After NASA captured the first images of the moon from the Artemis II mission in April, Molly Wasser ’09 and her team got to choose which ones to release, and they wrote the accompanying captions. Wasser, a communications specialist for NASA’s Planetary Science Division, has worked at NASA for almost a decade; she was previously the digital media lead of the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. For eight years she was also the voice of @NASAMoon on Twitter, once even famously blocking @NASASun during a solar eclipse.
Wasser chatted with E.B. Bartels ’10, senior editorial writer on Wellesley’s communications and public affairs team, about being a science educator and communicator, the influence her unusual major and minor combination at Wellesley has had on her career, and her love for the moon.
EB: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me, Molly! Can you start by describing your current role at NASA?
MW: I am a communications lead for the Planetary Science Division at NASA headquarters, and within that job I have a few specific roles: I am the communications lead for Artemis Science and for Planetary Defense, which is tracking potentially hazardous asteroids and preventing them from impacting the Earth—
EB: Not protecting the Earth from aliens?
MW: No, but my third beat is astrobiology, which is the search for and understanding of extraterrestrial life. Asteroids, aliens, and the moon sums up what I do now, but I’ve communicated about the moon for a long time. I’ve been at NASA since 2017, and I’ve done a huge amount of communications and public engagement specifically on lunar science. Now my job for Artemis is to explain every science instrument and investigation on the missions, make sure we’re telling a cohesive story, and clearly communicate the science out to the public.
EB: How did Wellesley help prepare you for this career?
MW: I really credit my time at Wellesley with enabling me to do this line of work. I was a cinema and media studies (CAMS) major and an astronomy minor, and everything I’ve done in my career is because I had this weird combination of interests. I just studied what I loved, even though it didn't make sense, and it ended up working out. I always recommend to college students: Do what you’re passionate about, don’t try to fit into a certain track.
At Wellesley I never learned I couldn’t do film or science, even if both are male-dominated fields, because I had so many supportive professors, like Wendy Bauer and the entire astronomy department, Salem Mekuria, who was my thesis advisor, and Wini Wood, who was my writing professor and major advisor.
I was also the astronomy tutor while at Wellesley, and that’s when I realized how much I love teaching people about astronomy, more than doing research myself. And then, of course, being a CAMS major is all about storytelling and communicating. I think of myself as a science translator—my favorite part of my job is talking with the scientists and figuring out the story there. They use a lot of jargon, and they’re very focused on these incremental discoveries. It’s my job to have conversations with them and learn from them, and then figure out how that fits into an overarching picture. I’ve become very comfortable asking questions, and I think it really helps that I have just enough science background, with my astronomy minor and also having worked science-adjacent for so long, but I’m not actually deep in the science myself. For example, someone I was talking to kept using the term “mass spectrometer” and I told him, “You may want to define what a mass spectrometer is.” The scientist said, “Oh, Molly, everyone knows what a mass spectrometer is!” [laughing] I was like, “No.”
EB: Yeah, I have no idea what a mass spectrometer is, ha.
So you wrote on LinkedIn that being the communications lead for the Artemis II mission felt like a pinnacle of your career. How did you support the mission?
MW: One example—the morning after the lunar flyby on April 6, I sat down at breakfast with Kelsey Young, the lunar science lead for the mission, and we talked about what the astronauts saw, the major points we wanted to make, and what story we wanted to share with the public. And then I wrote it all out into a news briefing, which is what she shared in the press conference later that day. In my role, I mostly focus on overarching messaging, so talking points and media interaction, but you know all those pictures from the science room and mission control? The team I lead set those up. My team and I got to pick and caption the first images of the moon that NASA released. That was the coolest and also most stressful part.
EB: Incredible!
MW: It was a true career highlight. I’ve been trying to get people to care about the moon for almost a decade, and I think I’ve done a pretty good job. It’s harder to get people to care about the science and what we can learn from the moon, so to see the public response to the Artemis II mission … I’m going to get emotional! It was special to be part of something that was so uplifting to so many people.
I’ve worked with this team for so long, I’ve grown up with these people, and to see the science team being leaders, seeing my friends go viral just for being excited about lunar science, to see the science team getting emotional—it was just amazing.
There was a headline in the New York Times the next day about how science can often seem “colorless and plain” but that this lunar science team has shown us emotion and “moon joy.” That headline was what I’ve been trying to achieve my entire career.
EB: I just got chills! That’s really special. Moon joy!
MW: I fell in love with astronomy at Wellesley. I give Professor Bauer a huge amount of credit for getting me into astronomy and science, and so, since Wellesley, I’ve done everything I can to encourage underserved audiences, particularly women and girls, to pursue science. I think the week of the Artemis II mission did more to encourage girls to pursue science than anything else I have done in my career up to this point.
EB: So after all that, what will you do now? Retire, I guess?
MW: Now we’ve got to land on the moon!