Working at NASA meant that I could use
my creativity and design process that I really enjoyed doing.
to think outside of the box while still doing engineering.
As a kid, I never in a million years pictured myself working at NASA.
Working on lunar soils and helping to develop tires for rovers and being able
to send those to the Moon or Mars and actually seeing your work completed.
That's that's just huge.
My name is Heather Oravec.
I am a research engineer here at NASA Glenn Research Center.
My job is.
to help develop
and test tires for planetary rovers for both robotic and for manned missions.
And these missions are going to go and explore places on the moon and Mars
that have previously never been explored.
Tires need to be tested.
so that you know your tire is going to function properly.
on the moon.
These tires are extremely important to any type of roving mission.
I would compare it to driving your car.
How important are the tires on your car?
If the tires on your cargo flat, you're not getting very far.
So if we send a rover up to the Moon and our tires fail,
there's nobody up there that can fix it.
Essentially, that mission is over.
Most of the previous lunar missions and the Mars missions.
They're generally designed for very short durations and very short distances.
If you look at the lunar roving vehicle
I think the longest distance that traveled was on the order of 22 miles.
The Mars Rovers, Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity...those
drove anywhere from less than a mile up to 28 miles.
So we're talking very short distances.
Now, for future missions, we're looking at driving
thousands of miles on a vehicle that can last up to 10 years.
That's why we call this the reinvention of the wheel.
We're going to have to up our game and definitely test these
to further limits than they've ever been tested to before.
The Slope Lab here at
NASA Glenn Research Center was developed in the early 2000s.
This is a very unique one-of-a-kind
indoor test facility where we can test full size roving
vehicles on actual lunar soil simulants, and with the tilting bed.
So, I get to work in a lab that has a giant sandbox in it.
And in the giant sandbox, we get to drive rovers,
and as we're driving the rovers, we're taking all sorts of different data
and evaluating the performance of the tires.
For testing tires, a typical day is actually pretty routine.
I want to make sure that I have
the appropriate hardware, the appropriate test article,
and the appropriate test fixtures in place on the test rig.
I'll probably spend the better part of the day in the lab running these tests
and recording the data.
We'll use that data to compare to other tires
and see the similarities or the differences in performance.
And that helps us to see which design features of the tire are working
well for us and which design features need to be improved upon.
I would tell
somebody who is thinking that NASA is nothing more than astronauts
or rocket scientists that that's just a stereotype.
It is so much more than that.
There are so many more opportunities here.
My path is something that I didn't even realize I could do.
I grew up out in the country in a smaller town.
My father was a welder and fabricator.
And my mom was a secretary.
I would say in my time in high school and just growing up,
the STEM fields weren't promoted as they are today.
Especially for females wanting to go into the math and sciences.
It was probably high school my junior year of high school in physics class,
that's when I was first introduced to STEM.
And there are so many positions as a STEM
career...STEM engineer that you don't know that even are out there.
Some that I don't even know are out there.
My advice to students who have an interest in automotive space
or designing tires for spaceflight, or even just working at NASA
as an engineer, and I'm going to say one of my favorite quotes of all time.
It’s from George Frideric Handel. It’s...
Learn all there is to learn and then choose your own path.
Students today have so many opportunities in the STEM area
that are available to them. See what you like.
See what you're good at.
See what you don't like.
Learn all there is to learn.
And then you can really choose your own path.
And as long as you have the aptitude and the willingness to learn,
you're already there.
You can achieve what you want to achieve.