When I was younger I was always fascinated by astronomy.
And I can remember just looking up in space
and looking out at the stars out there wondering what was out there.
I actually wanted to be an aerospace engineer even when I was a little girl.
I really liked math, and I liked you know space, and astronauts.
And I would write letters to the NASA centers, and get pictures and stuff.
I had posters in my bedroom of Jupiter, and Neptune, and Saturn. I thought they were just amazing.
As a little kid Jupiter was my planet.
I would look out there and you couldn't touch it,
you couldn't learn about it enough because you couldn't get there.
And so I always had this yearning to want to reach out.
When people would ask me "what do you want to do when you grow up?"
I said I want to work on spaceships.
I really wanted to work on rockets and build things that would go into space.
It's just really exciting to have a chance to do something
that I really wanted to do when I was a little kid.
For whatever reason I got lucky and I'm the head of Juno.
And I'm reaching out.
And of course I could never have done it myself. It's only through everybody reaching together that we can reach at all.
It started out on the back of an envelope, as many things do.
It's amazing being able to see a vague notion that you have in your brain turn into
a real piece of hardware that is going to fly all the way to Jupiter.
So Juno is really an incredible international mission.
It's a very large mission. It involves people from many many different countries.
Scientists, engineers, administrative people, technicians, people who do purchasing.
I mean, it's amazing how many people in different walks of life have to be involved in making a mission like this happen.
It's a big public endeavor. Everybody's involved.
We really have the A-team here. And it's amazing that when you get that kind of atmosphere,
and that kind of collaboration, and synergy, how that can just make the whole thing,
even the hardest problem that much more palatable.
We check our egos at the door. We roll our sleeves up.
And then we just dive in and work whatever needs to be worked.
I think that it's a tremendous experience to be involved in something where we can learn about how planets formed.
We ask why are we here, where do we come from.
Jupiter is the place to go to understand our origins. How the solar system formed.
How the earth got its water and organic molecules.
And whether we are a typical planetary system in the cosmos.
You get to open a door that's never been opened by a human before.
You're sending something to someplace where few things have ever gone.
When you work on a project like Juno, which is really exciting, and there's a lot riding on it,
and a lot of people working on something that takes a long time to prepare,
there's an opportunity to be really anxious,
there's an opportunity to be really excited.
You can worry about all kinds of things.
In a way it's like having a child.
You rear this child throughout the years, and then all of a sudden they take off on their own and they become independent.
It feels a little like an unruly teenager that I'm ready to get out of the house.
Some of those cameras really do feel like my babies
that I've been working on for such a long time. It's gonna be really wonderful.
We developed the design for the spacecraft.
We put it together and we let it fly.
There's nothing like listening to that launch vehicle take off.
And watching something that you've built, and poured a lot of time and energy into, leave the planet.
You know that the whole team has done everything they can
to ensure mission success.
But there are no guarantees. So, I think pretty much everybody holds their breath and just waits.
I think it's starting to hit all of us.
How close we are, and this is really gonna happen.
I'm excited to see this thing go and shake people's hands and walk away proud of working this mission.
I don't know what else in life that you could do that would be so exciting
and so different all the time. And again, have such job satisfaction.
It's very rare to see a team that knows how to work together the way that this team does.
It's quite a privilege and honor to be able to perform in this role.
This is certainly the best job I've ever had and I love it.
It's such a fun job and it's really a wonderful way to make the world seem even bigger than it is.
(Cheering)