Katy Mersmann

Katy Mersmann

Social and Multimedia Producer

NASA •

Take a Road Trip through Time with Landsat 9

In 2018, our satellites captured beautiful imagery from throughout the solar system and beyond. However, some of our favorite visualizations are of this very planet. While this list is by no means exhaustive, it does capture some Earth satellite images from this year that are both visually striking as well as scientifically informative. This list also represents a broad variety of Earth’s features, as well as satellite instrumentation. Take a journey with our eyes in the sky! Before making la
NASA •

2019 Temperature By the Numbers

Dr. Yolanda Shea is a climate scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center. She’s the project scientist for the CLARREO Pathfinder (CPF) mission, which is an instrument that will launch to the International Space Station to measure sunlight reflected from Earth. It will help us understand how much heat is being trapped by our planet’s atmosphere. Her mission is designed to help us get a clearer picture than we currently have of the Earth’s system and how it is changing Yolanda took time from stu
NASA •

Countdown to Launch of Landsat 9

In 2018, our satellites captured beautiful imagery from throughout the solar system and beyond. However, some of our favorite visualizations are of this very planet. While this list is by no means exhaustive, it does capture some Earth satellite images from this year that are both visually striking as well as scientifically informative. This list also represents a broad variety of Earth’s features, as well as satellite instrumentation. Take a journey with our eyes in the sky! Before making la
SELF •

We Need to Talk About Migraine Stigma

The first day I set aside to write this article, I instead spent curled up on my couch, in the dark, with Netflix playing softly in the background. I had a migraine, and it made writing impossible. Really, it made it impossible to do anything more than lie under my weighted blanket and shuffle back and forth to the kitchen for seltzer. If you've never had a migraine, it might seem surprising that a headache could knock me down so hard. But migraine is so much more than a headache. It’s a serio
SELF •

Life Hack for People With Chronic Illness: Write an Elevator Pitch. Here’s Why.

A few months ago, I popped a blood vessel in my eye. I was in the middle of a migraine—a common experience for me—but the eye thing was new. I panicked. Was I having a stroke? I wanted a qualified medical professional to tell me I wasn’t dying. The telehealth doctor I called spent most of our 10-minute virtual appointment assuring me that migraines aren’t fatal. I was scattered and scared, and I couldn’t get across to him that I know what a migraine is. I have chronic migraines, but I felt too

Taking in Some Arctic Air – NASA Earth Expeditions

by Katy Mersmann / SKIES OVER ALASKA AND CANADA / The Arctic Boreal and Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) covers 2.5 million square miles of tundra, forests, permafrost and lakes in Alaska and Northwestern Canada. ABoVE scientists are using satellites and aircraft to study this formidable terrain as it changes in a warming climate. In some ways, NASA’s DC-8 feels like a commercial airplane, with its blue leather seats and tiny bathrooms in the back. But once the plane starts to spiral down over

In Arctic Tundra, It’s Getting Easy Being Green – NASA Earth Expeditions

As I walk up the Alpine Trail in Denali National Park, I can see the vegetation changing before my eyes. Deciduous plants, like willows and smaller shrubs, start huge, as tall as my head and shoulders. But as the trail leads up, and as the altitude grows, the vegetation shrinks. Over the course of the roughly 1,300-foot elevation gain, the plant life gets shorter and shorter until suddenly it’s almost gone—we’ve reached the tundra. By climbing up the side of this hill, we’ve mimicked traveling

The Fact and Fiction of Martian Dust Storms

For years, science fiction writers from Edgar Rice Burroughs to C. S. Lewis have imagined what it would be like for humans to walk on Mars. As mankind comes closer to taking its first steps on the Red Planet, authors' depictions of the experience have become more realistic. Andy Weir's "The Martian" begins with a massive dust storm that strands fictional astronaut Mark Watney on Mars. In the scene, powerful wind rips an antenna out of a piece of equipment and destroys parts of the astronauts' c
RJI | Reynolds Journalism Institute •

How we created our Futures Lab update in a vertical video format | RJI

From the beginning we knew we wanted our report on non-horizontal video to be presented in a vertical frame. This would enable us to provide an example of how an entire show would look in that shape, since few news organizations have deliberately created video this way. (The closest things we could find were the square videos in places like Instagram, Vine, Facebook, etc.; vertical content posted in SnapChat, which contains mostly on-the-scene footage; and a single vertical video example posted
MIZZOU Women in Media •

Q&A: Stalking and Moving On

As women in media, we often face unique threats to our well-being and safety, both in person and online. That’s why we’re hosting Stepping Up Safety: A Panel on Personal Security in the Field and Workplace on October 7. Leading up to the panel, we’ve asked industry professionals to share their stories, advice and personal experiences. Lola Alapo works in public relations for a university in the South. Before transitioning to PR, she worked for a newspaper as an education reporter, where she was
MIZZOU Women in Media •

We Belong Here, From ONA15

As women in media, we often face unique threats to our well-being and safety, both in person and online. That’s why we’re hosting Stepping Up Safety: A Panel on Personal Security in the Field and Workplace on October 7. Leading up to the panel, we’ve asked industry professionals to share their stories, advice and personal experiences. Last weekend I attended the Online News Association’s annual conference in L.A., where more than 2,000 journalists gathered to discuss the future of digital media
MIZZOU Women in Media •

"Can I Say Sexism?": Leading Women in Media on the State of Things

Monday was a whirlwind day at Mizzou — the Missouri Honor Medals, when the J-school recognizes people and organizations for distinguished service to journalism. This year, we asked three of the medalists to join us for a panel about women in the media. Led by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jacqui Banaszynski, the panel featured freelance reporter and author Barbara Ehrenreich, editor-in-chief of CNN Digital Meredith Artley and long-time New York Times copy editor Merrill Perlman.
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