Maggie Williams spears another piece of pasta with her fork and thinks for a moment about her post-college graduation plans.
"I'd like to plan missions to Mars," she says.
Williams, 20, is a student at the University of Colorado in Boulder. On this pre-dawn Friday morning she's wrapping up a night shift managing a space probe orbiting the sun 55 million miles away from Earth, helping download its precious scientific data. CU-Boulder runs the probe, known as Kepler, on behalf of NASA. Williams is one of a team of about 18 students paid to "talk" to the probe during its continuing mission to search for new planets across the solar system. Continue reading the article here.