Jessica Watkins
Credit: NASA

American astronaut and geologist Jessica Watkins is making history this month. She is the first Black woman selected for an extended mission in space. Watkins and three other astronauts launched aboard a new SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft named Freedom atop a Falcon 9 rocket on April 27, 2022. Once the crew arrives, they will work and live aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The ISS is a large, inhabited Earth satellite that more than 15 nations are operating in space. Watkins is set to work aboard the station for six months. On the ISS, she will work at the microgravity laboratory and serve as the team’s mission specialist.

Jessica Andrea Watkins was born in Gaithersburg, Maryland, on May 14, 1988. Her family later moved to Lafayette, Colorado. She enrolled at Stanford University in California, in 2006.  Watkins led Stanford’s rugby team to win the 2008 national championship. Watkins was a member of the United States Women’s Eagles Sevens Rugby team, competing in the 2009 Women’s Sevens Rugby World Cup in Dubai. Watkins earned her bachelor’s degree in geological and environmental sciences from Stanford University in 2010.

Watkins studied and worked extremely hard to reach her new career in space. Watkins earned a doctorate degree in geology at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2015. Watkins conducted post-doctoral research at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). At UCLA, she studied landslides on Mars. At Caltech, she helped plan missions for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Curiosity rover.

As an undergraduate, Watkins participated in an internship for NASA at the Ames Research Center outside of San Jose, California. She compared simulated Martian soils with data gathered by the Phoenix Mars Lander.  In 2009, Watkins served as the chief geologist for a simulated mission at the Mars Desert Research Station outside of Hanksville, Utah. As a graduate student, she interned for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. In 2017, Watkins was selected for astronaut training. In 2019, Watkins participated as an aquanaut in a simulated space mission at the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) Aquarius habitat, on the ocean floor off the coast of Key Largo, Florida. NASA has also selected Watkins as a crew member for the Artemis mission to the moon’s surface.

February 20, 2017

No Greek mythological goddess can match Artemis—or, as her Roman counterpart is known, Diana—when it comes to personal modesty and purity. Artemis fiercely defended her own innocence, but she stood up for romantic love and was the goddess of childbirth and fertility. She was associated with chastity, the hunt, farming, the moon, the natural environment, and wild animals. Always alert, she is often depicted as a beautiful woman carrying a bow and a quiver of arrows. The epic poet Hesiod described her as “delighting in arrows.” She is sometimes accompanied by deer or hunting dogs.

Artemis reaches for an arrow in this statue in Marseille on the southern coast of France. Credit: © Shutterstock

Artemis was the daughter of Zeus, the king of the gods, and the goddess Leto. The god Apollo was Artemis’s younger twin—bursting on the scene, she helped Leto deliver him. A virginal deity, Artemis demanded moral purity from her followers. Young girls about to be married prayed to her, offering her a lock of their hair as a tribute.

Artemis did not take disappointment lightly, and she could be cruel to people who let her down. She punished followers who failed to live up to her standards, and she was often blamed for the sudden deaths of women. She was protective of her own purity, as well. The hunter Actaeon accidentally spotted her bathing in a woodland pond, and for that transgression, he was turned into a stag (a full-grown male deer) and then ripped to pieces by his own dogs. Artemis was initially kinder to the great hunter Orion, but his unwanted advances got him killed. In her sorrow, she placed Orion in the sky as one of the most visible and well-known constellations. Artemis is also sometimes blamed for the death of handsome Adonis, and she forced King Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia.

Artemis defended those who pleased her, however. To save the beautiful nymph Arethusa from the river god Alpheus, Artemis turned her into a spring. She sent a bear to suckle the orphaned infant Atalanta, who lived to become a great runner. She also helped the hero Aeneas survive the Trojan War. To keep Artemis happy, the ancient people of Ephesus (near the modern day Turkish town of İzmir) built the colossal Temple of Artemis, which was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Artemis was also especially revered in Sparta and the small island of Delos, her mythological birthplace.

The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was one of the largest temples built by the Greeks. It was famous for its decoration and extensive use of marble. Credit: WORLD BOOK illustration by Birney Lettick