{"id":42097,"date":"2015-08-02T15:24:41","date_gmt":"2015-08-02T15:24:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=42097"},"modified":"2018-04-20T02:27:13","modified_gmt":"2018-04-20T02:27:13","slug":"moogega-cooper-the-jpls-space-engineer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=42097","title":{"rendered":"Moogega Cooper: The JPL’s Space Engineer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Moogega Cooper: The JPL’s Space Engineer<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

LA Weekly<\/a>
\nLos Angeles, California
\n2014-05-14<\/p>\n

Sophia Kercher<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Somewhere on Mars<\/a>, the initials of NASA’s<\/a> Jet Propulsion Lab<\/a>, J-P-L, are written in Morse code<\/a> spanning hundreds of meters across the red planet. It’s this kind of detail that thrills JPL scientist Moogega Cooper<\/a> – especially since JPL, considered NASA’s little brother, accomplished this on the sly.<\/p>\n

“Initially, for the robotics missions, we had JPL [stamped] on the wheels so that as it rolls along Mars it would tag Mars: JPL, JPL, JPL. And NASA stepped in and said, ‘No, you can’t do that,’?” Cooper explains. “So JPL said, ‘OK, sure, we’ll take that off.’ And instead they put it in Morse code.”<\/p>\n

Cooper, named rainbow or “moo-jee-gae” by her Korean mother and raised by her African-American World War II<\/a> veteran father, is a human comet of beauty, intelligence and creativity. The scientist graduated from high school at 16, and at 24 earned her Ph.D., then launched her NASA career.<\/p>\n

Now 28, she is a planetary protection<\/a> engineer at JPL. A big part of her job is making sure that NASA doesn’t contaminate other planets with terrestrial microorganisms or any other Earth life, and vice versa – bacteria from, say, Mars, that could potentially harm humans…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Moogega Cooper: The JPL’s Space Engineer LA Weekly Los Angeles, California 2014-05-14 Sophia Kercher Somewhere on Mars, the initials of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, J-P-L, are written in Morse code spanning hundreds of meters across the red planet. It’s this kind of detail that thrills JPL scientist Moogega Cooper – especially since JPL, considered NASA’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,1245,8,20],"tags":[20603,20604,16657,20605,20602,28476,19572,20601],"class_list":["post-42097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-biography","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-jet-propulsion-laboratory","tag-jpl","tag-la-weekly","tag-mars","tag-moogega-cooper","tag-moogega-cooper-stricker","tag-nasa","tag-sophia-kercher"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42097"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56226,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42097\/revisions\/56226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}