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High Flying

Season 1Episode 220Nov 5, 2021

CJ Scott details the WB-57 aircraft, the unique imaging systems on board, and the teams that support operations. HWHAP Episode 220.

High Flying

High Flying

If you’re fascinated by the idea of humans traveling through space and curious about how that all works, you’ve come to the right place.

“Houston We Have a Podcast” is the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center from Houston, Texas, home for NASA’s astronauts and Mission Control Center. Listen to the brightest minds of America’s space agency – astronauts, engineers, scientists and program leaders – discuss exciting topics in engineering, science and technology, sharing their personal stories and expertise on every aspect of human spaceflight. Learn more about how the work being done will help send humans forward to the Moon and on to Mars in the Artemis program.

On Episode 220, CJ Scott details the WB-57 aircraft, the unique imaging systems on board, and the teams that support operations. This episode was recorded on September 10, 2021.

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Transcript

Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, we have a podcast! Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 220, “High Flying.” I’m Gary Jordan, and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight. But, let’s be honest, we cover a lot more than that. When humans return to Earth on American spacecraft, a high-altitude aircraft is deployed to capture imagery as it heads in, providing early data on the spacecraft’s status that helps mission control and recovery operations. That aircraft is called a WB-57. We’ve talked about the aircraft briefly on this podcast before, but today, we’re going to explore the aircraft, its operations, and some cool features in more depth. Joining us for this episode is Carey Scott, goes by CJ; he’s the deputy principal investigator of SCIFLI, which is of course an acronym for Scientifically Calibrated In-Flight Imagery, based out of NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia. We’ll talk about the WB-57, its operations, what SCIFLI is all about, and some ongoing work to prepare for Artemis missions with Orion returning from the Moon. Exciting stuff, so let’s get right into it. Enjoy.

[ Music]

Host: Hey, CJ, thanks for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast today.

CJ Scott: Hi, Gary. Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Host: So I’m excited to talk about the WB-57. I love this airplane. I got to see it at Johnson Space Center a couple times and see some of the operations. But what I didn’t realize is just, you know, there’s much more to this, and I never really dove too deep into what it does, and the science, and some of the great investigations on board. So before we go into that, CJ, I want to understand a little bit about you. We were talking with Tom [Horvath], and you can talk a little bit about Tom before, before we get into you, if you want, but he said, you are the person that’s going to take over the reins for this SCIFLI thing, so big responsibility. Tell us about yourself, and your career path that got you to where you are today.

CJ Scott: Yeah. Well, I was born and raised in, in California, went to Chico State, graduated in 2010 with a bachelor’s in physics. I was actually a high school and middle school science teacher, and then I worked as a curriculum developer while I was pursuing an aerospace graduate degree. During that time I spent a summer working at NASA Ames [Research Center] as an opto-mechanical engineering intern for the SOFIA project, which is really cool. That’s the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy; it’s, like, the world’s largest airborne infrared observatory, and basically it’s a 747 aircraft with a huge IR telescope that points out of the aft section.

Host: Oh, cool.

CJ Scott: Yeah, pretty neat stuff. In 2017, I took a little break from school, and got an internship working at NASA Langley [Research Center] in Virginia. And then I was hired as an aerothermodynamics researcher in 2019. That’s where I met Tom Horvath and Rich Schwartz. They started the SCIFLI project. Back when it started, it was called HYTHIRM (Hypersonic Thermodynamic Infrared Measurements), and, you know, basically as an aerothermodynamicist I kind of focused on, well, I focused on systems that basically help spacecraft survive, you know, the heating environment during launch or re-entry, you know, to Earth, say, from space station, or from the Moon. And, you know, I’ve always had a passion for human space exploration, spacecraft design, cosmology, so I’m really grateful to have been given the opportunity to work with Tom, and Rich, and the rest of the SCIFLI team to support NASA’s, NASA’s mission.

Host: Were you always into airplanes? Seems like all these opportunities you took, you know, Ames and Langley, you’ve been in the world of aerospace, right, especially with flight, and NASA’s a little bit of everything but seems like your interest lies with, with planes.

