Even a Blind Chicken Sometimes Finds a Grain of Corn—In My Case in Space

Sometimes you need to take strategic risks even though you cannot know in advance where they will lead. I left my comfortable city life in Helsinki for a PhD position in space physics far away in the Arctic. The first part of the title of this paper is a compliment—originally a German proverb—a throwaway comment from a professor in connection with my decision. Good luck also helps. When I was appointed as a university lecturer, I did not have a clue about a new law in Sweden opening the possibility for promotion of suitably qualified lecturers to professorships. Taking risks have several times been to my advantage. Even my most important discovery, meteor head echoes, was the result of a risky idea for observing sporadic E‐layers. Instead, we got the first direct signals from the plasma coma around the very fast small grains entering from space into Earth's atmosphere monitored with a high‐power large‐aperture (HPLA) radar. In addition to my research activities, I have been interested in equal opportunities and gender issues. The many twists along my way have enriched my knowledge capital. At the top of my career, sitting in decision‐making bodies I finally learned and can now, afterward, reveal some secrets about how things work.


Introduction
Fifty years ago, I passed my final exams at school.I dreamed of becoming an architect but failed in the entrance exams.Instead, I studied maths and physics which had been easy for me at school.The difference between school and university was huge and the first few years I felt completely lost, passed exams, but did not understand a lot-I thought.At that stage considering myself capable of becoming a professor of physics and a successful space scientist would have been a great joke.
My interest in gender issues arose early.I used to wonder why girls were not allowed to do the fun things but had to stay around being passive and admire boys playing ice hockey, football or ski jumping, which I secretly tried anyway.Later in science I got the impression that the male students were considered to have potential for the top positions in their respective departments while the problem with the talented female students was where else to recommend them.
In this paper, I want to share my experience.I will present a perfect career plan, then I speculate about what might possibly go wrong and the difficulties that young and especially female scientists might encounter.Before going onto the sections about space and my research, I will describe how funding and employment committees make decisions.I hope my anecdotes, based on my own experiences and observations, which although they cannot be dated back to any specific cases, may encourage students and junior researchers to tackle and surmount difficulties they might meet.I will also describe how I have worked with the concept "Women in Radio Science" for increasing awareness of gender issues within a traditionally very male dominated branch of science.

A Perfect Career Plan
An optimal start for a scientific career is a proper undergraduate education, in engineering or science at a good university.Pass your courses on time, do not expect that you understand everything, that comes later.When you have acquired the basic tools, recall what you were passionate about and check out the hot topics in that field.
Abstract Sometimes you need to take strategic risks even though you cannot know in advance where they will lead.I left my comfortable city life in Helsinki for a PhD position in space physics far away in the Arctic.The first part of the title of this paper is a compliment-originally a German proverb-a throwaway comment from a professor in connection with my decision.Good luck also helps.When I was appointed as a university lecturer, I did not have a clue about a new law in Sweden opening the possibility for promotion of suitably qualified lecturers to professorships.Taking risks have several times been to my advantage.Even my most important discovery, meteor head echoes, was the result of a risky idea for observing sporadic E-layers.Instead, we got the first direct signals from the plasma coma around the very fast small grains entering from space into Earth's atmosphere monitored with a high-power large-aperture (HPLA) radar.In addition to my research activities, I have been interested in equal opportunities and gender issues.The many twists along my way have enriched my knowledge capital.At the top of my career, sitting in decision-making bodies I finally learned and can now, afterward, reveal some secrets about how things work.

