A planetary geologist traces how curiosity, unexpected detours, and early exploration led to a rover mission on Mars.
Katie Stack Morgan is a planetary geology researcher and the lead scientist for the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover, “the most advanced robotic explorer ever sent to the Red Planet.” It was designed to seek signs of ancient microbial life and collect rock/soil samples to return to Earth. Katie leads a massive international team of 450 scientists.
Ever since she was a child attending star parties and Mars viewings with her father, Katie has been fascinated by space, stars, and black holes.
However, her journey to leading a Mars rover mission was not a simple, linear path into planetary science. Instead, her career has been defined by a willingness to step outside of her comfort zone, take unexpected off-ramps, and embrace new challenges. This mindset was fostered in part during her first independent learning experience as a high school student at the EXPLO summer program.
Katie attended EXPLO during the summer before her senior year, as a day student on the Yale campus. “It was a great first taste of what college would be like. . . . In high school everyone took the same, required classes, but at EXPLO I could follow my interests and choose what I wanted to study.”
Though her love for outer space was already strong at this age, Katie purposely took the opportunity to explore other subjects. She recalls taking courses in math and American history during that summer.
One class in particular stuck with her. While learning about fractals, they watched the 1998 German film Run Lola Run. “It’s about the butterfly effect—how one small perturbation can result in a totally different outcome,” says Katie. “I just remember talking about it with the class and having this truly cerebral moment,” she says. “These were concepts I’d never thought about before. That really stuck with me because it was such an eye-opening experience.”
EXPLO, Katie says, broadened her horizons. The design of the program then, and now, encourages deep thought, open discussion, and exploration of curiosity.
“You don’t know what you don’t know. And then suddenly you are exposed to it and you’re like, wow, there’s a whole other world out here . . . there are so many interesting things to learn about . . . that was very much my experience during EXPLO,” says Katie.
Those positive experiences of stepping outside of her comfort zone and digging into her interests at EXPLO primed Katie to continue stoking the fire of her curiosity. She credits EXPLO with providing the positive reinforcement needed to take risks, noting that if you never stray from your original plan, you might miss the “off-ramps that become the new main freeway.”
While attending Williams College, she enrolled in a planetary geology tutorial, even though she was on the path to become an astrophysicist (one she did not anticipate straying from). That is, until the tutorial changed the trajectory of her life.
“Planetary geology really spoke to me because we can use the commonplace rocks on Earth in our backyards or in the road cut along the highway to study the origin and history of far distant planets,” says Katie. “Building this connection between familiar and alien worlds in our Solar System is one of my favorite things about studying planets.”
Katie made the pivot, crammed her schedule full of geology classes, and set out to accomplish a new goal: to be a planetary geologist. The geological observations Katie made on Earth “informed these exciting, bigger questions that I want to ask about the solar system,” she says.
After graduation, Katie enrolled at Caltech for her PhD. “As a PhD student, I had the good fortune to have an advisor who was the lead scientist of the Curiosity rover mission at the time.”
Working on her PhD, at times, was isolating, Katie admits. But working on the rover? That was energizing.
“It was just this really interactive experience where I could focus on problem solving,” says Katie. “Joining the Mars rover team gave me instant access to a whole community of like-minded scientists and other engineers with shared interests and the same goal—to use Curiosity to make incredible new scientific discoveries on Mars.”
It reminded her of her time at EXPLO.
As a day student at EXPLO, Katie formed a tight-knit bond with a diverse group of peers. She recalls fond memories of birthday parties, mini golfing, and even matching “day student” t-shirts that the group made for themselves. Despite having different backgrounds, “the experience brought us together. We really connected with each other,” she says fondly.
For Katie, the experience was one of “finding people who are a little bit like you.”
“I think the Mars rover teams are a lot like this,” she says. “Because you come onto the rover team, and you realize, ‘You all like the things that I like,’ and ‘You like to ask the same kind of questions.’ That’s what EXPLO was like for me: ‘This is my crew.’”
Today Katie’s “crew” consists of a massive international team of 450 scientists. She uses the relationship-building skills and collaboration she first experienced at EXPLO to navigate cultural dynamics, understand people’s motivations, and unite a team around shared goals.
“One of the things I enjoy is just observing our team and trying to understand the motivations and priorities of the people around me—why they’re doing what they’re doing, why they’re saying what they’re saying,” says Katie.
“I observe in so many different aspects of what I do,” she adds, noting that as a Mars rover scientist, much of what she does is observe the surface of the planet and its geological properties.
“You’re looking for all those little details, and at the same time putting new data into a broader context and recalling observations of other rock outcrops you’ve seen or visited before. You look for patterns and connections across different scales and different datasets, sometimes asking, ‘How does this new view from the rover on the ground compare with what we viewed of the surface from an orbiter image?’” says Katie. “It’s a constant feedback loop of observe, integrate, synthesize.”
This attention to detail and the problem solving it takes to create a comprehensive narrative of the Red Planet gives Katie purpose.
“I really enjoy pulling out those details and trying to put it in a big picture framework, especially on a rover mission,” says Katie. “As the rover drives along, it’s really easy to focus only on the really cool rocks right in front of the rover that we’re looking at today. But I most enjoy asking, ‘How does this little rock we’ve looked at today fit into the whole history of the crater that we’re studying?’”
“The rovers are very aptly named,” says Katie cheekily, making reference to the bots’ monikers, Curiosity and Perseverance.
“Curiosity is where it all starts. You have to always be asking questions,” says Katie. “I’ve had many positive experiences in academic settings, and so I’ve really benefited from that. I think that helped to foster my love of learning, the desire to ask questions about the world and solar system around me, and to be engaged in the research and academic world. And EXPLO was the start of that.”