CJ Scott: Yeah, I mean, that’s funny. You know, as a kid I had a lot of LEGO sets, and didn’t matter what was the picture on the box, it was going to be some type of flight vehicle [laughter], whether it was an aircraft or a spaceship, or something. It was always, turned into an airplane at the end.

Host: That’s hilarious. Awesome. Well, now you get to do the adult version of that, so that’s fantastic. WB-57, let’s talk about this particular aircraft, because I think that’s a big part of some of, you talk about SCIFLI, we can get into that, but let’s first start with the aircraft. You talk about SOFIA. This one is a little different, high-altitude plane. CJ, what is the WB-57?

CJ Scott: Yeah, so, you know, actually JSC, Johnson Space Center, is the home of the WB-57 High Altitude Research Program, which owns the last three of these aircraft in the world. Originally, it was called the WB-57F, I think, by General Dynamics, and these three have been repurposed, and are now based at Ellington Field. Essentially, they are high-altitude research aircraft. They’ve been flying since the ’70s, and, you know, today, they are still an asset to the scientific community in, you know, human spaceflight.

Host: That’s right. Now, OK, if I was imagining, you know, being a pilot for this thing, and I was going to do a research investigation, you know, what would that, what would that look like? I’m assuming, you know, I can’t just, you know, go in as, like, a passenger, right? I feel like I have to wear something fancy to fly this thing.

CJ Scott: Yeah, so, I mean, the aircraft is pretty unique, right? It’s a mid-wing, kind of dual-engine, long-range aircraft. It can fly for really long periods of time, up to about 60,000 feet. It’s got a really long wingspan, about 122-1/2 feet, and so it’s almost, you know, its wingspan is almost double the length from nose to tail. So —

Host: Oh, wow.

CJ Scott: — yeah, it really does take some special skill to, to fly these things. For imaging missions, though, the crew, you know, usually operates below 50,000 feet, so they don’t have to wear that bulky kind of full-pressure suit. The full-pressure suit is pretty cool. I’ve seen a few of the crew wearing them, and, I mean, it’s, you’re pretty much, you’re almost like an astronaut, right? It’s a whole thing. You got a helmet, and the whole, you know, the whole getup. It’s pretty fascinating. The cockpit’s got, you know, two members, two flight crew. There’s a pilot and a sensor equipment operator, SEO. The pilot, you know, sits in the front, has everything he needs to operate the aircraft, while the SEO, or the back-seater, kind of has all the navigational equipment, but also the controls for operating all the payloads that may be, you know, on the aircraft.

Host: So you got two people flying, and sometimes they get to wear those super-cool suits. Now, in terms of a mission itself, right, I’m guessing it’s not just those two folks. They got some, a little bit of help on the ground.

CJ Scott: Yeah, there’s a whole host of personnel that really make operating the WB-57 possible. You know, the, the maintenance personnel do excellent work, you know, literally getting this aircraft off the ground, maintaining the vehicle. As far as mission planning goes, you know, we always begin with imaging objectives, and, you know, kind of go from there to develop, develop the mission more fully. But, yeah, there are a lot of people involved at various levels that make this type of work possible.

Host: Yeah, yeah. Let’s explore mission planning a little bit more. So say, you know, it sounds like you have a good support network on the ground. You got the pilots ready to go. It’s a very large aircraft. When you’re getting ready to perform a mission, what goes into that? What do you have to do ahead of time to make sure you’re ready to support whatever mission it is?

CJ Scott: Yeah, so, you know, as I mentioned earlier, the mission planning always begins with imaging objectives. So, you know, what part of the flight are we looking at? What locations on the vehicle do, does the customer want to see? Are there any dynamic events, or particular, you know, phenomena that need to be imaged? So the SCIFLI team will typically, you know, collect information. We call that, like, conops, or a concept of operations, from the customer, and then our team will kind of use that data to develop a preliminary kind of mission geometry to meet the derived requirements, or, you know, the scientific objectives. We will use, you know, high-fidelity modeling tools to kind of compile and simulate the geometries of the vehicle, and, you know, the theater of operations, the flight paths of, you know, the target, the imaging aircraft. We can input, you know, the timing of key events. We, you know, put in the payload spec[ification]s, and basically, you know, we put the entire mission into a 3D virtual environment. And that allows us to really communicate well, you know, back and forth with the customer, to make sure that everyone’s on the same page for, you know, the imaging mission.

