early 35 years after the first moonwalk, the atmosphere at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) was tense. Two of JPL’s three most recent attempts to send missions to Mars had failed. This time, Mars exploration and possibly many jobs at JPL were at stake. Ashley Stroupe ’90, an engineer who’d joined the Pasadena lab a month earlier, watched with interest. The 1990 Harvey Mudd College physics graduate recalls of that day in January 2004, “When we got the signal back that the rover was on the ground, there was relief and elation. To be that close to something I’d wanted to do my whole life was incredible. It felt like an end point, but it was really a beginning. What would the rover see? Where would it go? What would it find?” Across the country, 16-year-old Heather Justice ’09 viewed a documentary about the rovers. Inspired, the high school student began thinking about the excitement and challenges of a career in space and robotics. A decade later, both Stroupe and Justice work on JPL’s Mars Exploration Rover operations team. That’s not all they have in common: Justice also attended Harvey Mudd, earning her bachelor’s degree in computer science in 2009. Both went on to graduate programs in robotics at Carnegie-Mellon University. Stroupe became the first woman to drive a Mars rover, and Justice is completing her training now. Both grew up in Maryland. Neither ever expected to work with the rovers. Justice, who joined JPL in 2011, explains, “The Mars rover that landed in 2004 was supposed to last 90 days. I just celebrated 1,000 sols—Martian days— working on the mission myself. I never imagined the rover would last long enough.” This is actually Justice’s second stint at JPL: In summer 2009, she assisted two of her Harvey Mudd computer science professors, Robert Keller and Christopher Stone, with a research project involving simulation and modeling. While an undergraduate participating in the NASA Robotics Academy, she also spent two summers as a research assistant at NASA Ames Research Center and a team leader at NASA Goddard Space Center. For Stroupe, the path to JPL was less direct. Enamored of space exploration since age three, she dreamed of becoming an astronaut until she realized even a carousel gave her motion sickness. After completing concentrations in astrophysics and anthropology at Harvey Mudd, she considered graduate study in each of these fields, worked at the Smithsonian Institution and took a variety of engineering classes before settling on robotics.
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Harvey Mudd College
“Because of my education at Mudd, I realized there’s not just one way to get to an end point,” Stroupe says. “Ultimately, I ended up where I should be, and I think all the steps I took made me a better engineer.” Nine months after joining JPL, Stroupe moved to the Mars mission, analyzing data and the performance of robotic systems used to drive and operate the rovers’ arms. When she became a rover driver, Stroupe learned only months later that she was the first woman to do so. She says, “I’d assumed this wasn’t the case. That was the last ‘first’ for women
for MER planning. They’d already been doing all the other jobs, which is even cooler to me.” Nonetheless, Stroupe considers her first solo drive a career highlight. Directing the rover’s movements on her own, Stroupe recalls, “I could see every place we’d been and every place we’d go. I could see the