When the world stopped due to the pandemic, so, too, did plans to explore outer space. In 2019, NASA had five missions scheduled for the next three years, which were halted due to COVID. With NASA behind schedule, Israeli-American scientist Eliad Peretz helped put the organization back on track.
Peretz, 40, is the mission and instrument scientist for NASA’s Heliophysics Science Division at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center In Greenbelt. After the onset of COVID, Peretz assisted in a mission called GTOSat for a small spacecraft team to map radiation belts around earth. Peretz helped develop a mission to explore solar flaring on the surface of the sun. The missions have since come to fruition.
While the Silver Spring resident and Tikvat Israel Congregation member likely isn’t going to be the man on the moon anytime soon, his work has been instrumental to space exploration.
On May 1, NASA honored Peretz with the Exceptional Achievement Medal for his mission design work.
You used to go to the olive groves with your grandfather in Israel. What was the significance of that?
That’s where the first lessons of life come to me. One of them has to deal with planning: being able to look forward, not just a few months, a few weeks, [but to] look forward like one year, two years, three years. And just think about, how does this tree need to be cut to produce more food? Or how much work needs to be done on a grove?
The other one had to do with patience. My grandfather’s parents were immigrants from Morocco to Israel. And they had language challenges. So in Hebrew, we have a term, “ktzat savlanut” — “a little bit of patience.” But my grandparents were Moroccan, so they said, “sak savlanut,” and “sak” means “bag,” so a bag of patience. That stayed with me
for life.
How did you get to NASA?
In the fifth grade, I knew I was going to go to NASA. I knew I wanted to be a space mission designer. And that’s my entire life. If you look at single choices, you cannot see that link. But if you step back, and you look at all the choices I made, you’ll see how this path is not coincidental.
So it starts with, what classes do you want to focus on in school? So English, math, physics. It goes next to, where do you serve? So in my case, I started in Israeli flight school, the Air Force.
Then it goes to which undergraduate program you go to. There is only one undergraduate program in Israel for aerospace engineering: the Technion [Israel Institute of Technology]. If you want to be a mission space designer, you know you’re going to go to NASA. So that led to the Technion, which is where I coincidentally met my wife, who had a Fulbright scholarship.
Why did you want to go into space and aeronautics?
At my grandfather’s house, there was a large lawn, and all the cousins — because we all lived next to each other — would come down in the evening. You’d put a blanket [down] and look at the sky. Those are the moments where I started to understand I’m interested in space.
Sometimes religion and science can be at odds with one another. In your eyes, are Judaism and astronomy compatible with one another?
I think they coexist. Judaism, first of all, for me, is not just a religion. If you just kind of open your mind to the ways in which both worlds can coexist, you can find answers.
The Bible says the world has only existed for 5780-something years. And we know from science that that’s not the case. So how do you reconcile those questions? And a good way to think about this, at least for the people who are believers, is that those sentences in the Bible say, for example, one day in your eyes could be 1,000 years or more.
What advice do you have for young people interested in one day working at NASA?
Just be very good at what you do, and make sure you plan ahead. My grandfather told me, being ready is half of being lucky. So just be prepared for the opportunity when it comes.
