The Space Shuttle touches down at Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert. It rolls to a stop and a crowd of people cheer for the astronauts and another successful mission. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in Houston, Texas, at Mission Control are the people who make it all possible - the flight controllers. Working together with the astronauts, the flight controllers monitor and control every aspect of the shuttle and its mission from the ground.

Gloria Araiza works with the data processing system which is the Shuttle's computers. All the different functions of the Shuttle from the booster rockets to the guidance navigation system are controlled by the computers on board. >From her console in Houston, Gloria scrutinizes the data to make sure everything is working the way it should. "There is no room for error." she says. "Problems must be recognized and handled instantly for the safety of the crew and equipment out in space."

It took hard work and strong mathematical skills to realize her dream of working in Mission Control, but a discovery she made in school was actually the first step. Until then Gloria thought math just meant sitting in a room proving theorems. However, a professor showed her that wasn't necessarily the case. Gloria recalls, "He started pointing out the application side of mathematics, the concept of acceleration, velocity and I just thought, wow! It was incredible, it was a totally different insight and realization into what math is."

She discovered that math is used to determine how to get a spacecraft into orbit and how fast it can travel in space. She promptly changed her major to mathematics and started working toward her goal of a job in the space program.