Plain Language Summary
The "empty" space is full of small grains.If we are lucky, we can observe a shooting star when a centimeter-sized grain enters the Earth's upper atmosphere.There is, however, a much larger population of smaller extra-terrestrial dust particles and an increasing number of man-made space debris, which can threat the space-borne infrastructure on satellites.Large radars can monitor these objects and record their velocity, mass, orbits and flux.This paper presents some of the pioneering work in the field.
Take courses that lie in that direction.From now on it will become important to understand.A little warning is that there might be hard competition in the very popular topics or the cool theoretical disciplines.In the former since there are many applicants and in the latter due to only a few top positions later.If you dream of becoming a doctoral student at your own university, gather information about the research groups before your master's thesis work.
The next step is important: check how successful supervisors have been with earlier graduate students, how successful they are at getting funding, which groups they collaborate with and their international networks.Start early on writing publications during your PhD, then it is easier to finish on time.Choose a good research group from your supervisor's network for a postdoctoral position and continue to write papers.After the postdoc you are around 30 and can apply for a tenured position starting with an assistant professorship.If you work hard, write publications, teach and boost public awareness of science, you will be promoted to associate professor and finally to full professor.Now you are around 40 and have reached the highest position of academic freedom.You can obtain funding and have a group of a strategic size with members at different stages in their own careers.Together with them and other networks you can do cutting-edge research.

A Lot Can Go Wrong
It is easy if you follow the instructions above and some people indeed succeed in proceeding at a calm pace toward their professorship.Still, most of us suffer delays on the way.I will describe here the steps where I have seen people, including myself, meet problems.
In the beginning at university, I was impressed by the other students, they must be clever since they were studying at the university.During the first year I learned that my talent in maths was limited to algebra, but in theoretical physics we had an inspiring cool lecturer who made me feel that I understood something else, and I enjoyed learning more physics.Toward the end of my studies, I delayed on starting with my master's thesis work, I felt that I did not know enough, and finally when the analysis was done, I wanted to improve the thesis before submitting.After my master's exam, I took 1-year course in pedagogical studies.It was not as fun as doing science but turned out to be a stroke of genius for my future career.
There has not been any intensive #metoo movement among scientists, but such scenarios, within both genders do occur.Be careful at conferences, older charismatic scientists can lose their inhibitions when an opportunity arises.My advice is to keep the relationships, especially to your supervisor, on a professional level.
A very delicate phase, especially in female scientists' careers is the step toward tenure.This is often referred to as the leaking pipeline in gender studies.In employment committee work I saw that even if there were hardworking female candidates, the male candidates had more merits that matter in their portfolios and were more successful in winning positions.Thus, I advise even the young female scientists to gain such merits by trying to minimize the number of "anti-merits".
An anti-merit provides a parameter you can be failed on.It is something you have not done on time or at all, such as five further publications after your PhD, a teaching course, you have not written enough proposals and got funding from highly ranked organizations, not been in the "right" group to get your name as co-author in publications, not been at the "right" conferences, nor published in the highest ranked journals.Such reasons are used even though they are not always true and can be put on a list of reasons why you are unsuitable for a position.Maybe you had not done those things because you did not know that the world works like that, you had instead performed some other important accuracy-requiring work that needed to be finished at your department and you wanted to do a thorough job, you did not have a mentor from whom to get advice, or you were tired after receiving your PhD.