Host: Let’s give a couple of examples of missions that at least I’m aware of; maybe you know of a couple of other ones. When it comes to supporting, you know, for the WB-57, supporting various missions: the ones, I mean, we’re talking the human spaceflight down here at Johnson, so the ones I’m aware of are particularly for landings of human spaceflight vehicles. So the ones I know of are, you know, SpaceX Dragon, when that lands in the Atlantic Ocean, WB-57 is deployed, and provides some imagery, and the Orion, and that was true for EFT-1, Exploration Flight Test-1, and I know part of the discussion today is really gearing up for Artemis and supporting that in the future. So how do those work? Give us an example of what the team is doing to prepare for SpaceX return or for an Orion return.

CJ Scott: Yeah, definitely. So, you know, each mission really is unique, and depending on the target and the customer, we, you know, we optimize the flight to focus on, you know, the critical events. So sometimes, we’re imaging rocket launches, so we want to maybe focus on booster performance. Sometimes we need to collect data to help assess, you know, material performance, so, you know, we may be imaging, like, the thermal protection system of a re-entry vehicle. And sometimes, you know, we focus on late-stage vehicle recovery events, like parachute deployment. Generally, we will kind of develop a flight profile with the WB-57 crew, you know, keeping in mind flight safety is always the primary objective, right, everyone’s safety first. So the pilots always provide critical feedback on, you know, performance limitations, hazards, boundaries, and other things like that. The back-seaters will provide inputs to help us optimize the imaging system settings, and, like, the gimbal performance during the mission. Generally, the SEOs will configure the communication system, so it’s important to be able to communicate both to and from the aircraft to the imaging support team, you know, that’s located in mission control. Sometimes we broadcast images in real time, and sometimes we really need to communicate a message up to the, the cockpit to, you know, modify the flight. We get great support from the Spaceflight Meteorology Group at JSC. They kind of help us navigate through different weather systems, and of course, you know, SCIFLI helps to provide calibration of any of the sensors, we do material analysis. You know, it’s really important to make sure sensors are properly configured, so they receive the right amount of light to avoid any kind of overexposure, which would make, you know, the image too bright, or underexposure, which could make the image too dim. You know, overexposure, or sometimes we call it saturation, it reduces the scientific value of the data, and underexposure actually reduces the signal-to-noise ratio, so it makes it a lot harder to pinpoint, you know, what signal you’re getting. Ultimately, you know, we can convert thermal signatures into temperature. You know, that helps the researchers kind of verify their systems are performing as expected, or modify their design tools. As far as, like, a Dragon landing, you know, generally, once we’ve developed all of this kind of pre-mission work, we compile that into a, what’s called a mission execution plan, or an MEP. And we, you know, share that with the customer, make sure everyone’s on the same page. Then we will receive, like, a family of possible trajectories and splashdown points from SpaceX. The mission execution team will basically get those family of trajectories, process them using the simulation tools that I kind of mentioned earlier, and then provide the information to the WB-57 flight crew, you know, prior to takeoff. Then, you know, the operations team will maintain contact with, you know, lots of different people within NASA, at mission control, or, you know, from SpaceX to kind of receive updated mission information as the, you know, mission elapses. And generally, you know, we get a lot of this information prior to the Dragon undocking from ISS. Any mission updates that we get, including, you know, capsule status, or undock timing, splashdown location, that gets shared to the WB-57 crew, and then they can kind of adjust their flight accordingly.

Host: Would they deploy from, like, Texas? Is that part of the reason that you need it so early, is just because, OK, we need a plan, we need to make sure we’re at the right place, right time. Are you guys coming from Texas?

CJ Scott: So, again, you know, that’s really mission-specific, but yeah, generally, you know, if we’re flying out of Texas, the aircraft has got about six or seven hours of endurance. So depending on the splashdown location, right, if it’s on the west side of Florida, you know, maybe somewhere in the Gulf, flying out of Texas is not a problem. Sometimes we need to fly out of Cape Canaveral, so that we’re a little bit closer and we have more loiter time in the air. And sometimes, for, you know, splashdowns that are, you know, in the Pacific Ocean, the WB may forward-deploy to a location, you know, in California. So, again, it really is mission-specific, yeah.

Host: OK. That makes a lot of sense. Let’s get nerdy with the imaging system for a bit. You talked about that this is one of the capabilities of the WB-57 is it flies really high, and it takes really cool pictures. So let’s learn a little bit more about that system. How does that work when you’re flying, you know, and when you’re flying, how do you point the camera? And what sorts of imaging systems do you, what kind of imagery are you able to capture from the plane? And then, I guess, overall, you know, why is that important?

CJ Scott: So, for, you know, ongoing SCIFLI missions supporting the NASA Commercial Crew, the primary payload is the kind of legacy system, which is a two-channel imaging system called DyNAMITE, and that stands for Day and Night Airborne Motion Imager for Terrestrial Environments, which I really like the acronym, I think it’s pretty cool [laughter]. The legacy system is kind of located within the AIRS gimbal; AIRS is the tracking system, so the Airborne Imaging and Recording System, it’s a two-axis gimbal system that was originally designed for space shuttle launches. It can change the roll and pitch orientation of the telescope, you know, relative to the aircrame. So it has a really wide field of regard, both in, like, azimuth and elevation; so, I mean, picture kind of a cone of available viewing out of the front of the aircraft, which is about, you know, 200 degrees wide, so to speak. DyNAMITE uses refractive optics, so basically a series of lenses that provide the desired image magnification, and also, you get a really cool, like, continuous zoom capability. There’s actually two systems, and either can be modified for use during, you know, night operations. One channel is a visible, and the other channel is an infrared, imaging system. So, you know, if you’re not familiar with infrared systems, you know, all objects give off light based on their temperature. So we refer to this as, like, infrared. We don’t typically see infrared with our eyes. Our skin actually is an infrared sensor, so you can kind of feel, you know, heat. But IR cameras detect these photons and then turn them into images, so that we can kind of visualize what’s going on. So that light in the mid-wave spectrum is really good for acquiring targets at extreme distances, tracking, and then you can infer surface temperature. The visible systems provide really good spatial resolution, so you can get really good detail. So that’s kind of the legacy system. The SAMI system, which is currently under development, is a six-channel, multi-spectral imaging system, which uses a reflective telescope. SAMI stands for the SCIFLI Airborne Multispectral Imager, which has been a really neat project. And if you have a moment, I’m happy to tell you more about that.

Host: Please, yeah. Let’s dive right in.

CJ Scott: Sure, yeah. So it basically uses, you know, a reflective telescope, you know, which uses mirrors instead of lenses to provide the magnification. Then, you know, the light is kind of filtered into a custom set of prisms, called beam splitters, which separate the light by wavelength, and then kind of direct them into individual channels. And lenses are then used to focus each beam path on separate detectors. So we’ve got four sensors, which are aligned with the near field of view telescope; that’s the reflective telescope system. Those enable spatial imaging in the ultraviolet, the visible, the near-infrared, short-wave infrared, and mid-wave infrared wave bands, simultaneously. SAMI also has a high-speed filter wheel for subdividing the mid-wave infrared channel into even smaller, narrow filter bands. The spinning filter wheel kind of lets us really accurately manage the photons coming from the target. That way, we can infer surface temperature, and, you know, see flow features associated with, you know, launching a rocket that, you know, aren’t usually observable with the naked eye. SLS, you know, for example, Space Launch System, will have plumes from the core stage, which contain a lot of water and CO2 (carbon dioxide), and it’s really hot. Both of those gases are transparent in the visible, and so, you know, when we image in the infrared we can actually see those kind of invisible plume structures, and then we can kind of see how those are impacting, you know, the vehicle, if they’re causing additional heating, or things like that.

Host: CJ, that was incredibly nerdy, and I absolutely love it. Now, taking all of that, you know, here’s how it works, right, here’s how the imaging system works, and here’s, especially the difference between the legacy and the new system; now, particularly with the new system, but really just the imagery in general, why is this important? Why are we deploying planes to support some of these human spaceflight missions?

