#SoCaltech: Kathryn Stack Morgan

“Excitement is definitely the main thing I’m feeling right now, but there’s also a fair amount of anxiety. It’s hard not to think about how much is riding on Thursday’s landing—Perseverance’s mission and the whole Mars Sample Return effort. They don’t call rover landings ‘7 minutes of terror’ for nothing! When Curiosity landed in 2012, I was a graduate student at Caltech, and I felt like I was along for this really amazing and exciting ride but that someone else had built and was driving the car. But having been in a science leadership position on the Mars 2020 mission for the past several years, I’ve had the chance to experience the team’s incredible effort to build, launch, and land this rover on Mars. The stakes feel so much higher! I can’t wait to get back our first images from the surface at Jezero crater. I’ve been staring at and picking apart the orbiter images of our landing site for years now, so the opportunity to finally see the rocks on the ground through the eyes of the rover will be such an incredible experience.”

Kathryn Stack Morgan (PhD ’14) is a research scientist at JPL and deputy project scientist for the Mars 2020 mission.

#SoCaltech is an occasional series celebrating the diverse individuals who give Caltech its spirit of excellence, ambition, and ingenuity. Know someone we should profile? Send nominations to magazine@caltech.edu.