In some ways, Faith Vilas ’73 was born with the drive to explore what’s above the Earth. Her grandfather was an early aviator in the 1900s, and her dad and aunt both flew planes, too. When she was growing up, “I never thought I couldn’t fly,” she says. So fly she did. By the time she got to Wellesley, she was a licensed pilot and had been active in the Civil Air Patrol. She fondly recalls hitchhiking from campus to local airports, sometimes taking classmates along with her, to rent airplanes and go for joyrides in the sky. She once flew over campus with a friend, doing power-on and power-off stalls, while her classmates on the ground were buzzing about the “crazy pilot” overhead.

Even earlier, around the second grade, Vilas had set her sights far beyond the Earth’s atmosphere—all the way to space. She remembers reading The Golden Book of Astronomy, which she says opened up her world and gave her the idea of studying planets. It was an era of endless possibility, when humankind’s knowledge of space was expanding rapidly. The U.S. was in a race to land on the moon—a feat first achieved in 1969, just before Vilas entered Wellesley—and the notion of discovering what lay beyond it was thrilling to the young woman watching from the ground.

Over more than four decades, Vilas went on to make foundational discoveries about what does lie beyond, increasing our understanding of the surfaces of planets.

“The idea of seeing or doing something for the first time—that was just amazing, and it still is,” she says. “I’ve still felt like a small child in a candy shop.”

Vilas’ mother went to Wellesley, so she and her family always envisioned it as part of her path, too. When she visited campus, she was especially impressed by the astronomy department and its chair, Professor Sally Hill.

She remembers Wellesley as a “wonderful place to study” with a lot of flexibility in coursework. Her interest in planets grew at the College. A geology class sparked her curiosity about what the surfaces of other planets look like. She parlayed her love of instrumentation, straight from her love of flying airplanes, into the field of planetary science.

The day before her Wellesley graduation, she received a very rare invitation to come to Professor Hill’s house. Vilas was deciding whether to go to MIT for graduate work, and she still remembers how quiet it was as she entered and sat down. Hill gave her advice that stays with her today: ”Why don’t you just try,” she said. “If you don’t like it, you can always leave.”

Vilas went on to MIT, where she researched Mercury. She’d originally wanted to work on Mars, but her advisor told her if she switched to Mercury, he’d send her to the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile to study the planet. She fell in love with the country, persuaded the observatory to hire her full time, backpacked around South America. She returned to the U.S. to earn her Ph.D. at the University of Arizona and work at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Vilas spent 20 years at NASA, where she worked on quantifying orbital debris from spacecraft as well as her planetary science research. While at the Johnson Space Center, she also traveled on an expedition to Antarctica to search for meteorites.

She went on to direct the MMT Observatory in Arizona, a joint venture of the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Arizona, and she is now a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute and editor of the Planetary Science Journal.

Vilas’ pioneering work has been foundational to our understanding of Mercury, asteroids, and moons. Her observations from the ground helped prove the existence of Neptune’s rings in 1984. She developed a technique to more easily locate the presence of water on airless bodies. Studying the presence of water has helped explain the history of the solar system and the potential for development of life. Her instrument design and observational techniques have also helped us explore the full diversity of the solar system.

Pam Melroy ’83, NASA deputy administrator and former shuttle commander, says Vilas’ work has “had a stunning impact on knowledge of our solar system.”

Melroy adds that beyond her scientific contributions, Vilas has a “real gift” for mentoring. “She has personally nurtured over two dozen summer interns, research associates, postdocs, and faculty fellows, mostly women. This does not include the dozens of women in aerospace she has mentored informally, like me,” Melroy says. “Faith has left a large wake of women stronger and more confident professionally and personally. While her scientific achievements are world class, her mentoring has had just as profound an impact on aerospace.”

For Vilas’ profound contributions to the field, she received the Fred Whipple Award in 2019 (the highest honor from the Planetary Sciences section of the American Geophysical Union) and the Harold Masursky Award for Meritorious Service to Planetary Science from the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), and she was elected a Legacy Fellow of the AAS.

When Vilas received the Whipple award, she thanked Sally Hill, “for encouraging me to pursue my scientific passion in planets—the combination of passion and persistence underlies many advancements in science.”

Vilas also has an asteroid named for her: 3507 Vilas. She has, of course, observed it from the ground.