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Introduction: NASA in Silicon Valley Podcast

Season 1Jul 20, 2016

NASA in Silicon Valley, a new podcast series from NASA’s Ames Research Center located in the heart of Silicon Valley

NASA in Silicon Valley Podcast


NASA in Silicon Valley Introduction

NASA in Silicon Valley podcast gives an in depth look at the various researchers, scientists, engineers, and all around cool people who work at NASA to push the boundaries of innovation.

Transcript

Featuring:

– Matthew Buffington
– Steve Smith
– Mary Beth Wilhelm
– Laura Iraci

[Music]

Matthew Buffington (Host):You’re listening to NASA in Silicon Valley. A new podcast series from NASA’s Ames Research Center located in the heart of Silicon Valley. Throughout this series we will meet various researchers, scientists, engineers, and all around cool people who work at NASA to push the boundaries of innovation. When you think of Silicon Valley, the first things that come to mind are start-ups in garages that begin with a nugget of an idea and grow into huge tech companies that innovate and disrupt the status quo.

Long before the words Silicon Valley entered popular culture, the Ames Research Center has led NASA and the academic community in world-class research and development. Now Silicon Valley is more than just tech companies or even a location; it is a culture it’s a mindset, it’s questioning how things are done.

Now, throughout this podcast series, we are going to cover a whole range of topics; trying to find other planets in other solar systems, looking at robotics, and earth science and even the science that is up on the International Space Station that is driving our journey to Mars.

As a general format, we will typically launch each episode with a quick rundown of the latest news coming out of Ames and other NASA centers. We’ll also give a quick introduction to the upcoming episode. To start out, we will dig into some stories from NASA.gov that you might have missed. We will also jump into conversations with experts to give us more insight not only on what they are working on, but how they got where they are. Here is a quick taste of what we are working on:

Host:… you feel that zero gravity, what is going through your head?

Steve Smith: Well, I tell people being in space is like a magic show. Because everything is floating around, you are going 17,500 miles and hour, you are seeing the sunrise 16 times per day, set 16 times per day…

Mary Beth Wilhelm: My research right now, I’ve been doing a lot of work in the Atacama Desert in Chile. And it is such and extraordinary place. It is the driest place in the world, the site that I work at…

Host: It is not just hyperbole.

Mary Beth Wilhelm: No, it is the driest place in the world. It gets about two millimeters of rain per decade.

Laura Iraci:AJAX is the Alpha Jet Atmospheric Experiment. It is 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, sort of the California and Nevada area. Maybe two to three to four times a month, depending on when the plane is available and when the pilots have hours they can fly.

Host: In the future, we hope to add some interactive features to the podcast, but in the meantime, you can always tweet at us @NASAAmes and use the hashtag #NASASiliconValley.

So go ahead and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcast app and we will have a new episode up every Wednesday. So please join us as we reach new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind.