Friends in Space: How NASA’s Galileo Mission Inspired a Children’s Book

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Join Adventurers’ Club members Nagin Cox and Rosaly Lopes for a talk about their work on the Galileo mission, the challenges of space exploration, and the friendships it forged that led to the adventure of writing a children’s book for the first time.
The Galileo spacecraft arrived at Jupiter in 1995 and made remarkable discoveries until its plunge into Jupiter in 2003. Three young women from very different backgrounds who met and worked on the mission at JPL formed a deep friendship that spanned decades. Claudia Alexander started on Galileo as a scientist and eventually became the Project Manager, becoming the first female African-American woman to lead a major planetary mission. Nagin Cox worked the challenging mission operations and Rosaly Lopes led investigations of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io. After Claudia sadly passed away, Nagin and Rosaly came together to write a children’s book inspired by their friend, Claudia’s Class Goes to Mars.

Nagin Cox is a Mission Lead on NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she has held leadership roles on numerous interplanetary robotic missions. A former U.S. Air Force Space Operations Officer at NORAD/U.S. Space Command, she holds engineering and psychology degrees from Cornell University.  She is a recipient of three NASA Exceptional Service and Achievement medals, and the namesake of Asteroid 14061 (Nagincox). She serves on advisory councils for Human Rights watch, The Planetary Society, and Space for Humanity, and is a Fellow of The Explorers Club, a board member of the Adventurers’ Club of Los Angeles, and an adjunct Professor of Practice at the Air Force Institute of Technology.
Dr. Rosaly M. C. Lopes is a Senior Research Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a leading expert on volcanoes on Earth and across the Solar System. She has worked on the Galileo and Cassini missions, visited more than 60 active volcanoes on every continent, authored seven books and over 120 scientific publications, and lectures internationally on volcanology and space exploration. She is a recipient of numerous honors, including the Carl Sagan Medal, NASA’s Exceptional Service Medal, and the namesake of asteroid 22454 (Rosalylopes). Awarded the Lowell Thomas medal from the Explorer’s Club, she is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Geological Society of America, and a member of the International Academy of Astronautics.

This program was organized by Reymundo Perez #1219.