#planetary scientist

This rumpled fabric at the corner looks like evidence of ongoing tectonic activity.

It's November 9th, Carl Sagan Day! On this day in 1934, the brilliant Carl Edward Sagan was born in Brooklyn, New York. A trip with his parents to the 1939 New York World's Fair sparked Sagan's lifelong interest in science. He was fascinated by scientific exhibits that turned a flashlight beam into a crackling sound and the sound of a tuning fork into a wave on an oscilloscope. He also saw an exhibit featuring the technology that would replace radio - television. The world held wonders of a kind he could never have imagined.

Sagan never lost his childhood passion for science. After he graduated from the University of Chicago with BA, BS, MS, and PhD degrees, he had a distinguished career as a professor at first Harvard and then Cornell. But that was just the beginning.

He went on to become America's pre-eminent astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, and – the role he is most famous for – science communicator. It seemed at the time that his crowning achievement was the 1980 blockbuster PBS documentary series "Cosmos" that he wrote, produced, narrated, and starred in.

But Sagan went on to do so much more. He wrote popular books such as "Pale Blue Dot," "The Demon-Haunted World," and "Contact" (which Hollywood turned into a movie, starring Jodie Foster). He helped send the first physical Earth messages into outer space –the Pioneer Plaque and the Voyager Golder Record. He convinced NASA to turn Voyager I's camera toward the Earth and take a picture of us from six billion kilometers away before the space probe left the solar system. This of course resulted in the famous "Pale Blue Dot" image.

A love of magnetic rocks, old machines and space recently led Beck Strauss to a dream job at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The path to that career wasn’t always clear. Yet it’s a perfect fit for someone who has studied everything from the cave formations called stalagmites to lava flowing on the planet Mercury.

Strauss is a planetary geophysicist who studies the magnetic fields of planets and how those fields are recorded in rocks. Electric currents deep within the Earth’s rocky core form a strong magnetic field. (That’s what causes magnets in compass needles to point north.) Understanding how magnetic fields change over time can tell researchers not only about the surface, but also about what’s inside a planet.

At NASA, Strauss is zapping rocks with laser beams to figure out how old they are. This scientist also is developing sensors to detect the moon’s magnetic field.

Like a compass, Strauss has helped guide other researchers too. Strauss identifies as both transgender and non-binary and uses the pronouns “they” and “them.” A transgender person’s identity doesn’t match the gender they were assigned at birth. Instead of male or female, non-binary people can feel like they’re both genders, neither or somewhere in the middle.

A few years ago, Strauss began working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Md. They wanted to join an LGBTQ+ employee club. They figured such a club would help them to make friends and be supported at work. But the club no longer existed. So Strauss formed a new one for employees and ran it for 18 months. The group helped get gender-neutral bathrooms on the campus. And it made NIST more welcoming to a diverse community of scientists.

"We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever."