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Space Time
The Woman Who Sees Space First
Candice Hansen-Koharcheck is a firsthand witness to some of the most iconic images of outer space
For decades, space scientists could only speculate about what the surface of Mars looked like. It wasn’t until 1965 that NASA’s Mariner 4 spacecraft sent the first images of the red planet back to Earth. Today, spacecrafts on and around Mars continue to capture images that help the agency understand what our outer worlds look like.
Imagine being the person who sees these images before anyone else. That person is Candice Hansen-Koharcheck, the deputy principal investigator of the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and one of the co-investigators on NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter. Over her 40 years at NASA, Hansen-Koharcheck has been present for the capturing of some of the most iconic images of our solar system.
These photos are aesthetically stunning, but they also contain valuable scientific data. Before the HiRISE camera started documenting Mars in detail in 2006, scientists believed the planet was a barren, flat, lifeless world. “When we were designing the camera, the conventional wisdom was that Mars was monochrome,” Hansen-Koharcheck says. “It had this reddish tint everywhere, because everybody knew the global dust…
