Ashley Stroupe ’90 (third from left, kneeling) was one of 30 women who made “herstory” on Feb. 23 when, for the first time in NASA history, an all-female team took charge of operating NASA’s Mars rover, Spirit. The event was planned as an early celebration of Women’s History Month in March.

Unlike spacecraft operations teams of 10 years ago, women perform nearly every role in MER spacecraft operations, in both engineering and science. There are women who drive the rovers, who analyze the telemetry and who work with every science instrument. Ashley commented that the most remarkable thing about the February 22 achievement was that, to the MER team, it was unremarkable. On many previous occasions, the team had nearly consisted of all women merely by chance, and nobody can remember a day when no women participated in the commanding process. The MER team arranged this event, not for themselves, but to help demonstrate to the young women who may be tomorrow’s scientists and engineers that opportunities are within reach.

Ashley has been working with the Mars Rovers since August of 2004. She is a rover planner, one of the people who writes the command sequences that deal with rover motion (driving and moving the robotic arm). She says, “In fact, I am the first woman to drive solo on another planet. On that particular day, we used the robotic arm to take several images of the dust accumulating on the rover.”