A lot of my role is advocacy, and as a scientist, you're an advocate, too, because you are coming up with a theory and having to convince your fellow scientists that you're right.
The public has an incredible capacity for appreciating the wonder of our planet, our solar system, our universe.
As a card-carrying space nerd and NASA's chief scientist, I love space movies, from 'Star Trek' to 'Star Wars' to my all-time favorite - 'The Dish', an Australian comedy that celebrates that first moment when Neil Armstrong stepped down onto the surface of our moon.
I'm so biased to this issue of the origins of life and the limits of life.
I'm actually a NASA brat. My father was a rocket scientist. He started working at NASA before it was NASA in 1959.
We have to ask, 'How can we break a huge challenge like sending humans to Mars into a series of doable, affordable steps? How can we break that problem down into chunks in order to keep making progress?'
To avoid congestion, I get up at 5:10, grab a slice of raisin toast, and leave the house at 6 A.M. My husband, Tim Dunn, who works for an environmental agency, is still asleep when I slip out, and I find that rather annoying.
People see space as a place where you go and cooperate.
Being able to have a laboratory on Mars, being able to have some sort of sustained human presence on Mars in the future, I think, is critically important for science.
If I had an unlimited budget, I would really be probing that question of life because we know what the questions are, and we know what the destinations are.
I wish someone would redo 'Dune.'
As chief scientist, it's sort of my job to look at bridges between what we do and to see the connections. But when we try to understand how are planets around other stars habitable... to looking back at the Earth - how are the changes that are taking place, how are they going to affect humanity?
What we expect to find, certainly in our own solar system, are probably simple single or multiple-cell forms of life. To get to intelligent life takes stability of conditions over huge, long periods of time.
'The Martian' may be fiction, but at NASA, we are working to make it a reality.
Mars missions will require up to three years in reduced gravity, so we need to make sure astronauts can not only survive but thrive as they move outward to explore this new world.
If you think of the Apollo capsule coming into Earth with a parachute, the Mars atmosphere is just so thin, you've got to find some way of slowing yourself down really rapidly.
We like to talk about pioneering Mars rather than just exploring Mars, because once we get to Mars, we will set up some sort of permanent presence.
With the mission to Mars, the whole world wants to get involved. So we actually have 13 different space agencies from around the world working on the global exploration road map.
Every time I give a talk, I ask the audience - especially if it's kids - how many want to go to Mars. At least half raise their hands. I don't think there's going to be any shortage of volunteers.
One of the big things about space exploration is that it is as expensive as it is complicated, and you need all the countries of the world to help if you want to accomplish big goals.