My Way
I grew up in an environment of gender equality.I had two elder brothers, we hardly fought, but I learned to argue.I was never prohibited from doing the things they did.My parents, an improbable couple in peace time from different parts of the country, with different languages, got married during WWII and decided that they would support their children in obtaining the education they never had the chance to get while growing up, and my father occasionally even starving in the newly independent, very poor, Finland.We lived in a suburban area of Helsinki 10.1029/2022CN000176 3 of 7 in a war veterans' house.Our fathers had all been at the front for 5 years fighting against the Soviet Union and were winners in the sense that they had survived, formed families and kept Finland sovereign.We were many kids with the same background and traumas at home.I learned to defend myself, which I think prepared me well for the male-dominated academic life ahead.I loved my liberal school with its aim to teach us for life and not just the final exams.At the university there was a small overrepresentation of female students on my science courses and most of us worked hard to pass exams.A slight gender difference appeared as work on the master's thesis loomed ahead.Female students chose a safe future as schoolteachers.I also had that option, but gave a PhD student post at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Kiruna, far beyond the Arctic Circle, an opportunity.I could always go back to teaching if I failed in my northern adventure.
Despite the title of this paper "a blind chicken finding a grain of corn," a well-known derogatory proverb in my culture and which I got as a final greeting from my alma mater, I didn't feel that I had experienced discrimination in Finland, my suburban teens had taught me to ignore such comments.Sweden introduced me to gender structures.Being inside system I identified issues; some might still be valid today.In projects where tasks were shared, male colleagues started to work on my assignments, which I only became aware of at the next meeting when they presented how well they had solved the problem!Maybe incidents like this are the reason why female scientists often ended up on a side road working almost alone at that time.I have never been a tough feminist, rather more of an advocate for equal opportunities after a long time observing what happened around me regarding employment appointments and research grant decisions.Sometimes it is not just female scientists who are left out, but also researchers who do not generally fit in for various reasons.
I myself was lucky, just 8 months after I started my PhD, I got a permanent research engineering post, responsible for continuous ionosonde measurements with the possibility of working toward the PhD at a slower pace.This was ideal for family planning; I had a son and a daughter.In a permanent position you can choose when to take the next step.At a research institute you do not need to teach, which is a time-consuming activity.I had been a teaching assistant in quantum mechanics and high energy physics at the University of Helsinki and started to long for student contacts.When Umeå University started a Space Engineer program in Kiruna, I applied for the position of lecturer in physics.I got it since I had done that course in pedagogics in addition to my research experience!After a decade I was promoted to professor.Responsibilities in international committees, evaluations, funding decisions and employment committees gave me more insight into gender structures.

Committee Work
Applying for funding takes time.Learn to write your proposals properly, you have no chances with a badly presented fantastic idea -if you are not a "very important person."An outstanding application will probably get funding, a very good one will not.All the excellent proposals in between are weighed against each other.Those that will share the remaining budget depend on the constitution of the assessment committee.Many times, in an intensive tug-of-war, these proposals are waved up and down in the priority list, with support from members with their own specialities.On these committees experienced delegates may repeatedly lift their favorite candidate further up on the priority list-"this applicant has such a wide international network."The same scenarios occasionally occur in employment committees-"this candidate would be extremely valuable for your university."I have witnessed evaluations, where anti-merits have overcome clear merits.Maybe the reviewer had read that application carelessly or just wanted to justify the choice of another candidate.It is very important to keep the process democratic, but sometimes I came out from these meetings frustrated, when I felt that a diffuse decision had been forced through.Anyway, do not give up, you can have better luck next time with your excellent proposal.Maybe there is a different and more open-minded committee ahead.

Space Science
What can be cooler than being a space scientist?We use satellites and radars to monitor space.The Voyager missions launched in the 1970s have reached the outskirts of the Solar System and taught us very much about it.Now we send instruments into orbit around our interplanetary neighbors and the Sun and learn details about them.There are many exciting technological challenges for each of these missions.
Radars register various natural and man-made phenomena in the air, atmosphere and space, but can also monitor downwards from spacecraft with synthetic aperture radars.Unfortunately, the frequency spectrum, one of our most important natural resources, is heavily strained today and limiting the use of radars for many interesting phenomena.
My instrument was the sophisticated EISCAT Incoherent Scatter radar located in northern Scandinavia to study the solar-terrestrial interaction manifesting as aurora (Folkestad et al., 1983).I was among the first PhD students to use the radar.Understanding it required knowledge of plasma physics, radio wave propagation, signal analysis, data processing and electronics, all of which I gained enough expertise in, by doing.In the 1990s computing capabilities increased hugely.New applications such as atmospheric physics, space debris and interplanetary dust studies contributed to the new EISCAT_3D concept after commercial activities started to take over the old EISCAT frequencies (McCrea et al., 2015).

