Emily Calandrelli: 100th Woman in Space

On November 24, 2024, Emily Calandrelli, an aerospace engineer and popular science communicator, became the 100th woman to reach space. Calandrelli joined five other passengers on Blue Origin’s ninth space tourism flight. Blue Origin streamed the launch and Calandrelli’s reaction, which brought hundreds of supportive comments online, but Calandrelli also received some toxic and sexist comments disparaging her response.

Seeing our planet for the first time, a dream decades in the making.

You’re seeing so many emotions intertwined. Excitement, awe, and pride - but to be honest a little fear and confusion too. You just launched on a rocket and you’re seeing something you’ve never seen before… pic.twitter.com/HlL85ENshC

— Emily Calandrelli (@TheSpaceGal) November 25, 2024

Calandrelli received degrees in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from the University of West Virginia. She then attended MIT and earned master’s degrees in Aeronautics and Astronautics and Technology and Policy in 2013. Calandrelli also interned at NASA. 

Since 2013, Calandrelli has worked as a science communicator, advocating for STEM education, particularly for girls, through various media. She is the host of Xploration Outer Space, part of Fox’s Xploration Station, which targets pre-teens and teens with mainly STEM-based programs. Calandrelli had already filmed YouTube videos with the engineering department at the University of West Virginia and had a growing online following as The Space Gal on her social media channels when Fox tapped her to host the program.

Calandrelli also pursued writing with Ada Lace, a STEM adventure series for kids. This six-book series follows 8-year-old Ada Lace as she uses science to solve problems. Calandrelli has also written a picture book, Reach For The Stars, and two science experiment books for kids. 

In 2020, Calandrelli took her passion for STEM education a step further. She pitched the idea for a children’s science show to Netflix and the company picked up the show. Calandrelli, who was pregnant with her first child, got to choose whether she wanted to film the series pregnant or wait until after delivery. The science communicator took the opportunity to film the entire series of Emily’s  Wonder Lab while 36 weeks pregnant.

In an interview with Parentaly, Calandrelli said, “On TV, you don’t usually see someone who is pregnant doing something other than being an expectant mother - or hiding it.” While the show wasn’t renewed for a second season, it still ranks high on Netflix’s list of shows. 

Calandrelli has continued to support STEM education and careers for girls and women through her YouTube channel, recently launching Emily’s Science Lab, where she demonstrates science experiments for kids. Calandrelli also maintains active social media accounts on Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, and Bluesky, where she reaches several million followers as The Space Gal.

When Calandrelli traveled past the Kármán line in November, fulfilling a long-held dream to travel to space, she posted her reactions online, despite the risk of all-too-familiar disparaging comments from internet trolls.  Calandrelli posted on Instagram, “I refuse to give much time to the small men on the internet.” Instead, she continues to focus her efforts on advocating for STEM and space exploration for all, particularly for girls and women.

Find out more about Emily Calandrelli at thespacegal.com. 

A Family Affair

By Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, and Sethanne Howard

It’s not atypical for children to follow in the footsteps of their parents or for siblings to have similar career paths. During our research for various other blog posts, the editors of AASWomen were surprised to see so many family connections in the field of Astronomy and extending to planetary science and physics. We shouldn’t have been – the mother-daughter planet hunters Natalie and Natasha Batalha have already caught the attention of various news outlets. We tweeted a request for more family connections in these fields and were inundated with examples, which we list here in roughly chronological history. Do you know of more? If so, add them to the Comments section.

The earliest example of a female science lineage may be the mother-daughter-granddaughter line of women who lived c. 2334 BCE. According to some reports, Enheduanna (mother) was a princess, priestess, astronomer, and the world’s first known author. She lived in Ur in ancient Sumer. Two thousand years later in Alexandria, Egypt, the philosopher/astronomer Hypatia (~370-416CE) worked with her father, Theon. She taught philosophy at the Great Library in Alexandria, produced commentary on the works of her father, and also wrote her own book on astronomy. Hypatia invented the device for measuring the specific gravity of a liquid.

