Long before Nasa became part of her life, when she was growing up in England, Fox’s fascination with the universe was nurtured by her father.
“He would carry me in from the car, and he would always point up at the moon and say, ‘Just think, men are up there right now’.”
She credits her father with encouraging a fascination with space, and said he was enamoured with missions such as Apollo, Gemini and Mercury.
Since his passing, she has often thought about what it would have meant to him to know that “the 2-year-old he was carrying … would one day be sitting in the launch readiness review for the Artemis mission”.
Cowan asked Fox whether being a woman in science had impacted her pursuit of the field, but Fox said she grew up largely free from stereotypes that might discourage her from exploring her interests.
“I went to an all-girls school,” she said.
“So I actually never experienced the stereotypes that say girls do this and boys do that, because we were expected to take all of the subjects. And I genuinely loved physics.”
However, Fox never imagined working for Nasa.
Her big break came while attending a conference in Alaska as a graduate student, where a chance conversation with someone from Nasa led to an invitation for a two-year postdoctoral opportunity in Maryland, US.
Although she initially wanted to return to England, Fox ended up staying in the US after being offered a job at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
She spent 20 years there before returning to Nasa.
Now, she is helping oversee one of Nasa’s most ambitious telescope projects yet.
Fox explained how much more of the universe the new telescope will be able to survey.
“What Nancy Grace Roman can do in a month would have taken a century for Hubble to do.”
She described it as the “biggest astrophysics telescope in terms of the data it provides”. According to Nasa, it will send back 1.4 terabytes of data every day.
Scientists hope the information will help them tackle some of the biggest unanswered questions about the universe.
“How does our universe work? What is our place in our universe? Are we really alone?” she said.
One major focus will be dark matter, which Fox describes as “the fabric of the universe”.
“When you look at the universe, and you see galaxies, and you see stars, and you see planets, between those, there’s dark matter. It’s very hard to measure because you can’t see it.”
The telescope will also capture images of planets outside our solar system, using more powerful equipment that allows them to see more clearly.
“You’re looking for the atmosphere around it and asking whether it has the make-up, the ingredients that might be able to sustain life.”
For Fox, the question of whether there’s life beyond Earth is a mystery she hopes to have answered in her lifetime.
“Why is it successful here? Did it start on Mars? Did it start in other places in the solar system, in the much younger solar system, and then it didn’t take there? Those are the things we study all the time.”
Fox encouraged young people to be curious to find their vocation.
“I think sometimes people think you have to be super smart to be a scientist. You just have to be really curious. You have to like asking questions. You have to want to know more about anything, even if it’s not space.”