My Most Amusing Research Results
My most satisfying achievement was the re-discovery of the meteor head echoes (Pellinen- Wannberg & Wannberg, 1994).Meteors were eagerly studied with radars before the space era to find out how intensive the meteoroid flux was before sending humans to space.Observations showed that they would not be a threat to astronauts even during extra-vehicular activities.After this result meteors were forgotten and funding cut-off-this is wonderfully described in a social science paper by Gilbert (1977).
As often happens in science, our experiment was intended to study something else, sporadic E-layers, rather than what we eventually found, the meteors.Since the layers can include metal ions from ablated meteoroids, we wanted to monitor them before, during and after a meteor shower, the Geminids in December 1990.A Barker-coded experiment was run on the EISCAT radar in a broad band mode to register possible heavy ions.During the measurements we received very strange echoes, symmetric with several peaks.The five beautiful forms were repeated in both strong and weak echoes.We soon understood that the forms were a result of convolution of the Barker-codes and were associated with different Doppler-shifts.We were monitoring very fast targets by direct echoes from the meteors!These had leaked into our data flow due to the broad frequency range receiver mode.EISCAT differs substantially from specular meteor radars in frequency, power and antenna size.Earlier observations of the stochastic appearance of the so far unexplainable head echoes were very rare.Jones and Webster (1991) reported 768 head echoes from the Springhill Meteor Observatory within a 25-year period starting in 1957.If we had employed former measurement strategies, we would probably not have found our head echoes.
The discovery completely enthralled me.In step with the fast-growing computing and data storage capabilities even the time and spatial resolution increased for the observations.Still, it required some special solutions for recording the data from the radar-receiving system in the beginning.The further development required improved coding techniques.Most of our experiments since 2001 were run with a 32-bit coded-pulse sequence with binary phase shift keying (BPSK) and a bit length of 2.4 μs giving a total pulse length of 76.8 μs.This gives an effective range resolution down to 30 m giving time-of-flight velocity estimates with mean errors below 50 m/s for meteoroid velocities varying between 10 and 80 km/s (Wannberg et al., 2008).
Studying meteors with EISCAT was a gold mine, we could monitor the smaller than millimeter-sized objects simultaneously, at both UHF and VHF (Westman et al., 2004).With the tristatic UHF system we looked at the meteors from different directions revealing the head echo scattering process (Kero et al., 2008a(Kero et al., , 2008b)).We also observed meteoroid fragmentation (Kero et al., 2008c).The tristatic feature made orbit determinations as well as estimates of the visual magnitudes of the recorded meteors possible before interferometry was implemented on radars (Szasz et al., 2008a(Szasz et al., , 2008b)).Polarization observations revealed a signature of a transverse charge-separation resonance in the plasma immediately behind the meteoroid (Wannberg et al., 2011).Soon, other incoherent scatter and large radars such as the Arecibo Observatory radar in Puerto Rico, the ALTAIR radar on Marshall Islands and the MU radar in Japan started to apply the method (Close et al., 2000;Mathews et al., 1997;Zhou et al., 2001).Even new radars were used for this purpose (Schult et al., 2013).Hundreds of papers have been written on meteor head echo applications so far, see for example, Kero et al. (2019) and references therein.
During a meeting break in the 1990s, at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, a world-famous professor shouted angrily at me that everything worth knowing about meteors had already been studied.A decade later 10.1029/2022CN000176 5 of 7 this gentleman greeted me very respectfully at another meeting.Although we once received a very critical review of a paper, it was still easy to show that our arguments were correct, and the publication was accepted (Pellinen- Wannberg & Wannberg, 1996).A few years later we received a letter from another world-famous professor admitting that he had been that reviewer.He had just attended a talk at Cornell University where similar results had been presented from the Arecibo Observatory radar."There is something in what you are doing," this brave man wrote.

