"Hubble Women Making History"
My name is Madison Brodnax and I'm an electrical power systems engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope.
Being an electrical power systems engineer entails making sure everything goes
smoothly on the telescope, basically keeping it safe. Something I do every year is manage the
solar eclipses for the telescope to make sure that it can, power wise, make it through that. Me
and the other electrical power systems engineers manage any anomalies that might arise that are
power or electrical related or even thermal related. I think a lot of people think it's
just a telescope floating around in low Earth orbit, and it just kind of does its own thing,
but in reality there are tons of people keeping it safe and healthy day to day with whatever
problems may arise. It goes through hot seasons, cold seasons, there could be electrical problems
or pointing and control problems with it, there's a huge team of people that keeps that going and
seamless so that the public gets these really great images, you know, year after year.
What I find most rewarding about the work is probably being able to flex my engineering brain every day.
I think of working on such a historic project that has a lot of information that needs to be
learned about it, back to its conceptualization all the way up to now in 2023, and is really like a
privilege and also keeps me on my feet every day. In my day-to-day I wake up and I pet my dog for a
good like 15-20 minutes. If I'm coming in office it's me versus 295 for a good 45 minutes. Once I
come in I usually get to talk with my teammates about the things that have been happening for
the past week. I really enjoy being able to collaborate with everybody in the mornings,
then I sit down and do some work, chug away at some more coding or some more numbers, hopefully
have a cool meeting and get to schmooze some other NASA people, and then also head home and go to the
gym or trivia. I think one thing to take away from, you know, being a woman in STEM is that
you're stronger and more knowledgeable than you think. You are the smartest person in the room,
all of us are the smartest person in the room, and I I think, you know, worrying about confidence
level is not as important, just showing up, flexing the knowledge that you know you already have is
really important. My favorite Hubble image is probably the Butterfly Nebula, it's you know,
one of the older ones, but I love all the pinks and purples in it, I think it's really pretty.
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