Dr holly gilbert astrophysicist degrasse

Dr. Holly Gilbert is the Deputy Division Director of the Heliophysics Science Division at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She is also the NASA Deputy Project Scientist for Solar Orbiter, a collaborative mission between NASA and ESA dedicated to solar and heliospheric physics, set to launch in 2018.

How did your career path lead to NASA?

I started out as a physics major in undergraduate school and I was always interested in astronomy.

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I started an internship at UCAR’s High Altitude Observatory, which is a place that has solar data and studies the sun, and I immediately fell in love with the images I was seeing. I was so impressed with this big ball of fire (that’s what I used to think the sun was), and all of a sudden it became this incredible ball of magnetic fields and plasma, and to find out that we don’t know a whole lot about the sun – we do, but there’s so much we still have to explore.

It just caught my attention, and that’s when I became interested