In a corner of Jan Rogers' desk sits a bottle of
soft drink that was not a marketing success. But it does represent a bit
of Rogers' work and where she hopes to conduct in in the next few years.
The drink is Orbitz which has small globules of candy suspended inside. Rogers has spent most of her professional career studying how fluids react to each other, including suspending drops of one fluid inside another to simulate fluid behavior in the free-fall of space.
The drink globules are about the size of metal samples that will be measured as they melt, vibrate, and freeze inside TEMPUS, the German-built electromagnetic levitation furnace making its second flight aboard MSL-1.
As the U.S. project scientist for TEMPUS, Rogers will help direct work with the furnace during the MSL-1 mission. Eventually, she hopes to do the work directly on TEMPUS or other facilities as an astronaut.
Rogers earned her bachelor's in chemical engineering at the University of Colorado, then went to work for IBM as a chemical process engineer. She went on to a master's degree and then a doctorate, all at Colorado. (She still goes to college, only now it's as an adjunct professor, teaching chemical engineering thermodynamics at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.)
In 1989 won a graduate fellowship to work with Dr. Don Frazier of MSFC's Space Sciences Laboratory on what happens when immiscible liquids meet.
Immiscible means that the chemistry of the two materials keep them from mixing, like oil and water. Rogers studied how they react when droplets collide or coalesce. She continued her work at Marshall, for a contractor, then as a National Research Council associate, and now as a NASA employee.
She also applied to be a mission specialist, a NASA scientist-astronaut. Rogers made it to the final interviews when she was disqualified because her uncorrected eyesight was just shy of what NASA would allow. The requirements have since been relaxed and she plans to apply again.
Along the way, her career took off - literally.
"Mike Robinson [the MSL-1 mission scientist] had a piece of equipment designed to work as an electromagnetic levitation furnace aboard the KC-135 zero-g aircraft," Rogers explained. "Mike was looking for someone to run the experiments aboard the plane." At the same time, in August 1994, Rogers joined SSL as a civil servant. Her experience with that series of experiments led to her appointment as U.S. project scientist for TEMPUS when Robinson had to devote his time to MSL-1.
"I enjoy it quite a bit," she said. "I'm the official NASA point of contact for the scientists. I have to make sure that the best things happen for the U.S. principal investigators and for TEMPUS in general."
After the mission, she goes back to her research projects.
"I am a co-investigator on other projects that have gone on the back burner," she said. One is a project to compress into the space of two lockers a holographic imaging system that took the space of a double rack on earlier Spacelab missions. With luck, she will get to operate it aboard the Space Station in a few years.
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Authors: Dave
Dooling, Jan
Rogers
Curator: Linda Porter
NASA Official: Greg
Wilson