She is the founder of Spacehack.org, a directory of ways to participate in space exploration, and the global instigator of Science Hack Day, an event that brings together scientists, technologists, designers and people with good ideas to see what they can create in one weekend. She is also a fellow at Institute For The Future. Recently, Ariel was appointed as a National Academy of Sciences committee member of a congressionally-requested study on the future of human spaceflight. In 2012, she authored a white paper on Democratized Science Instrumentation that was presented to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She has keynoted DARPA’s 100 Year Starship Symposium and O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention, and has also appeared on the SyFy channel.