A Very Special Shooting Star and Meteoroids Hitting Satellites
The Swedish Institute of Space Physics located in the auroral zone is continuously developing optical instruments.The Auroral Large Imaging System (ALIS) has been a powerful tool for auroral studies (Brändström, 2003).
During the 2002 Leonid storm on November 19th, we made a very special observation of a meteor trail.One of the monitoring optical imagers was equipped with a filter initially chosen for emission lines for calcium, Ca, at 422.7(±14) nm and the second one for sodium, Na, at 589.3(±10) nm respectively at a different location.The Ca line was much stronger than the Na one even though the theoretical vapor deposition profiles indicate the opposite.This filter however also covers the 433 nm Balmer γ-emission line from hydrogen, H, for which the most probable compound is water, H 2 O.This Leonid at 03:48 UT was assumed to originate from the 1767 ejection from Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle according to simulations (McNaught & Asher, 1999).It was a young meteoroid, just seven orbits from the ejection from the parent comet and the grain could thus still include ice and emit water-related signals during entry into the Earth's atmosphere (Pellinen- Wannberg et al., 2004).
Since I started as a PhD student, I have had the feeling that using spacecraft instruments is much cooler and more spectacular than using ground-based instruments for research.Still, I stayed faithful to the EISCAT radars for decades.I was even fighting eagerly to ensure their continuation EISCAT_3D for more than a decade, even though the decision was made after I had left the EISCAT Council.Colleagues analyzing Cluster electric field data (Gustafsson et al., 2001) had told me several times that they observed signals probably caused by meteoroids impinging on the spacecraft.When it was apparent that EISCAT would lose its properties crucial for meteor observations, we applied and obtained funding to search for and analyze meteoroid impacts on satellites and I was finally lifted into space together with the other cool scientists!It took a few months for my newly recruited postdoc to find the first signals (Vaverka et al., 2017).We expanded the study even to cover data from the MMS spacecraft (Vaverka et al., 2018).These studies gave a very satisfying end to my research career.However, I am still looking forward to experiencing the EISCAT_3D meeting expectations as an extra-terrestrial matter monitor (Pellinen- Wannberg et al., 2016).

Where Space Research Needs to Go
Human curiosity has been a driving force for the progress on our planet.We have succeeded in taming fire, discovered electricity and nuclear power.We co-operate and agree not to enslave others, but still there are wars, trafficking and pandemics.Our well-being has unsuspectingly caused our worst acute problem, the climate change that can threaten all life.Nobody did this on purpose when we found methods to overcome hunger, get warmer homes, develop easier transportation, refrigerators, freedom with our own cars, charter travel to sunnier destinations, internet, social media and bitcoin mines.The price is increased carbon dioxide emissions.They started to accelerate half a century ago and became common knowledge during the past decade when extreme weather in the form of heat, forest fires, cold, storms, floods or melting glaciers became everyone's experience.
Satellites provide infrastructure for society, communication resources and monitoring of space weather and the state of the planet.They must work, otherwise we will revert 50 years in the development of life, be without GPS or satellite images.We must protect the space environment and restrict the exploitation of it with international laws.Unfortunately, satellites also contribute to the increasing environmental problem of space debris in orbit and can cause catastrophes in the form of chain collisions.Nowadays spacecraft are launched by competing commercial companies and states.Every now and then something goes wrong after a launch and more junk is produced.Earth-orbiting satellites are sometimes blithely shot down leaving unnatural particles in orbit and the atmosphere.Some are destroyed by quite simply letting them disintegrate on atmospheric re-entry.
Future space research may follow the needs of other disciplines to clean up after our own littering.Radars can track the debris while spacecraft need to perform the work.Radars do not contaminate space and are easier to upgrade.The EISCAT_3D facility, soon in operation, has great potential in monitoring space debris and head echoes from interplanetary and interstellar meteors.Even these natural objects with their huge velocities can contribute to devastating collisions with satellites and the growing cloud of junk.It is a challenge to keep track of the debris distribution since increased space weather activity also expands the atmosphere which decelerates the junk particles and alters their orbits.
We visited the moon when I was a teen, not later!It was an inspiring success, but still in the womb of planet Earth.Mars is a greater challenge, both technologically and for the visitors, since it is far away, and its environment is very harsh, exposed as it is to cosmic radiation and lacking in both oxygen and water.We will visit Mars some day, but it will never become a cozy home.Meanwhile it is most important to keep our beautiful Mother Earth, its soil, water, atmosphere and space environment in a healthy condition.

