When NASA successfully landed a rover on Mars last month Áine O’Brien, a Glasgow-based physicist, was overwhelmingly emotional.
The 29-year-old has spent the last four years studying organic compounds in martian meteorites and is working to determine whether the Red Planet has the components necessary to support life.
Watching the Perseverance rover mission come to a successful landing on February 18 this year was a moment for real celebration.
The project seeks to find signs of ancient life and collect samples of rock and regolith which can hopefully return to Earth.
Áine, a PhD student at Glasgow University, could barely hold back the tears when she was interviewed on BBC Scotland’s The Nine on the night of the landing and her excitement was infectious to anyone watching.
“I can’t tell you how many emotions I’ve had,” she said. “To have achieved this in a pandemic, there are no words for how excited and relieved we all are.”
Áine studies and analyses the Mars meteorites on a daily basis.
She told the Record: “One of the meteorite samples I’ve been working on is a bit of Mars which has now gone back there on the rover.”
She laughed: “It’s like one of my little babies has gone home.”
In an industry still so overwhelmingly lacking in gender equality, this passion is inspiring - especially in someone who was told at age 16 “you should be a nurse because you’re a woman”.
Speaking ahead of International Women’s Day on March 8, Áine told the Record how important the Mars landing is in inspiring the next generation of female scientists to continue solar exploration.
A survey by the Royal Astronomical Society in 2016 revealed that, at professorial level, women make up just 12% of those working in astronomy (up from 6% from 2010), 21% of those in solar system science (up from 13% in 2010), and 10% of those in solid-Earth geophysics (up from 8% in 2010).
Áine works part-time as a diversity officer for the society and agrees work being done to encourage women, non-binary and other minorities into the sector isn’t good enough.
She said: “There’s a lot of visibility about the issue but it has clearly not actually changed as a system yet in academia.”
Áine said she is still struck by an experience age 16, when a senior engineer tried to discourage her from the industry.
She said: “This has always been a thing that is really close to my heart.
“Go back about 13 years ago when I was 16, I thought I was going to be an engineer and I was on work experience.
“I spent a week at an engineering firm at home in Newcastle going round with different staff.
“On day two I was assigned to this bloke. I arrived and said “hello, I’m 16 I want to be an engineer” and he said, deadly serious, “well, you’re a woman you should be a nurse”.”
The feeling of discomfort at these words is something Áine says she’ll never forget.
“That company had 80 engineers and only one was a woman, who was a placement student doing a year in industry,” she said.
“That moment was a big defining thing for me, I’ll never forget how awkward I felt.”
The comment turned her off the idea of engineering, but luckily finding positive female mentors stopped Áine from abandoning science altogether.
“That put me off and I decided I wouldn’t be an engineer but then a few weeks later I got a scholarship for a space camp and met loads of amazing women who were undergrads and postgrads studying physics and I thought this is clearly a bit better.
“So I studied physics and astrophysics and I think my undergrad degree was about 85% men and 15% women.”
Áine says mentorship for women in science is key to changing diversity problems.
“That’s where I think I have been so lucky,” she said.
“Loads of studies show that mentoring is one of the most affective ways you can change things and make things more diverse.”
However, Áine insists mentorship should not only fall on the shoulders of those who have broken the glass ceilings.
She said: “It’s really hard if you’re a trailblazer.
“In 2019 there was the first black woman to graduate with a physics PhD from Glasgow Uni [Dr Monifa Phillips] which is amazing but that’s so much on her because she can’t be that support person for everyone.
“I’m not saying the onus should always be on someone exactly like you. It comes down to men as well, it shouldn’t just be about women supporting women it’s about everyone supporting each other.
“Find someone you think sounds cool and ask if you can get a coffee or a zoom call and ask them questions. Most people will be really touched and if they say no then you know they wouldn’t have made a good mentor anyway.”
Looking back on her time as an undergraduate at Leicester University, Áine says things are slowly getting better.
“I don’t remember a single physics lecturer who was a woman, I think I had one maths lecturer but I can’t remember a single science lecturer who was a woman in my four years of my degree.
“It’s better now. They have a female head of department who is amazing.”
She added: “There are amazing people who are working really hard to change it. People like the physicist Jess Wade who makes new Wikipedia articles for women and people of colour.