The Herschel Siblings, 1896
(Credit: Album/Wellcome Images)

Fast-forwarding several hundred years, we have the Herschels, perhaps the most well-documented family to share a passion for astronomy. Caroline (1750-1848) steadfastly assisted her brother William (1738-1822) while he painstakingly mapped the night sky. William discovered the planet Uranus. Caroline wrote down coordinates and other observations for William bringing necessary structure to his observations. Caroline became recognized for discovering several comets, and eventually she was awarded a gold medal for her lifetime of work. She was hired by the British government to finish William’s work and thus became the first ‘civil servant’ who was a woman. William’s son, John Herschel, was also an astronomer. He continued the star cataloging done by the Herschels and introduced the concept of studying individual stars for their properties.

In the pre-telescope era, Tycho and Sophie Brahe (brother and sister) made their own contributions to the advancement of science. Many of us are familiar with the observations of Tycho (1548-1601), which allowed Johannes Kepler (astronomer) to develop the laws of orbital motion. Sophie, a physician, helped Tycho with his observations.

Maria Magaretha Kirch (1670-1720) was the spouse of Gottfried Kirch (1639-1710).  He founded the Berlin Observatory in 1700 and was the first member in the Prussian academy (Leibniz was the second). Margaretha was an accomplished astronomer and a recipient of the gold medal of the Prussian Royal Academy for discovering a comet. Of her 14 children her daughters, Christine (1696-1782) and Magharetha (1703-1744), and her son, Christfried (1694-1740), were all astronomers and continued the work of their parents. After Christfried’s death, Christine even came on the payroll of the academy (a novum at that time) with a considerable salary. 

In more contemporary times, we have a slew of relatives who work or worked together in the same field or parents who (intentionally or not) influenced their children to pursue careers in science:

Mother/daughter or son

• Paris Pişmiş (1911-1999) and daughter Elsa Recillas are both astronomers. Her son, Sevín Recillas Pishmish, became a mathematician. Recillas married astronomer Carlos Cruz-González, and their daughter Irene Cruz-González also became an astronomer.
• Carol J.A. Rieke (1908-1999) and son George Rieke.
• mother Vera Rubin (1928-2016) and daughter Judy Young (1952-2014) were both astronomers. Son Karl Rubin (1956- ) is a mathematician.   
• mother Yolanda Gómez (1962-2012) and son Vicente Rodriguez-Gomez are both astronomers.
• Ulyana Safronova is a physicist who does work in laboratory astrophysics; she has at least two daughters also doing physics: Alla and Marianna
• Silvia Torres Peimbert served as President of the International Astronomical Union. Her husband, Manuel Peimbert, and son Antonio Peimbert, are both astronomers.
  
  

L to R: Pişmiş (Credit: BAAS), Recillas Pishmish (Credit: CONAHCYT), Cruz-González (Credit: UNAM)

Father/daughter or son

• Georg Christoph Eimmart was an avid amateur astronomer (1638-1705), and his daughter Maria Calara Eimmart (1676–1707) produced some of the most striking astronomical art since the invention of the telescope
• Norman Pogson (1821-1891) discovered several minor planets and made observations on comets and daughter Isis Pogson (1852-1945), who was one of the first women to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society
• Vernon Barger (Physics) and Amy Barger (astronomy)
• Jeff Hester and Janice Hester 
• Jerry Ostriker and Eve Ostriker
• Dan Gesari and Suvi Gezari
• Ralph Wijers and daughter Nastasha Wijers 
• Sean Matt and Cayenne Matt
  
  

Siblings

• sister Joan Feynman (1927-2020) and brother Richard Feynman (1918-1988)
• Emily Hardegree-Ullman and Kevin and Michael all work in the field of astronomy
• Leslie Young and Eliot Young
• sisters Else Starkenburg and Tjitske Starkenburg
• twin sisters Angela & Maren Hempel

Else Starkenburg (Credit: University of Gronigen) and Tjitske Starkenburg (Credit: Northwestern)

