Chapter 1 Diana Trujillo decided at the age of eleven that one day she would work for NASA TOUCH THE STARS s a child Diana Trujillo gazed at the stars and the sky More than anything she wished she could reach out and touch them She wanted to know more about what was in outer
r When Diana was eleven she learned about the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA at school She learned that NASA built rockets and sent astronauts into space Her school gave her a NASA sticker Diana loved the sticker's design And she knew that one day she wanted to wear the logo that appeared on the sticker She wanted to work at NASA When Diana was a girl the Mir Space Station below was the shining star of space exploration Its name can be read in English as world peace or village Ty
THE EARLY YEARS Diana grew up in Cali Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s As a young girl Diana liked figuring out how things worked She spent hours at the library reading books She also played outside and explored nature She learned to swim dance and roller skate When she swam and danced Diana paid attention to how her body moved through water and air When she roller skated she wondered what made the wheels of her skates roll along the sidewalk Diana's hometown of Cali Colombia
Diana loved to draw and design too She loved that even a single line could look different depending on how she drew it She found art in books and then combined images to make a new design Diana also spent many hours building things with LEGO bricks alongside her younger brother They would build their own rocket ships and launching pads cars cities and creatures Diana thought carefully about how the LEGO bricks could fit together to form different structures 88 NASA IN THE 1990s The 1990s was a very exciting time at NASA In just ten years NASA launched more than sixty space shuttle missions more than twice the number of space shuttles that they had launched in the 1980s In 1990 the space shuttle Discovery carried the Hubble Space Telescope into space With this telescope scientists are able to view space in a way they never could from Earth The next year NASA began building a space station In 1997 NASA sent a land explorer called Sojourner to Mars A camera on Sojourner took more than 550 photos of the Martian landscape 9 8 7
