Hi Aileen,

I think most of us are having to stay home right now; many of us are on our second week (at least) of doing so.

Overall, I would say it isn't too bad for me in that 99% of what I do is on a computer and I just need internet access to spacecraft data (although some of that I have on a local disk) and online publications etc. So, I can do that fairly easily from home.

The difficulties come in trying to replace in-person meetings with virtual ones (which only works so well and is often much less efficient), not being able to just pop in to a colleague's office and brainstorm about an issue or idea, and I am involved in some hardware that is stalled because people aren't allowed in the labs to do testing/development.

I've also had a number of large and small scientific conferences and team meetings around the world cancelled (most recently one that was supposed to happen this August in Sydney, Australia). That's a big bummer because those are often some of the best opportunities to talk to other scientists about your (and their) work and form collaborations.

But we're definitely lucky that we can do a lot of our work from home and our employers are still paying us to do so! Not everyone has that kind of flexibility or support.

-Christina