. And as luck would have it, one of our scientists is Italian. He talked to them and just seeing the kids light up and hearing like, oh, this guy is like us who speaks Italian, he works on this incredible mission. It kind of like you could see the connections in their eyes like, oh, wow, this is something I could do. It’s not NASA is, you know, unattainable thing that no Italian has ever worked at. It’s like, no, I could do this if I really want to do it. So that was a recent one that just warmed my heart to see these kids just they sat there and they were really locked in. And they loved hearing about Webb in Italian. So that was a good one.

And a funny one that I’ll end on is you never know who you’ll meet at these conferences, like I assume, and it’s a good assumption that you’ll run into, like scientists, engineers at these science and engineering conferences. But one of my first events for Webb, I was at a Space Research Conference in Pasadena, California so just outside LA. And this guy walks up. I told my coworker, oh, that looks like Billy Zane, the guy from Titanic. And he walked up, and his dad said Billy Zane and I was like, oh, it is Billy Zane. I was just like, hey, like, what are you doing here?  He owns some small company and he’s interested in tech, and he lives in Pasadena. So, he’s like, oh, I saw it was here so I bought a badge and I came. Tell me about your mission. And he was just really interested in space stuff. He took us to lunch. We hung out with him for an afternoon. Yeah, it was just surprising connection that came out of nowhere.

[music]

Louis
We hope you enjoyed our episode. Please visit Longitude [dot] site for the transcript.

Also, we are getting ready to release a library exhibit to accompany this series. Any campus library can have access to our slides for display. Check out our website Longitude.site for more details soon.

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.