[rented_mule]

I'm trying to keep this account anonymous so that I'll speak my mind more easily, and she's probably more private than I am, so I don't want to say her name.

Among other things, she worked on mission control software for tracking rover-carrying spacecraft en route to Mars and related ground data systems (I'm probably getting the wording wrong, but that's my outsider understanding of it). Later she worked on software used to analyze interferometer data for exoplanet research on the Caltech side (again, wording?). I'm not aware of her ever being near robotics work.

Part of her shift to Caltech was to try to get to an environment where there was more predictable focus on the science, but a lot of the grant money there was from the same or related budgets as JPL's money, with plenty of strings attached that weren't always pulling in directions she was excited about.