Favorite/Least Favorite Job Activities

Without a doubt, my favorite thing is getting my hands on new Mars data and tearing into it to see what it has to tell us. In the case of my HST work, it's always a thrill to finally get the processing done, and to be the first one to lay eyes on a new picture of Mars. It's also exciting when I can make some of the pictures available to the public, and can see that people who don't think about Mars for a living are also excited by the results. In the future, I'm looking forward to seeing the MARCI camera launched; it'll be mind-boggling to have a piece of equipment I've actually worked on heading off toward Mars!

The biggest "downside" of research is all the time it takes to write proposals for funding. Sometimes, it seems that almost as much time is needed to write the proposals as is available to do the actual research! All in all, though, the excitement of doing the work far outweighs the drawbacks.