Other relationships

• Jan Smit, a geologist/paleontologist who studies the impact that killed the dinosaurs, and Wildrik Botjes (1810-1874), from an earlier generation in the family, who invented the planetarium
• E.E. Bernard (1857-1923) and his niece Mary Ross Calvert (1884– 1974)
• daughter Hamsa Padmanabhan, mother Vasanthi Padmanabhan, and father Thanu Padmanabhan are/were astrophysicists
• the Allers, with three generations of astronomers, including grandfather Lawrence H. Aller and granddaughter Monique Aller
• The Carters (father, daughter, grandson), three generations who worked in the fields of geodesy and astronomy.
• Elizabeth Lada and Charles Lada 

We thank the following for their contributions: Randall Smith, Maria Calara Eimmart, Tod Lauer, Renske Smit, Keren Sharon, Matthias Steinmetz, and Benjamin Lefebvre. If any corrections need to be made, please let us know.

[Ed. note: Completely serendipitously, Nature published an article titled "A family affair: how scientist parents’ career paths can influence children’s choices".]

Crosspost: An Observatory Spied on LA's Carbon Emissions—From Space

Written By Katrina Miller

Eldering's team created this video showing the aggregation of different "swaths" or strips of data from NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-3) taken over metropolitan Los Angeles

While most people might be attracted by the perpetually sunny skies, nearby ocean, or mountains hugging the Los Angeles basin, environmental engineer Annmarie Eldering was drawn to the city’s smog. “It’s the best place to go,” she says. “You’ve got tons of pollution!”

Urban areas release over 70 percent of human-made carbon dioxide emissions that wind up in the atmosphere, and LA is no exception. With over 13 million residents in its larger metropolitan area, a sophisticated network of freeways, and an international transportation hub, LA produces the fifth-most CO2 of all the cities in the world. That makes it a sweet spot for studying the role humans play in climate change.

Eldering is the project scientist for NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3, or OCO-3, an instrument that measures atmospheric CO2 levels from space to better understand the impact of human activity on the natural carbon cycle, the process by which plants, soil, oceans, and the atmosphere exchange carbon with each other. In a paper published this month, Eldering and her colleagues released a map showing the most detailed variations of CO2 emissions over the LA basin ever seen from space. This research demonstrates that space-based monitors can be used to collect large swaths of data over pollution hot spots, information that could help inform policy to combat climate change.

“What’s exciting about the OCO-3 result is that this is the first time we’ve gotten this kind of area map over a city like LA from space,” says Joshua Laughner, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech who works on a global ground-based monitoring system called the Total Carbon Column Observing Network.

Read the rest of the article, written by the Women in Astronomy blog team's very own, Katrina Miller, here:
https://www.wired.com/story/an-observatory-spied-on-las-carbon-emissions-from-space/

AASWomen Newsletter for July 12, 2019

AAS Committee on the Status of Women

Issue of July 12, 2019

eds: Nicolle Zellner, Heather Flewelling, Maria Patterson, JoEllen McBride, and Alessandra Aloisi

[AAS has migrated their email system to Microsoft Exchange, so please check your spam folder if you did not receive the newsletter this week. It is no longer possible to subscribe or unsubscribe to the AASWomen newsletter by means of Google Groups. We have updated our subscribe and unsubscribe instructions below. Please follow us on social media for updates and thank you for bearing with us as we work out all the kinks.

Twitter @AAS_Women, Facebook https://bit.ly/2PkU9of]

This week's issues:

1. Crosspost: Pre-registration Open for the Inclusive Astronomy 2 Conference

2. Register now to watch the first Astro2020 steering committee meeting!

3. Education Professional Development Mini-Grant Opportunity Now Open

4. Women are less supportive of space exploration – getting a woman on the Moon might change that

5. Astronaut Barbie has landed, and it’s one giant leap for women in STEM 

ESA Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti
and her Barbie (stylist.co.uk image)

6. How a decision-analysis tool helped one scientist couple make some tough career choices
7. These young scientists will shape the next 50 years of Moon research  

8. Queer voices in palaeontology  

9. How I lost my identity — and embraced a new one

10. Why Men Thought Women Weren’t Made to Vote

11. Who gets grant money? The (gendered) words decide.

12. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

13. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

14. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter