An end of year compilation of conversations with various NASA scientists, engineers, and researchers throughout 2016 on the NASA in Silicon Valley Podcast.
Transcript
Matthew C. Buffington (Host):You are listening to episode 23 of the NASA in Silicon Valley podcast. With 2016 winding down and 2017 just over the horizon, I thought we would do something a little different to close the year out. This episode will be our end of year clip show, highlighting some of our favorite conversations this year. So in case you missed any of these episodes, feel free to dig through the podcast feed and find the whole episode. I hear it is perfect to listen to on any long holiday road trips or flights. Per usual, we use the #NASASiliconValley and the Twitter handle @NASAAmes. Also leave us a review or comment in whatever podcast app you use. Those reviews really help others to discover the content. And of course, you can also get a plethora of NASA in Silicon Valley information on NASA.gov/Ames. Let’s go ahead and jump right into the show.
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Host: NASA’s exploration spans the universe. Observing the sun and its effects on Earth. Delving deep into our solar system. Looking beyond to worlds around other stars. Probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe. Everywhere imaginable, NASA is out there. This first conversation is with Thomas Barclay, who works on the Kepler space telescope which has located thousands of exoplanets, including earthlike planets in the goldilocks zone. Here is Tom talking about how NASA engineers kept the telescope up and running despite some technical difficulties.
Thomas Barclay: Yeah, in 2013, we lost the second of four reaction wheels. Reaction wheels are just spinning, heavy disks. They look a little like…
Host: Wheels, maybe?
Thomas Barclay: Dumbbells, almost, if you’re on weights. And they spin around. And so by spinning them at the right speed, you can change the pointing of the spacecraft. You can minutely adjust how the spacecraft is pointing. But you know, we live in a universe that has three dimensions, and with two spinning wheels, you can’t control three dimensions. And so, we were stuck until some of the genius engineers…
Host: Because one of those wheels literally stopped working?
Thomas Barclay: Two of them. Two of the four. So, we started with four, one backup. Two of them stopped working, and so we didn’t have a method to accurately control the spacecraft.
Host: Was it just pointing wherever, just circling around?
Thomas Barclay: Exactly, yeah. We could hold it loosely, but not precise pointing. And then engineers…
Host: They come up with crazy stuff.
Thomas Barclay: The funny thing about engineers, especially working on NASA projects, they spend most of their life being very conservative, because we launch very big, expensive missions, and they have to think of contingencies and they don’t want anything to go wrong. But suddenly we had a mission that didn’t work, and there were basically no rules. If you could find a method to do something interesting, do it.
Host: Because you had this multi-million dollar, you have this huge telescope. You went through all the effort to put the thing in space, and then great for four years and then these things stopped working. It’s like, we got it up there, what can we do with this?
Thomas Barclay: Yeah, and you see these engineers suddenly…
Host: Creative thinking.
Thomas Barclay: They’re like, this is what I was trained to do, this is what I dreamed of doing, and they’re bright-eyes, and they get to come up with methods of pointing the spacecraft. And so, the one that won out was to use two wheels to control two axes of the spacecraft, what we call pitch and yaw. If you think of the spacecraft as a soda can, pitch and yaw are the up-and-down and left-and-right of the soda can looking out at one direction. But that left a free axis, and that would be the roll, that would be the spinning of the soda can in your hands around the circular side.
So, how do you control that? And the method to control it is, the spacecraft has a shape, and it’s kind of symmetrical almost, if you look at it in that direction. So, what’s causing the spacecraft to not point accurately? What’s making it roll? And that’s the sun. The sun itself is sending out a lot of energy, a lot of particles, a lot of photons, mostly it’s particles. And those, we call this a solar wind, and this solar wind is trying to push the spacecraft away from where it wants to point. But, by balancing the spacecraft against this solar wind, solar pressure, you can keep it in stable pointing.
Host: So you have the two wheels, they’re keeping at least two points, but it keeps spinning around, but if you get it in the right way, you can take advantage of the force the sun exerts to stabilize.
Thomas Barclay: That’s right, and that’s what you’re doing. This is not entirely stable, so once we start to roll away from the thing, that will start to accelerate. This is an equilibrium, but it’s not entirely stable. So, we can hold this for a few hours, and then it starts to roll away. So, we fire a thruster to put us back.
Host: To pull it back.
Thomas Barclay: Pull it back, and this is how we go. So, what we do is we point it at a field for roughly three months, and every six hours or so we fire a thruster to pull us back, and then we slowly roll away, fire a thruster, it puts us back to where we want to be. And this keeps us pointing extremely accurately for a long, long time.
Host: We are on a journey to Mars. Today, our robotic scientific explorers are blazing the trail. Together, humans and robotics will pioneer the next leap in exploration. Our next clip, if from Darlene Lim, who is working a project that is specifically testing how humans will conduct science on the red planet.
Darlene Lim:BASALT is an analogue research project, and the premise of it is that we do real science, non-simulated science out in the field, but under simulated Mars mission conditions. So our field sites, one is in Idaho at Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, and the other one is in the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the big island around Kilauea. And so, the two sites represent to us very interesting volcanic environments which have a strong analogy or comparison to Mars. Mars has undergone a lot of volcanic activity. There is basalt throughout the surface of Mars, which basalt is a type of volcanic rock.
But what we’re curious about in these two settings, these two volcanic settings, is Idaho represents a sort of present-day Mars. It’s not a perfect analogue, there’s never a perfect analogue on earth.
Host:Of course. You can breathe the air.
Darlene Lim:You can breathe the air, exactly, there’s oxygen. But the thing about Idaho is it’s dormant, and we know that it’s a shield volcano. It’s a volcano which is in a very interesting environment, and it’s in the United States, so it’s quite easy for us to access. And then, there’s another volcanic setting we work to, which is in Hawaii, which is active. And so, that’s more representative of conditions on early Mars, where you have these what are called fumerals, these very hot vent-like environments where there are some interesting minerals getting deposited around these vents.
The geology of these two areas has been fairly well characterized, particularly around Hawaii, but what has not necessarily been done, where the knowledge gap was, was trying to relate the geology of these two volcanic settings to the type of microbial life that is associated with these two settings. And so, we wanted to do that as a foundational piece to understanding, are there differences between these two sites, one more active than the other, one that has potentially undergone a longer period of what’s called water-rock interactions or alterations in the outer. And then, what is the net result? So, we had our first field program that took place in June, and we’re already seeing some amazing science results around the biology.
Host:And what does that look like? Is there a master control, and then you have a bunch of scientists walking through the field collecting samples, and they’re talking back and forth?
Darlene Lim:Yeah, no, that’s a great question. Normally, if we did this and it wasn’t under the simulated Mars mission conditions, we’d just take a crew of 15 people, a bunch of grad students, and we’d stay out there, eat our lunch, all day. The difference is that the Mars architectures that have been developed dictate that there are two to four people that are out doing at any point in time, doing a traverse, an EVA. And so, what we simulated is the case that you have two people out on the surface of Mars, and they are the ones that are in direct contact with two other buddies essentially that are on Mars, sitting in a control station, let’s say a pressurized HAB. And those four people are interacting, and they’re looking at the timeline, looking at how much life support they have. So, let’s say it’s four hours of life support.
And then, having to go out and conduct a traverse which is in line with science objectives that have been dictated by a broader science team. And that science team is on earth, and they are desperate for results. And that’s the reality actually that we deal with, because it’s real science. They’re desperate for solid results so they can make discoveries, so they can publish papers, so they test hypotheses. And those scientists sit 50 kilometers away from the action.
Host:Do you add the delay in all that?
Darlene Lim:We add the delay. So, the scientists — it’s crazy, because looking back eight months ago, we came up with I think 468 technical requirements that had to be implemented to make this whole mission work. And this was driven by the science, it was driven by the operational research requirements, all sorts of things. So, when the scientists sit in the back room, they are linked, they are connected to what’s going on “on Mars”, out in the craters of the moon, by voice. They can hear what’s going on, but it’s on delay. They can see what’s going on, because we have video connection, we have still images that are coming back, that are taken in very specific ways following very specific procedures so the scientists can see the rocks. They can make determinations of what they’re seeing.
Host: Technology drives exploration. We develop, test and fly transformative capabilities and cutting edge exploration technologies. Our technology development provides the onramp for new ideas, maturing them from early stage through flight and giving wings to the innovative economy. One example of that onramp for new ideas comes from Alex Mazhari in the NASA Ames SpaceShop, here he is talking about how an open facility can help spark new ideas.
Alex Mazhari: The SpaceShop is very unique in the federal government in the sense that it’s a completely open facility. And when I mean open, anyone who is agency personnel can come and use it with the proper paperwork and the right authorizations.
Host: Yeah, your boss has got to be okay with it.
Alex Mazhari: Exactly. They have to understand what you’re doing with your time, and approve that that’s something you can do. And you’re able to come in and use all the equipment. And as I noted, it’s very diverse. You have laser cutters, a huge variety of 3D printers, everything to a band saw and drill press and power tools. And these are things you typically don’t have access to in your office.
Host: Yeah, some office and they’re like, okay, now you’ve got to go through procurement, a whole process to buy this setup, or a 3D printer, and some people may have it and some may not. But this is a cool place where if you don’t, you have a whole bunch of stuff altogether.
Alex Mazhari: Yeah, absolutely. And the combination of these things, it’s been attempted a couple of times throughout the agency, but maybe with not as much trust in the individual employees, right? The little bit of supervision, you have to be there the whole time, you can’t leave anyone unattended — you have to do the work for them, for example, if they’re using a certain type of equipment.
And the way our paperwork is formatted is that you get trained to a point where you can handle this equipment by yourself, and NASA has approved you to.
Host: So, it’s not just a free-for-all. It’s like, you want to come use it, awesome, we’re not going to make you buy the stuff, here’s a place you can work. But, kind of train them up, learn how to use it.
Alex Mazhari: And there’s a lot of safety protocols. Legal was involved, safety was involved. They approved everything step by step. There are job hazard reports everyone must read before using the equipment, all this stuff. And we make sure they get to a certain standard so they are not posing a very large danger to themselves. And yeah, but they’re able to work on their prototypes, and I loved it, so I stayed around, helped it.
And I’ve refocused the facility within the last couple of years, which originally was just primarily for low-fidelity prototyping. People kind of…
Host: Low-fidelity, what do you mean?
Alex Mazhari: By low-fidelity, I mean just very basic types of printing were available, very low-grade, desktop-grade FDM printing. The facility started, and as you know, when you get funds, you have to distribute it, especially for that type of facility, so you have a little bit of everything. But the emphasis on a little bit bothered some of the directorates. The usage wasn’t what it could’ve been and should’ve been and it’s definitely not what it is now.
And the way we got to where we are now is by understanding what people needed. What a research center really needs, and what a research center tends to use most often, what people were requesting in terms of materials and in terms of additive processes — and turnaround times, more importantly, making sure you can go from A to B really quickly is kind of the whole purpose of an in-house facility, right?
Host: This is kind of unique when people think of NASA centers. The big ones that are launching rockets or training humans for spaceflight, NASA Ames in Silicon Valley, it’s a research center, and so you’re starting the ideas, the nuggets of the ideas that will be instrumentation on Curiosity or into the Space Station. This is the beginning of those ideas.
Alex Mazhari: From what it seems, Ames tends to do very well in terms of progressing the technology readiness level of stuff. That’s one of the core objectives of the research centers, is to take something that’s a nine or eight, and bring it down to something that might be usable, like a six or a seven, something you can take a chance on, and something your management would be more comfortable with you testing. And what better place to do that than a prototyping facility, where if you have a crazy idea, you can take a piece of cardboard and laser cut it to the right dimensions. If you don’t know how to CAD, we teach you how to CAD, and within a couple days you’ve got something.
And you show the right people, convince the right people, throw in the right proposals, all the innovation funds that are out there, and before you know it, you get funded and it becomes a project.
Host: NASA’s fleet of satellites, its airborne missions and researchers address some of the critical challenges facing our planet today and in the future: extreme weather events, sea level rise, freshwater resources, just to name a few. Laura Iraci is running a project that is gathering that data right here in Silicon Valley.
Laura Iraci: AJAX is the Alpha-Jet Atmospheric Experiment. It’s a neat project we have here at Ames that takes advantage of some of our partners here at the NASA Research Park, and it gives us an opportunity to put atmospheric sensors on an aircraft and get measurements of the California and Nevada area maybe two, three, four times a month, depending on when the plane is available and when the pilots have hours they can fly.
We measure all sorts of things like air quality in the Central Valley, where it can be really bad in the summer, to greenhouse gases that are emitted, say from this natural gas leak that just happened in Aliso Canyon.
Host: Near LA, right?
Laura Iraci: Yeah, San Fernando Valley, just north. That was for about four months, there was this horrible leak of methane gas. And so, that’s one of the sensors we happen to carry on the AJAX payload. We have a sensor that measures CO2 and methane and water, we have another one that measures ozone, and one that measures formaldehyde, plus a wind pressure temperature sensor.
Host: I’m going, are there multiple ongoing experiments and lab things going on, so it’s just a matter of when you’re able to get up and get data sets?
Laura Iraci: Right. We have about maybe six or so science questions we keep queued up in the back of our brains, and we wait for the right weather and we wait for the right satellite overpasses. And when we find out, we’re going to be able to have flight hours on Thursday, we pull out our planning sheets and say, which satellites are where, what does the weather look like, how hot is it supposed to be in Fresno, and we figure out which science target matches best with the flight opportunity.
Host: Do you always try to coordinate it so it’s like at the same time as a satellite’s going over, you fly at the same time?
Laura Iraci: If possible, that’s ideal.
Host: That’s the ideal.
Laura Iraci: But in reality, the satellite’s going way faster than the aircraft, so they will overlap for one or two data points anyway out of a whole two-hour flight. So usually, within a couple hours is considered reasonable agreement. The air changes slowly relative to how fast a satellite moves.
Host: Okay, yes, it figures going…
Laura Iraci: Even relative to how fast the aircraft moves. So, we try to get within an hour or two.
Host: And since you’ve been working on the project, what has surprised you, I guess, or what has been surprising, or even like, I did not think that was going to be a thing? Or has it been more so validating what people had already expected?
Laura Iraci: One thing we’ve been fortunate in an unfortunate sort of way to be able to do is to sample large wildfires. We’ve had several large wildfires in California in the last handful of years, and they’ve been close enough to Ames that we’ve been able to go and make measurements of the emissions from those forest fires. That’s a science target that’s under-sampled.
So, most of the emissions that you can look up in these inventory databases that would predict what’s emitted from fires in the west are based on prescribed fires, but most of the burning that happens in the west…
Host: By prescribed fires, what exactly?
Laura Iraci: The Forest Service will go out and do a small burn to clear some land, or maybe it’ll be grassland.
Host: Okay, so they mean to do it.
Laura Iraci: They’re on purpose, yeah. They pick them for temperate weather conditions when they won’t expand too much, and they’ll burn something off in advance of it lighting on its own and going crazy.
So, the conditions are different than when something lights on its own and goes crazy. So, the emissions are different, yet all of our databases are built primarily on these gentle, controlled burns. And so in the west, the databases are not terrible representative.
So, we’ve been able to go out and get some measurements around about six or eight now different forest fires, and right in the Sierras where it’s the true fuel mix, and get a better understanding particularly of how much methane is emitted from these fires, because methane is a potent greenhouse gas, as you know. And it’s not been well-studied how that changes over time, over the life of a fire, and from one fire to another.
Host: NASA is with you when you fly. Every U.S. aircraft and air traffic control tower uses NASA-developed technology. We’re committed to transforming aviation by reducing its environmental impact, maintaining safety, and revolutionizing aircraft shapes and propulsion. Stuart Rogers works in our supercomputing division but works on both new and traditional ways to conduct aviation research.
Stu Rodgers: Computational fluid dynamics, or CFD, is essentially the science of solving the mathematical equations that govern fluid dynamics on a computer. And the whole reason you would do this is sort of the same reason you might build a wind tunnel. Imagine anything you might want to test in a wind tunnel to understand the aerodynamics or acoustics or anything like that, you could also theoretically simulate it in a computer and get perhaps even more detailed information than the wind tunnel. However, the interesting thing is that the mathematical equations, they’re non-linear partial differential equations, very difficult to solve.
Host:It sounds difficult.
Stu Rodgers: So it at the time, in the ’80s, it was a growing science. And the pioneers of developing the software for CFD worked at Ames. Many of the people who developed all the algorithms were here.
Host:So, before even you set up these algorithms and you have the computer running these tests, did you have to study the actual — I’m sure there’s hands-on tests of fluid dynamics where you submerge things maybe with dye or something like that. Did you have to study through all that stuff and figure out the real deal first, or how does that work?
Stu Rodgers: It’s actually an interesting split. As an undergraduate, you do a lot of study of fluid dynamics and different things, including the wind tunnel, but when you start to specialize in doing CFD for example, all the people that work in CFD generally stay behind the monitor working on the computer, whereas all the people that are doing work in the wind tunnels are the wind tunnel jockeys that are doing their work in the wind tunnels. And so the great thing about Ames is that we have such great wind tunnel facilities and we have had for such a long time is that there’s a real synergy between the two, and so the type of work we did as we were first developing CFD is, we had to validate that. We had to validate the models in the first place. And so, we developed, we worked with the wind tunnel people in a lot of instances to build a test we could then simulate in the computer and compare the answers and make sure we were on the right track.
Host:Obviously building a wind tunnel is a big endeavor. We have a few here at Ames, but imagine, building this is such a thing. If you have a computer model that can accurately depict that stuff, it’s easier. It’s a matter of running the system. Was the original intention to replace these wind tunnels? Is that what people were hoping for back in the ’80s when they were first contemplating this?
Stu Rodgers: And that was really a big controversy. There was even a paper written by some people at Ames that predicted we would be able to replace wind tunnels within a certain timeframe. And while CFD has matured tremendously, and a lot of aerodynamic data that programs need are now being generated on the computer, you cannot replace wind tunnel tests. They really work together.
Host: And finally, let’s talk about the International Space Station, where NASA is literally working off the Earth, for the Earth. The space station is a blueprint for global cooperation and scientific advancements, a destination for growing a commercial marketplace in low-Earth orbit, and a test bed for demonstrating new technologies. The space station is the springboard to NASA’s next great leap in exploration, including future missions to an asteroid and Mars. We close with veteran astronaut Steven Smith talking about real experiments on the space station and how they are making our lives better on Earth.
Steve Smith: I’m involved with our space station efforts to take experiments that have to do largely with biology to the space station and make them successful. And that involves using some of my operational experience, it also uses some of my diplomatic skills to try and make sure we get funding, and that we use it correctly, and that the incredible scientists and engineers here understand what the constraints are in terms of schedule and politics and funding to make it successful.
So, it’s not only going to make the current experiments we do in space successful from Ames, but also to try and find new experiments to do in space. For example, there are people here at Ames working on how we do laundry in space to use less water.
Host: Okay, how do you do laundry in space?
Steve Smith: Right now, we throw everything out.
Host: Really?
Steve Smith: Correct, yeah. The clothes don’t get quite as dirty, because they’re not pressing against your body, so you can actually wear them a little bit longer, but in general when we’re done with them, we put them into a vehicle that burns up on reentry. But we can’t do that on the way to Mars. So, right now, we can send things to the space station quite often during the year, so we can send new clothes for example.
But on the way to Mars, which is a multi-month mission both ways — for example, using current propulsion techniques, it’s about nine months each way. So, you really can’t resupply as much, so we’re going to have to learn how to clean laundry to get to Mars. Correct. That’s one of our smaller problems in terms of getting to Mars, by the way.
Host: Among a slew of many problems that people are working on.
Steve Smith: And there are benefits to that technology. If we can figure out how to use less water to do laundry, there’s an obvious spinoff to help people on earth, where we can use less energy and resources like water to do laundry on earth.
Host: It’s like the quintessential example of efficiency.
Steve Smith: Exactly, absolutely.
Host: All the resources we take for granted here, at the space station, you’ve got to make it work.
Steve Smith: Exactly, and going to Mars, it’s going to be even harder.
Host: Wow. So, if I understand it correctly, coming out of Ames is like 50 different projects we’re working on for ISS?
Steve Smith: Correct. Somewhere between 40 and 50. They span a wide variety of interest areas, but we are doing a lot for the United States, to get our names on these experiments.
Host: I always say, that was one of my favorite meetings when I first came in, was you sat there and you went through PowerPoint slides of all 50 you kind of went through — and you’d think that’d get boring after a while, but you’re sitting there like, we’re doing that? That’s cool. That’s fascinating.
Steve Smith: It’s pretty amazing. One of the first things we’re trying to do is get a list of everything we’re doing at Ames to upper management here, so they can understand and be proud of the wide variety of things we do here.
Host: Wow. So, what are some of the major programs right now going — some of the major science that Ames is doing and working up through the space station that the average person wouldn’t really be familiar with them?
Steve Smith: A large number of them are related to space biology, and what that means is how organisms like human bodies operate in zero gravity. Thad’s one of the real expertises here at Ames Research Center. A lot of them are deep medical scientific-type experiments to understand how organisms react. And if we can figure out how they react, we might be able to better life on earth, because it helps us solve a problem on earth, but we can also help send people beyond earth’s orbit, for example to Mars.
We also launch a lot of miniature satellites from the space station that try different techniques, technologies. And so, Ames has a real expertise in small satellites.
But we also have several basic technology experiments people are working on like the laundry in space, that we will work on, on the space station. Another good example is how you compact trash efficiently and possibly reuse it for things like building things. There’s one technology demonstrator here at the Ames Research Center that’s trying to figure out, what do you do with trash? Is there something we can do better with it than just throw it away?
Host: Yeah, instead of sending it to go burn up in the atmosphere, is there something else we can do?
Steve Smith: Correct. We have to think like that, because Mars is a long way away. And so, if we’re going to be gone for two years, for example, we have to think about how we can do better with trash and potentially reuse it. We have to be better with our use of water, we have to be able to do laundry in space. We have to be able to offset the negative effects of radiation, things like that. It’s a huge number of challenges.
Host: Wow. Even just thinking the space biology part, just thinking of, so much of gravity you just take for granted, the way your blood flows, your eyeball for that matter. I even heard that when people go into space, they even have almost a bit of motion sickness.
Steve Smith: Correct.
Host: How was that?
Steve Smith: It’s not very pleasant.
Host: Is it like a car sickness? Like, you feel not too different, I’m guessing.
Steve Smith: I can speak first-hand, that’s exactly what it’s like. I think I’ve read about 60-70 percent of astronauts suffer from motion sickness when they’re in space the first few days. The large percentage of those people eventually get better. It’s just like having sea legs, you just get used to it. It’s like being on a boat, you feel bad for an hour or a day, but eventually you get better. There are some people who never get better.
Host: I can’t imagine spending an entire mission every day being sick.
Steve Smith: Yeah. Luckily, it’s a small percentage of people who continue that, but some other physiology changes. Your eyes actually change shape a bit because of the lack of gravity, so we have people who have different vision on orbit than they do on earth. So, we’ve had to come up with special glasses, for example, that had to be adapted.
One of the real negative effects of being in space is the loss of bone density and muscle mass because you’re not exercising to move around in zero gravity. You just fly all over the place, so your body just atrophies. So, we have to exercise intently. I believe the average space station astronaut works out about an hour and a half per day for their entire mission, just to try and keep it going.
Host: Just to keep it going.
Steve Smith: And so, when we go to Mars, that’s probably not practical to take a large exercise machine with you for that large journey.
Host: Especially in a small capsule, depending on — let alone the space constraints, you need enough space to exercise and keep yourself . . .
Steve Smith: Exactly. So, is there some other way that we can fight muscle and bone atrophy, hopefully maybe through medications for example? And just in the last month there’s been an experiment on orbit with a large pharmaceutical company looking at that, to see if we can use some kind of medication to fight that.
And the spinoff benefits for people on earth is really obvious. There are people who suffer on earth from bone atrophy, for muscle atrophy. So, if these medications can work for the astronauts, we can help people on earth. And so, that’s what we call spinoff, and there’s been thousands of them since NASA started in the late ’50s.
Host: Thanks for listening to the NASA in Silicon Valley podcast. We have more NASA conversations coming your way in the New Year. Don’t forget to like, star, tweet, retweet, share, and comment while we reach new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of all humankind.
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