Piers Sellers, who passed away on Dec. 23 more than a year after learning he had pancreatic cancer, leaves behind a dynamic legacy at NASA. As an astronaut he helped build the International Space Station. As a manager he helped lead hundreds of scientists. And as a public figure he was an inspiration to many for his optimistic take on humanity's ability to confront Earth's changing climate. But his most lasting contributions will be in the field where he began his career: science. He was born and educated in the United Kingdom and moved to the U.S. in 1982 to carry out climate research at NASA/GSFC. From 1982 to 1996, he worked on global climate problems, particularly those involving interactions between the biosphere and the atmosphere, and was involved in constructing computer models of the global climate system, satellite data interpretation and conducting large-scale field experiments in the USA, Canada, Africa, and Brazil. He served as project scientist for the first large Earth Observing System platform, Terra, launched in 1998. Piers joined the NASA astronaut corps in 1996 and flew to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2002, 2006, and 2010, carrying out six spacewalks and working on ISS assembly tasks. After 14 years as an astronaut, Sellers returned to Goddard, this time as a leader within the Sciences and Exploration Directorate and Earth Sciences Division — NASA — Our Changing Earth Source: NASA (https://images.nasa.gov/) Licence: Public domain (work of the U.S. federal government, 17 U.S.C. §105) Audio is served by the publisher; Budi does not host or modify it.
0:06So for all those future aspiring astronauts out there, particularly kids and you know I was a kid watching the Apollo landings at the age of 12 and 13. I thought the whole thing was just magical. I thought this was the best thing ever and it inspired me. You know the first thing I did go along to my careers master at school said how do I do that? And he said well you probably ought to study math, physics, chemistry, biology stuff like that and that's what got me going into science So I found the whole astronaut business was a tremendous motivator to study the sciences, which I've never regretted because I turned out I love science as much as I love being an astronaut. But I want young people to imagine that the whole business is not just astronauts
0:55but everybody who's bound up in the space business, because it's not just the crews, it's the whole community of people who are trying to make these good things happen. Now 20 years from now somebody could be walking down the ladder and stepping onto Mars. Just think how incredible that would be, just think what we could learn. You know it's possible there was past life on Mars, I'm prepared to bet you anything you like there's no life on mars now but it's impossible two billion years ago when there was an ocean and an atmosphere and it was warm that there was some kind of life wriggling around there and then the challenge would be how do we find traces of that and probably the only way we're
1:31going to do it is by sending people there using their eyes using their brains and going around and looking in the right places for the right things so the whole business of you know Exploration of our universe, manned and unmanned, is thrilling. It's still exciting to me at my advanced age of 61. So for somebody who's 50 years younger, 11 years old, I would say looking back it turned out to be just as thrilling and as exciting as I thought it would be when I was a kid.
This transcript was generated automatically from the recording, so it will contain mistakes — especially around names and places.