“There’s a real movement, mostly among young new researchers, to say let's make this a better environment to work in.
“There’s a whole skills gap, we need a bigger workforce because space exploration is expanding in the UK and just on that alone it seems daft to ignore the fact that there are whole sections of the workforce who could potentially be in our field who are being pushed out.”
Seeing people similar to you represented in the industry is transformative.
Áine believes part of improving the future for women in science relies on revisiting the past and finally paying tribute to those history has overlooked.
“Historically women couldn’t get degrees or be members of the big societies but loads of them still went and did it anyway,” she said.
“They managed to get published without the PhD or a lot were in partnership with their husbands who of course got all the praise but actually it was the women who did half if not more of all the work.
“Before actual computers were a thing we had people being the computers and they were all women.
“They were told to go and do the maths that the men couldn’t be bothered to do. If you watch the film Hidden Figures, that’s what they were.”
Áine points to Dr Swati Mohan, the Indian-American space engineer who was the Guidance and Controls Operations Lead on the NASA Mars 2020 mission.
Friends had texted Áine their emotion at seeing Dr Mohan wearing a bindi while leading the operation.
It was a small victory which spoke to so many Indian women who normally go unrecognised in the industry.
Áine said: “I have so many friends who are Indian who wept when they saw that because they had been bullied as kids for wearing their bindi to school and told a space career couldn’t be for them and then here they were watching a rover land on another planet and this woman was at NASA in charge of the whole operation.
“Friends were texting me saying ‘I wish I’d seen that when I was eight-years-old.’”
Thankfully lack of recognition for women in their fields is becoming less common, but Áine says it still exists.
“You only have to look at most of the coverage of the rover mission last month, the people who were mostly on the TV and in the things put out by the UK Space Agency were all the senior professors who are involved but really it’s their students and post-docs who do the work.”
The world of academia can be an intimidating one and Áine believes cutting through the jargon is the best way to inspire the next generation.
“I try to cut through the pointless fancy words,” she said.
“People in academia have been in it their whole life for the most part and use jargon that is just pointless.”
As a former teacher, Áine understands the best ways of engaging the wider public in the subject of space exploration, which many often dismiss as unnecessary.
She said: “When people say space doesn’t impact me, they may not know it but it does.
“There’s so little you can do everyday that doesn’t rely on some kind of space technology. Even banking goes via a satellite, tracking weather patterns, GPS systems, climate change, even fighting crime.
“One of the big things is natural disaster monitoring such as volcanic eruptions. We are so much more equipped to look at those and predict what’s going to come next with those emergencies because we have an amazing array of satellites going around the Earth.
“For me, that’s why space is so important. The whole infrastructure of our day-to-day life (unless you live completely off grid) relies on it.”
She added: “Of course there are dangerous sides as well. They say that if you’re reading a newspaper on the street a satellite can read the headline. It’s an interesting world.”
The Mars Perseverance rover landing was a cause for celebration, but also left some questioning whether the billions it cost to carry out was really worth it.
For Áine, space exploration is about discovering our place in the universe. Asking where we came from, what came before us and, crucially, where are we going next.
She said: “The solar exploration is the side which is really pushing the boundaries and for me it’s all about understanding our universe, understanding where we came from.
“There has been a lot of chat recently about how much this costs and whether it is worth it but it’s so little compared to the militarization of things.
“The perseverance rover mission cost under $3billion, that’s in total not per year. That is only 33 hours of the cost of running the US Department of Defence. I think it’s really important to get that perspective.”
She added: “The European Space Agency which is made up of loads of different countries costs per head about ten euros a year per person.”
It’s hoped samples from Mars will be brought to Earth in the early 2030s, meaning much of Áine’s job revolves around mapping out what scientists will do far into the future.
She said: “It’s weird that it’s going to be so long before samples are brought back.
“We have to think, what will we need to know in 10 to 15 years time when we also don’t know what else we’ll find out in the meantime.
“There’s no way of predicting for sure but we just need to think what could we do?
“That’s always been a thing with space science, the continuity is so important. We have to make sure that the next generation understands what’s happening because we will loose all the skill and knowledge.
“Luckily there is also enough stuff happening in between all the big stuff and lots of reasons to be excited.”
For updates on her work and the Mars mission, follow Áine on Twitter and Instagram.
