Anne-Marie Novo-Gradac

In 1994, we moved to Annapolis, Maryland, where I had accepted a faculty position at the United States Naval Academy. During my time at the Naval Academy, I conducted research on optical materials and taught a wide variety of physics courses to the Navy midshipmen studying at the Academy. Although I loved teaching, I found the research environment at the Naval Academy limiting. In 2001, I began looking for a different job. I learned of a position at Goddard Space Flight Center through a friend. I had no idea that NASA hired laser physicists. I never imagined I had a chance of working for NASA! Like many people of my generation, I had grown up watching NASA launches on TV with awe. One of my earliest memories is of the Apollo 11 lunar landing when I was 3 years old. (I can still remember how funny the astronauts looked as they bounced across the moon’s surface.) I never planned to work for NASA, and certainly had never dared to dream it. I got the interview and eventually a phone call offering me a job in the Lasers and Electro-optics Branch at Goddard. I literally skipped down the hallway with joy. I was going to work at NASA! I had been hired to help design the laser for the Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) instrument on the MESSENGER mission. Two months after starting work at Goddard, the laser physicist in charge of the team left NASA for a job in industry. I was promoted to team lead for the MLA laser and given full responsibility for delivering space flight hardware. This profoundly changed me from a research physicist to an aerospace design engineer almost overnight. I had to consider issues such as mass, volume, and power consumption. I could no longer work in the vacuum of a laboratory, but had to negotiate detailed interfaces with the other subsystems of the instrument. I never imagined that my dream job would require so much planning. I rose to the challenge and led my team for the next 2 years, delivering the laser for integration into the MLA instrument in July 2003. MESSENGER launched in 2004 and will arrive at Mercury in March 2011. During the voyage, the instrument has been turned on several times, and each time it has operated flawlessly. From 2003 to 2005, I led a research effort to examine failure modes of space-based lasers and worked to enhance performance and reliability of these systems. Some of the issues my team and I studied were long-term optical damage, contamination, thermal management, radiation tolerance, and reliability of commercial piece parts. In 2005, I took over leadership of the team building the laser for the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA), an instrument on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). LRO is currently orbiting the moon, and the LOLA instrument has produced over 1 billion laser shots on orbit, returning the most detailed topographical data of the moon ever recorded. During each of these projects at Goddard, I accepted more and more management responsibilities. I spent an increasing amount of time organizing and facilitating the work of other scientists and engineers and less and less time doing the hands-on work myself. I realized that it was my job to make sure other people had the resources to get their jobs done. I no longer had the luxury of being in the lab myself. I was just too darn good at planning! In 2007, I was offered a position as a program executive in the Astrophysics