CJ Scott: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, you can actually gain a lot of insight from collecting data from a vehicle while it’s in a real flight environment. Generally, you know, engineers will use software tools to kind of model, you know, the physics of the flight that they’re planning for: they can use wind tunnels to kind of simulate, you know, narrow regions of the flight profile, but Mother Nature’s really good at solving physics problems. And so, what we are able to do using the airborne imagery is collect that data from a real flight, real flight environment, to inform vehicle design specifications. For example, surface temperature can tell us a lot about the performance of a thermal protection system, or a heat shield, right? So for a capsule, as it re-enters the atmosphere, you know, going, like, 17,000 miles an hour, there’s a lot of energy which is transformed into heat at the, at the heat shield. And we want to protect the crew from that heat by using thermal protection system, so making sure it’s thick enough, and it has the right performance to kind of dissipate that heat, is really important to, you know, for crew safety. You know, if we obtain certain spectral features, it tells us a lot about the gases surrounding spacecraft during entry. This helps us to kind of modify the design tools that we use to make predictions, and explore, you know, other planetary atmospheres. But for human spaceflight, you know, parachute recovery systems are one of the most important and technically challenging subsystems on the spacecraft. They’re also one of the highest-risk items, in terms of safety of the crew. So NASA engineers will, you know, collect this, they look at this imagery to evaluate the performance of the parachute recovery systems on a regular basis, ensuring that, you know, we’ve got a good database of parachute recovery system performance, and from there you can actually develop kind of newer, updated models on just how exactly parachutes work. It’s an old technology that, you know, we, that we’re still really learning a lot about, to be honest.

Host: Yeah, yeah, parachutes are, kind of do a very magical thing, right? So let’s keep looking at it, and see what we can find out. And it seems like you’re still learning more and more. All super-critical stuff, CJ, what you’re talking about is, I mean, I think the way you described it is perfect. You just, you can replicate a flight environment as much as you want, but it’s never going to be quite like a flight environment, as the perfect place to gather such important data. You mentioned this a couple of times, CJ, throughout today’s discussion, you mentioned something called SCIFLI; so tell us a little bit about this, this effort here.

CJ Scott: Yep, SCIFLI is the Scientifically Calibrated In-Flight Imaging Team, and we’re generally based out of NASA Langley in Virginia. We’ve got a pretty broad team, with various capabilities from, you know, ranging from, you know, mission support at, in MCC-H, or Mission Control Center in Houston; we’ve got aerothermodynamacists, to, you know, help us kind of figure out what regions of flight are probably most critical to capture; we’ve got a lot of imaging specialists that we use to help develop our imaging systems, and tune them appropriately, calibration support, tons of programmatic support. We, and we also can do, like, post-processing of the actual collected imagery. So what you get isn’t really, you know, what you get from the camera isn’t exactly a temperature image, it’s really, you know, radiance, to use kind of a, you know, it’s a physical unit, and then you have to kind of convert those radiance values into temperature. And in order to do that you’ve got to calibrate the system using kind of a known temperature source. So that’s how you kind of get from the images to the temperature values. So we kind of do a lot of different things. Generally we facilitate the use of different aircraft or ground imaging platforms for various customers, and we will do the mission planning, you know, try to optimize or recommend optimal sensor settings, actually deploy the, deploy those platforms, collect the data, and then provide that data to the customer.

Host: And you’ve been doing this for a while now, or SCIFLI at least has been kind of collecting this data for a while, right? You’ve supported a lot of missions we’ve talked about a little bit earlier on today’s podcast, with SpaceX, mentioned EFT-1, right? And I think SCIFLI even supported a couple of the shuttle flights, some of the last ones, right?

