Woman called MOM leads Pluto mission
As the world celebrates the first spacecraft to visit Pluto, one of the heroes of the hour is a woman everyone on her staff calls Mom.
They're not being overly familiar. Alice Bowman is the MOM, or mission operations manager, for NASA's New Horizons, the piano-sized ship that swooped close to Pluto on Tuesday after a 3-billion-mile, 9.5-year journey. New Horizons captured the first detailed images of Pluto, images recalibrating our understanding of the solar system. And scientists and engineers alike say Bowman has been crucial to the spacecraft's triumph.
"It's really a credit to Alice's leadership that our mission has been so safely delivered across the solar system," says New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and the driving force behind the mission.
It was Bowman, 54, who announced, "We have a healthy spacecraft," when New Horizons finally phoned home late Tuesday after its flyby 13 hours earlier. And it was Bowman who prompted chants of "A-lice! A-lice! A-lice!" when she walked into the news conference after confirming that the spacecraft had survived the flyby.
Her colleagues at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which manages the spacecraft for NASA, describe her as "a rock" and "the glue that holds all the pieces together." Slight and soft-spoken, she couldn't be more different in superficial details from the gruff, crew-cut flight directors of America's early space program. But those who know her say she shares the qualities of those legends.
When flight controllers unexpectedly lost touch with the spacecraft 10 days before the flyby, "she was very calm, cool and collected. You would not have known she was under any pressure whatsoever," says Valerie Mallder, New Horizons deputy mission systems engineer.
"She's here early in the morning before I get in and many times she's still here when I'm leaving," says Chris Hersman, New Horizons mission systems engineer. Every few weeks, engineers send the spacecraft thousands — or tens of thousands — of commands. Bowman reviews them all.
As MOM, she is responsible for the communications to and from the spacecraft and for supervising the flight team that monitors the spacecraft's health. It is also her job to balance the demands of the researchers, who always want more data, with the well-being of the spacecraft and the engineers. Colleagues say it is a difficult and unforgiving role that she performs superbly.
She had no hesitation "about being a good mom, in both senses of the word, and saying, 'My flight team is under a lot or pressure … and cannot do this extra work,'" says Joel Parker, a New Horizons scientist at the Southwest Research Institute.
The space missions and sci-fi TV shows of the 1960s prompted Bowman, a native of Richmond, Va., and the daughter of a teacher and an architect, to a career in science. She earned undergraduate degrees in chemistry and physics before becoming the first female operations manager at the Applied Physics Laboratory. Married and the mother of an adult son, she plays bass in a bluegrass band, often jamming on a special bass her husband built for her.
In recent weeks, the air mattress in her office has often been pressed into service, and there were a number of days early this week when she didn't go home at all. She dismisses the disruption as trivial compared to the mission.
"This is what we'd been working for nine years, and there was no way anyone was going to keep me away. … We did everything that we knew to do to make it successful," she says. When the spacecraft signaled that it was alive and well, "it was a huge sense of accomplishment."