Event Details (U.S. National Park Service)

★

Special Event

Fee:

Free.

Location: LAT/LONG: 34.685654, -76.526238

Event will take place inside the Harkers Island Visitors Center

Dates & Times

Date:

Saturday, April 26, 2025

Time:

4:00 PM

Duration:

2 hours

Type of Event

Campfire/Evening Program

Partner Program

Talk

Description

Nagin has been exploring since she decided as a teenager that she wanted to work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She was born in Bangalore, India, and grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Nagin has held leadership and system engineering positions on interplanetary robotic missions including the Galileo mission to Jupiter, the Mars Exploration Rovers, the Kepler exoplanet hunter, InSight, the Mars Curiosity Rover, the 2020 Perseverance Rover, Mars Sample Return, and the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE) team. She is currently a Mission Lead on the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover and the Curiosity Rover.

Nagin is honored to be the namesake for Asteroid 14061. She has also received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal and two NASA Exceptional Achievement Medals. She is a U.S. Department of State’s STEM Speaker and has spoken to audiences around the US, the Arctic, Africa, Canada, Central America, Europe, the Middle East, Russia, South America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia on the stories of the people behind the missions.

Before her time at NASA JPL, she served in the US Air Force including duty as a Space Operations Officer at NORAD/US Space Command. Nagin holds engineering degrees from Cornell University and the Air Force Institute of Technology as well as a psychology degree from Cornell. She has recently reengaged with the Air Force as a Professor of Practice at her graduate alma mater.

Star Party Topic: Dare Mighty Things: Mars Rovers Paving the Way

Since the beginning of time, people have been entranced by the night sky and by our nearest planetary neighbor- Mars. Nagin will share stories of NASA’s “Journey to Mars” from the early rovers to the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover and Mars Helicopter. Percy and Ingenuity are the start of the Mars Sample Return campaign. Robotic exploration is the first step in the longer term vision of international exploration of Mars by humans.