CJ Scott: That’s right. So originally, the team was called HYTHIRM, and that was the, that project was started by Tom Horvath and Rich Schwartz here at NASA Langley. And they were doing boundary layer experimentation on the shuttle. So it started with, let’s image the underside of the shuttle, where the thermal protection system is, during a re-entry, see if we can get a global kind of picture of what the temperature looks like under there. And it was successful. That led to, you know, follow-on missions where they actually kind of bolted a little piece of metal under one of the wings and were able to image the impact of that little protuberance, or what we call a boundary layer trip, they were actually able to measure the thermal effects of putting a little trip under one of the wings on, on shuttle flights. Yeah, I came to the team in 2017, and since then, you know, we’ve imaged Dragon capsule re-entry, you know, Falcon-9 launches, Falcon-9, you know, booster recovery, we were part of the Dragon in-flight abort test imaging, we’ve done SpaceX parachute developmental and qualification drop tests, which helped to, help the Dragon capsule become human-rated, and, you know, we’ve imaged commercial resupply missions. We were also, supported Boeing at pad abort tests, and also during Orbital Flight Test-1. And, yeah, actually, in 2020, we did an imaging campaign in Australia during the Hayabusa2 asteroid sample return capsule re-entry. So that was pretty fascinating. You know, that was probably the second-fastest man-made object to enter the atmosphere, so that was pretty neat. Yeah. And then, you know, recently, we did a heliophysics experiment, basically imaging some plasma physics that were, you know, there was a plasma emitted from, like, a sounding rocket that was launched out of Wallops Flight Facility here in Virginia, and we were imaging the interaction with the particles, and the, you know, solar wind…really cool stuff.

Host: Yeah, super cool. I’m trying to imagine what it’s like for you, CJ. So, sounds like you’re very busy, right? You’ve got a lot of missions that you’re supporting. What’s the day like, you know, when it’s time to get up, and to support a mission? Where are you going? What are you looking at? What’s it like for you?

CJ Scott: Yeah, so I have different roles on the team. My primary role, you know, as the deputy PI (principal investigator), I’ve been really kind of a system engineer, you know, responsible for getting SAMI designed, built and tested. Day-to-day, you know, we’re talking with different folks, trying to kind of make progress on our planning. We’re always planning something, it seems like. In terms of mission support, you know, it really depends on the role. Sometimes, you know, the mission execution team will be supporting from Houston, be in one of the flight control rooms with, you know, headset on, you’ve got your monitors, your computers, you’re collecting data, processing, processing timing information, etc. Sometimes for ground operations, you know, I’ll be out in the field; many times we’ve been in the desert for many nights in a row, you know, with our telescope system set up, getting calibrated on stars, things like that. I’ve spent more than a few nights camping in the desert to support a very early imaging, imaging test. So, you know, it really does vary. I get to travel, you know, pretty frequently, which is, which is, it’s nice, but also, you know, spending the time away from the family can be tough sometimes.

Host: Yeah, totally get it, but it sounds like you’re going on all these really cool adventures. You’re camping, you know, you’re working with so many people across the United States, you’re supporting missions across the ocean, really cool stuff. You talked about really building up the capabilities with this, I think it was SAMI, to support the future, and it has a couple new capabilities. And I think that’s what’s an exciting takeaway from, from this discussion, is some of the cool stuff that we can expect for missions in the future, particularly with Artemis, right, when we have these capsules returning from the Moon. We’re going to have all these very interesting capabilities to collect data on this support for Artemis missions. So, CJ, tell me how, you know, the SCIFLI team and this new equipment is going to help us with Moon missions.

