Trailblazer of the Week

Ruth Berkun

5 August 2022

Ruth Berkun can still remember when her high school teacher shared with the class that NASA had discovered water ice on the Moon. Now, just a few years later, Berkun is a Lunar Trailblazer Mission Operation Systems/Ground Data Systems (MOS/GDS) intern coding scripts that will determine how and when the spacecraft relays its data back to Earth.

“In September 2021 my professor at Pasadena City College (PCC) sent our class the application for the Trailblazer internship,” says Berkun. “Being a high school senior at that time, I was not sure whether I was eligible, and even less sure whether I was experienced enough for such a role. However, the possibility of working on a space mission excited me. I was selected for an interview and I was excited to be accepted into the internship!”

Berkun has been a concurrent-enrollment student for the past two years, taking college-level math and coding courses at PCC while still attending Arcadia High School. She’s thrilled to now be starting as a freshman at Caltech later this year.

“Right now, I have not decided on what field I’m going into yet, but fortunately, experiences like Lunar Trailblazer give me a sense of what’s out there,” she says. “I’m excited for the possibilities to come when I enter Caltech as an undergraduate student this fall!”

Being from Arcadia, mere miles east of Caltech and PCC, Berkun visited these schools long before she enrolled in them.

“I watched a piano masterclass in PCC’s auditorium, toured Caltech’s Beckman Museum, and plastered JPL stickers on my folders,” she says. “Walking these campuses as a little girl and now as a student, I feel fortunate to have grown up with these two wonderful educational institutions in my life.”

What’s more, space and NASA have always been a fixture in her family.

“My home is near the mountains, which we would sometimes drive up at night to watch shooting stars,” says Berkun. “My father is also a JPL engineer, who has brought home many NASA mission pins over the years. He also often took me and my siblings to the California Science Center, and I still remember the awe of seeing the Space Shuttle Endeavor when its exhibit first opened.”

Berkun continued to be fascinated by science as she entered high school, studying human anatomy and competing on the Science Olympiad team. But it was after a coding class in tenth grade that she began exploring a new career path.

“I joined my high school’s applied engineering team, an entirely student-run organization that built solar powered boats,” she says. “I worked on the electrical sub-team, programming microcontrollers and analyzing motor performance and power draw under different conditions. Later, I also joined our robotics team, where I learned about closed-loop control systems, 3D printing, and operating shop machines.”

Then in 2020, Berkun participated in the University of Southern California’s SHINE (Summer High school Intensive in Next-generation Engineering) research program.

“Despite a steep learning curve, I successfully coded a Python program to read and extract information from a large dataset,” she says. “I also discovered the thrill of jumping into a project head-first. After this research experience, I became much more confident in exploring engineering and problem solving through coding.”

Now she’s applying this confidence to her MOS/GDS internship.

“Most days, I write scripts planning what will happen when Lunar Trailblazer is in contact with Earth,” says Berkun. “This involves processing different input files to determine when the contact times are, which antennas we are using, the rates at which we can send data to and from the spacecraft, and more.”

When scheduling these contacts, Berkun’s scripts also need to alert the science team if they are overlapping or use up too much of the spacecraft’s data storage. She also helps to fix miscellaneous bugs in other scripts.

“It can be challenging reviewing code I didn’t write, and it usually takes days before I really understand what I am looking at,” she says. “However, it is refreshing to not work on the same part of the database all the time. Instead of just thinking about contacts, I get to learn about what the spacecraft needs to do to observe targets, recharge its solar panels, and so on.”

Berkun’s path to working at the forefront of space exploration has come with some challenges and gender gaps she had to clear. Her middle school’s accelerated math class only had five girls in it. When she joined her high school’s applied engineering team, she was the only girl in the electrical and software project group.

“And when I tested into my high school's math team as a freshman, I remember hearing someone say, ‘Oh, we got a girl this year,’” says Berkun. “Thankfully, things seem to be changing. My high school’s math team now has as many female faces as male ones.”

But Berkun says her greatest inspiration yet was coming to Lunar Trailblazer and seeing all the active, influential women.

“Watching PI Bethany Ehlmann and Science Ops Planning Lead Elena Scire lead meetings, hearing other women give presentations and voice opinions during the Trailblazer telecon, and meeting other female interns has made me feel welcome,” she says. “Everyone here is a Trailblazer in more ways than one.”

Ruth Berkun is a PCC student, soon-to-be Caltech student, MOS/GDS intern, and Trailblazer of the Week!

Trailblazer of the Week is an ongoing series showcasing the diversity of experience and expertise that supports the collective determination of the Lunar Trailblazer mission.

By Emily Felder
Emily Felder is a Pasadena City College student and Caltech intern working on science communication for the Lunar Trailblazer mission.