Journey through space with Kevin Grazier
The brains behind Cassini-Huygens mission and several cinematic marvels
As a science planning engineer, Dr Kevin Grazier was one of the key factors behind the successful Cassini-Huygens Mission. Also his contribution as a science consultant in several acclaimed TV shows and movies such as Battlestar Galactica and Gravity is invaluable.
During Pragyan 2018, I was blessed with an opportunity to interview Dr Grazier.
You were hired at JPL when you were still at Grad school. That must have been an amazing experience. How did that happen?
So, interestingly, I was hired at two places at the same day. One was at JPL and other at Griffith Observatory. However, one of the reasons why I went to UCLA, which is across town in Los Angeles from JPL, was with the hopes of working in JPL one day. My grant funding had run out, and I was finding different ways of funding during my time in UCLA to get my Ph.D. JPL had student programs and I became a scholar in the academic part when I was a student. So, I worked 30 hours a week at JPL and the rest of my week, I would work on my presentation. By that I mean, every single working hour.
What advice do you have for people who look to join JPL or one of those big places? What do they look for in people?
One misnomer is that NASA is about science. NASA is about building things that collect science. So, if you want to work for NASA specifically, engineers are more likely to work for NASA than scientists.
I’m a scientist and I did work for NASA, and I will work for NASA again later this summer. But, they hire more engineers and programmers than they do scientists. So if you want to work with NASA, engineering is your way there. Only thing to understand is that NASA is about building and creating things and not just about analysing science.
After learning about his experiences as a scientist in JPL, I proceeded to ask him about his award winning program that shaved close to a quarter million dollars off the Cassini project.
As a science planning engineer for the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan, you co-wrote a beautiful and award-winning program called EVENTS. Could you tell us a bit about it ?
EVENTS is a program that takes as input the trajectories of planets, the moons and the Cassini spacecraft, all of which can be accurately predicted. Hence it determines where certain geometrical constraints are met and can tell people, “here is where you can make your observation.”
The EVENTS program takes up a trajectory given as an input and determines when certain observations can be made based upon the location of the stars.
One of the things we look for are our actuations, when Saturn passes between the spacecraft and the Sun. Because, only when the Sun starts passing through the outer layers of the atmosphere, we can determine the composition. Well once I ran EVENTS for more distant actuations, as sometimes Saturn is going to be too small and hence you end up wasting computer time as you have to let it run overnight, considering that it was a lot slower back then.
This was one of the major milestones and huge surprise, as it was found that at this distance every change in trajectory they made was made with the idea of preserving this opportunity.
This was discovered five years before the spacecraft went past Saturn and we did get that geometry and captured the observation which was on the front cover of December 2006 National Geographic.
There were 12 different support facilities and this allowed all of them to determine when they wanted to make their observations to maximise accuracy. It was a fun project to work on and that is what I first worked on when I was hired as grad student at UCLA.
As we came towards the end of our interview, I concluded by asking him about his work in ensuring scientific accuracies for movies and TV shows.
You have worked as a consultant for several TV shows and movies such as Pirates of the Caribbean. Can you tell us about how you go about making sure they are realistic?
That is unique to each production as each production might do it differently. In the case of Pirates of the Caribbean, we are talking film. Film and TV are produced very differently. TV is very writer-centric and writers run the show. When you see the opening credits which show all the producers and the executive producers, they are all usually writers as well. As someone cares about the input being as scientifically accurate possible, I was fortunate that Jeff Nathanson was the initial and the final writer of the film Pirates of the Caribbean, which does not happen very often. I collaborated with Jeff as we researched what kind of things are in the sky in the mid 1700s ,that we could utilise as hints, clues and omens for leading our characters on their journey. As he remained the writer throughout, we were able to preserve that input and produce the final product that you saw.
As you have seen the movies I assume you know how much astronomy is involved in the film. In fact, if you look closely at the poster for the Pirates of the Caribbean which was out at least a year before the movie, you will notice several details.
The jewels on the forehead of a golden skull are constellations, a streak down the middle represents a meteorite trail, a crack which splits into three is actually a trident and at the end of the trident are stars. There are crossbones that have equations carved into them, which are made to look like cracks. When you look closely at the poster you will see how much was told in advance. It was hidden in plain sight but no one actively noticed that this was clearly about astronomy. Now that you have seen the movies you can go back and look at the poster and see how much is hidden. It’s pretty neat.
Dr Grazier’s dedicated contributions to astronomy has helped us gain a better understanding of the galaxy we live in. Furthermore his indispensable assistance to movie writers to produce a more wholesome movie has been appreciated by movie goers and enthusiasts.
The interview was taken in collaboration with Divya S.
