Dave Williams, Planetary Scientist

A planetary scientist studies the planets, moons, and other bodies in our solar system and beyond. They archive data collected by spacecraft missions over the last 70 years, from Sputnik to Artemis, to ensure the data will be available well into the future.

In 1996, I got an email from a third grade teacher named Joan Goble from Cannelton, Indiana. Her class was doing a project on local trees, and one of the trees had a sign that said it was a “Moon Tree,” and they wanted to know what it was. I had never heard of them, and when I researched it and found out what an interesting story it was, I put up a web page and asked people to let me know if they knew of any of these trees. And I started getting lots of emails.

As long as I can remember, I’d loved science. I think I really got interested in planetary and lunar science because of reading science fiction, the Apollo missions, model rockets, the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” rock collecting, and even a poster I had on my wall when I was little (that I still have!). Then I had some great teachers and professors who really sparked my interest.

A lot of the data we have are very old, and some are in older formats, sort of like different languages, that are difficult to read. We are going through these older data and deciphering them so they can be read and used by researchers today. It’s sort of like detective work, or solving puzzles, so I really enjoy it.

Everyone knows about the Apollo missions, but what a lot of people don’t know is that the astronauts set up a bunch of instruments on the surface of the Moon that kept running after they left, and these instruments continued to return data to Earth for many years. So there is a lot more Apollo data than just photographs and rock samples, and we are still busy with this to this day. These data will be useful for planning our return to the Moon.