CJ Scott: Yeah, it is very exciting. So, you know, with the, with the SAMI system, it was designed specifically to help assess the heating and thermal environment near the base of the Space Launch System rocket. So, you know, as the rocket is, you know, traveling toward space, the, you know, as you go higher and higher in the atmosphere, the pressure decreases. And as the pressure decreases the plumes, their shape kind of expands out, gets wider and wider. And due to some kind of interesting aerodynamics, some of that plume gas, which is really hot, can actually become, like, entrained in the flow from the, you know, the tip of the rocket, and kind of start to recirculate. And actually, instead of just going away, you know, back from the rocket, it can actually kind of start to crawl up the vehicle, up the core stage. Now, a lot of the avionics, or the, the computers that control the, where the thrusters are pointing, a lot of the avionic systems are near the aft end of the rocket. And so, you know, we don’t want that region to get too hot, or else, you know, it could be a bad day. So SAMI’s designed to be able to image things that we can’t see in the visible, and kind of help us inform what the surface temperature is going to be like in that kind of base heat region, or the aft region of the SLS rocket. You know, again, as things come back from the Moon, they’re going to be coming in with a lot more energy than capsules coming from low-Earth orbit, you know, departing from space station. And so, that, that energy has to go somewhere, and, you know, it goes into the heat shield, it goes into the shock layer, or, you know, the, kind of the glowing plasma that, you know, you see on movies and stuff, that kind of goes around the vehicle as it re-enters. So being able to image and collect, you know, temperature values for those regions of flight are going to be really important. Again, parachute recovery systems are critical, so we want to be able to see inflation dynamics, we want to see vehicle/wake interactions, how the wake can, you know, influence how the parachutes are performing, any possible debris contact, or if there’s any anomalies, you know, we want to be able to, you know, visibly, or, you know, thermally, see the root cause for any of those anomalies. It’s also really, really good to capture these dynamic events, like, you know, heat shield jettison, or drogue deployment, things like that; really helps to verify that all the hard work that, you know, the numerous engineers who design these systems have put into making sure they work, what we do is we provide images to say, hey, look, your system worked as you expected. And if it doesn’t, then we also provide, you know, some data so, hey, here’s maybe why it didn’t perform like you thought. So it’s just really, I’m really fortunate to kind of be able to contribute, you know, to the NASA mission. It does feel pretty good, not going to lie.

Host: Seriously, and I think that’s the perfect place to end, CJ, is thinking about that. Just what you’re talking about is, you’re supporting some of the most critical phases of, of these flights. You’re supporting launches, you’re supporting landings, supporting parachutes, and like you said, you’ve got a lot of engineers, a lot of smart people relying on the data that you’re getting to help make the mission safer, better, more efficient, everything. And that’s the work that you’re doing, and that’s the work that your team is doing. Thinking about that, just, you know, this is a seemingly, you know, maybe from the outside, folks may think that this is a small part of the mission — oh, there’s a plane flying near a spacecraft, right, it’s not the spacecraft itself — but that data is so critical. So thinking about that, your contributions and your team’s contributions to making spaceflight successful, and how that all comes together.

CJ Scott: Yeah, it really is an honor to be involved with spaceflight in this way. You know, the old adage, you know, “failure is not an option,” right? We only get one shot to get this data, so we try very, very hard to do everything we can to plan for contingencies and all the rest, so that when the time comes, we’re in the right place at the right time, with the right sensors, so that we can collect the right data, and get it to the right folks, so they can make the right decisions.

Host: That’s some important stuff, CJ, and it seems like you’re enjoying it, though. It seems like it’s something you’re very passionate about, and something you’re very knowledgeable about.

CJ Scott: I’m definitely enjoying it [laughter]. There are some perks, right? I get to hang out with airplanes, and spaceships, and play with telescopes for a living. So things could be worse.

Host: [Laughter] All right, CJ, we’ll leave it there. This was an awesome discussion. I loved getting super-deep into, into how this stuff works. It’s very interesting stuff, and it is critical to the success, and really the continued success of missions, all critical stuff. So, CJ, appreciate you coming on Houston We Have a Podcast today. Thanks for your time.

CJ Scott: Hey, thanks a lot, Gary.

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Host: Hey, thanks for sticking around; I hoped you learned something today, and I definitely did with CJ. Awesome stuff, learning about all the imagery capabilities of the WB-57. He’s supporting a lot of missions that are going to the International Space Station, as well as Artemis. He talked about the SpaceX Dragon coming down, he talked about some data on the Falcon-9. He also talked about the SLS, Space Launch System, and the Orion, all kinds of interesting data being gathered from those missions. Check them all out at NASA.gov/iss, as well as NASA.gov/artemis. We’re one of many NASA podcasts across the entire agency. You can check us all out at NASA.gov/podcasts, or you can talk to just us at the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can use the hashtag #AskNASA on your favorite platform to submit an idea or ask a question, just make sure to mention it’s for us, at Houston We Have a Podcast. This episode was recorded on September 10th, 2021. Thanks to Alex Perryman, Pat Ryan, Norah Moran, Belinda Pulido, and Tom Horvath. And of course, thanks again to CJ Scott for taking the time to come on the show. Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on and tell us what you think of our podcast. We’ll be back next week!