Women in Radio Science
As an undergraduate student at the University of Helsinki in the late 1970s I attended a lecture given by a visiting female professor in theoretical particle physics, Cecilia Jarlskog, from University of Bergen in Norway.Normally at that time the professors had a dialogue afterward but there were not so many questions from the other listeners.Now the audience exploded, several younger, usually very quiet male scientists had questions of the type I had not identified at previous seminars.They wanted to check whether the lecturer was aware of certain theories or if she had read specific papers.Professor Jarlskog was obviously well prepared for this, since she gave outstanding answers and quieted one interrogation after another.A few years later in a sauna during a summer school I asked her about this phenomenon, and she answered that it is quite common that colleagues, who weren't acquainted with her, had to check what she knew.Over the years I have often realized that female scientists get a much broader spectrum of questions than others."Why did you not include this theory or these observations in your talk?" is quite common.Even I got it when I gave a General Lecture at the URSI GASS (International Union of Radio Science General Assemble and Scientific Symposium) conference in Istanbul 2011, even though the questioned observations were not relevant to my topic.That was not a problem for me, but unfortunately, I have often seen this happen to young and female scientists.
As a Senior Associate Editor, I have been running the "Women in Radio Science" column in the URSI publication Radio Science Bulletin since 2015.I wanted to profile successful female scientists in different phases of their careers and write about their successes as well as the difficulties they have met on their way.During my four decades in radio science, I have been astonished that the lack of gender balance in the upper URSI committees and among officers has been so stable even though there are nowadays so many both qualified experienced scientists and young female researchers knocking on the door with their talent and creativity.From the statistical point of view, it is a pity to lose half of the potential competence even though the URSI gentlemen do a very good job.It is also a question about being an example for coming generations everywhere and especially in cultures where diversity in society is neither encouraged nor in some cases, accepted at all.A world-wide, knowledge-based scientific organization such as URSI can make a difference (Pellinen- Wannberg, 2015Wannberg, , 2018)).
I have presented so far about 20 female scientists from all the continents, both young ones with babies, active in mid-career as well as often still hard-working retired ones.Their stories show that the circumstances for doing science vary greatly in different parts of the world.Some female scientists do not even dare to write about their work due to various reasons.Those stories have not been narrated.
Women in Radio Science has now expanded to a worldwide movement WIRS.The first WIRS Chapter was initiated by the United States National Committee UNSC-URSI (Baktur, 2020).Several other national URSI committees in Czech Republic, Egypt, Japan, Poland, Sweden and United Kingdom have followed this example and WIRS events have been organized at URSI Atlantic Radio Science Conferences (AT-RASC) in 2018 and 2022.A nice recent summary of the value and impact of diversifying the scientific workplace is given by Porter et al. (2022).The work continues… Many people have supported me-family, teachers, friends, study mates, students, PhD students, postdocs and colleagues.Special thanks to Dr Gudmund Wannberg, who I met as a colleague and who became my husband.He designed the extra hardware and software for the experiments which made our meteor head echo observations possible.I thank further three people whose impact has been crucial for my career.Without Dr Raimo Keskinen, lecturer on my first physics courses at the University of Helsinki, I probably would have not become a physicist.Dr Finn Karlsson, research secretary at the Swedish Research Council invited me to join the international EISCAT Council as a delegate.This was a sign of confidence from the Swedish research community.Dr Edmond Murad at the US Air Force Research Laboratory at Hanscom AFB, MA, was the first scientist to support our meteor head echo observations.This was an appreciated international recognition for our research.