Jamie Rankin

Graduate Student

Graduate Student

Salt Lake City, Utah

I arrived in Pasadena, California, to begin graduate school at Caltech on Friday, August 31, 2012 -- just six days after Voyager 1’s own interstellar arrival. My new advisor, Ed Stone, invited me to attend the Voyager Science Steering Group meeting which started the following Monday.

I will never forget my first day on the job -- walking into a room full of world-class scientists engaged in lively discussion about humankind’s first in-situ measurements of interstellar space. Indeed, it was a historical moment, and there I was, a kid in her early 20s wearing sandals, shorts, and a comical t-shirt with a black-hole Pac-Man eating a bunch of planets. I scanned the room noting that I was a few decades younger than the mean of the age distribution and thought, “Wow, what will they think of me? I’d better quietly sneak into the back corner so no one notices.”

But, I did not go unnoticed. Dr. Stone saw me and smiled as I came in, and introduced me to the whole group. Suzanne Dodd even joked that they should include my picture on the front cover of the SSG report. The Voyager team was incredibly kind and welcoming, and I very quickly found myself at home in my new home.

Currently, my work on Voyager involves examining how the intensities of galactic cosmic rays change through their interactions with the heliosphere.

Even now, five years later, my time here as a graduate student at Caltech continues to be an incredible scientific journey -- I am greatly blessed and humbled by the privilege of working with Dr. Stone as my advisor and writing my thesis using the latest Voyager data -- humankind’s first in-situ measurements of interstellar space!

These spacecraft are more than a decade older than me, and yet are still on the cutting edge, pushing the boundaries of humankind’s understanding and ability to explore space. Every day as a graduate student here is like living in a legacy of discovery.