Christina Zeringue remembers being 10 years old, looking to the sky through her new telescope to view the Moon and planets on Christmas night. It opened her eyes to space and inspired her journey from the backyard to NASA's Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.
"I became fascinated with astronomy and learning about stars and constellations, the solar system and planetary orbits, solar and lunar eclipses, and challenging myself to find stars and nebula at different distances from Earth," Zeringue said. "I was able to do and learn so much just from my own yard."
She became obsessed with following the development and images produced from the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched on a space shuttle that featured three main engines tested at NASA Stennis.
