WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for v, Moises Hidalgo, Igor Monti, Sabrina del Grosso, and Ed Dukeshire, on sale now.
As the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers face off against their Dark Ranger counterparts, they find themselves fighting an incredibly steep uphill battle. When things are at their worst, Billy reaches out to Grace Sterling, requesting that she activate the Green Protocol. It turns out that Grace has been developing her own Green Ranger in secret. This is a startling revelation, but maybe not unexpected from someone who has had such a long and storied history with the Power Rangers, even being the first Red Ranger on Earth at one time.
Many fans of the various Power Rangers series are likely unaware of Grace Sterling, as a character original to the Boom! Studios comics. Even without a small screen presence, Grace has become a key fixture in the pages of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, as well as an important part of the history of the Rangers and their universe. There isn't much known about her youth, but her time at NASADA (the in the comic equivalent of NASA) in the mid-to-late sixties and forward is well documented, beginning with her first appearance in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers #17.
When Grace worked as NASADA, she applied to be a part of their moon landing mission, but her being at the top of the class could not convince her superiors to overlook their own sexism, and so she remained grounded. On the night of the moon landing in 1969, she watched from the NASADA headquarters. As she spoke to a coworker about how her dreams of ever reaching the stars were dead, she was teleported by Zordon to the command center, along with four others who would become the first Power Rangers of Earth. The team was sent to the moon landing site, which had awoken a dormant Psycho Green whose mission to free Rita Repulsa had been interrupted by his confinement. Grace, the first Red Ranger, did her best to lead the team, but with no training or sense of what they were up against, she was less than successful. Only Grace and one other Power Ranger returned from the mission alive, at which point they were both furious that Zordon had sent them on what amounted to a suicide mission. Grace left the Command Center in disgust but made sure to bring Psycho Green's dagger with her.
After these events left her shaken, Grace resigned from NASADA to develop her own tech company called Promethea. Eventually, Promethea became an industry leader in Silicon Valley and moved its operations to a private island complex in the San Francisco Bay. The company would even go on to bringing Billy Cranston in as an intern, though he later resigned due to his Power Ranger duties overtaking his working hours.
Since establishing Promethea, Grace has reached out for help from and to offer assistance to the Power Rangers on many occasions. She has acted as a mentor to the team, and also tested the limits of their trust by imprisoning Lord Drakkon without their knowledge. It would even appear that this is who she has called on to act as her own personal Green Ranger, and can be assumed that she was able to develop this secret project at least in part due to her possession of Psycho Green's dagger. Given that her new Green Ranger is fueled by the same type of Chaos Energy, and that the rules are for Grace to set and enforce, this could lead to her accidentally providing the Power Rangers with one of their most dangerous threats or an impossibly valuable new ally.
Grace Sterling might not be the most recognizable name in Power Rangers history, but she's surely one of the most important. Even without knowing exactly what the future is going to hold after the Power Rangers face off against Lord Drakkon's failsafe, Grace Sterling is sure to be a crucial part of it.