Suggested Searches

Ian Brosnan: How NASA Collaborates And Shares Data With Other Agencies

Season 1Jan 26, 2017

A conversation with Ian Brosnan, Special Assistant for New National Aeronautics and Space Administration and United States Geological Survey Science Initiatives.

The cover art display for the NASA in Silicon Valley podcast.

A conversation with Ian Brosnan, Special Assistant for New National Aeronautics and Space Administration and United States Geological Survey Science Initiatives.

Transcript

Matthew C. Buffington (Host):This is episode 27 of the NASA in Silicon Valley podcast. From farms, national parks, and even responding to natural disasters throughout the country and the world, NASA’s science and data collection is making a difference in people’s lives every day. Today’s guest is Ian Brosnan, who works on collecting that data and making sure it is shared throughout the federal government and with the scientific community. Ian is the Special Assistant for New NASA and USGS Initiatives. We discuss how NASA collaborates and shares data with other agencies and also go into how data collection on the ground can complement data taken from space; which all helps us to better understand not only our world, but other worlds in our solar system and beyond. Without any delay, here is Ian Brosnan.

[Music]

Host: Tell us how did you end up at NASA, how did you end up in this area in Silicon Valley?

Ian Brosnan: So I actually came here right out of grad school under the Presidential Management Fellowship program, particularly under a track that NASA was key in initiating, which is the STEM side. So they’re really interested in bringing folks in, I think, who wouldn’t traditionally come into the federal government with a technical degree, but had an interest in federal leadership and management. So it was a perfect fit for me, because before grad school I started my career in the Coast Guard.

Host: Oh wow.

Ian Brosnan: So I was really interested in sort of pinning together that technical and that leadership side.

Host: Was it the Coast Guard that sent you to go do your grad school stuff?

Ian Brosnan: No, it wasn’t. I actually left the Coast Guard back in 2009 and went into the Reserves side then. But I was funded by DoD to do my Ph.D. research. A lot of work on acoustics and fish tracking.

Host: Nice. Really? So where did you do that?

Ian Brosnan: Cornell University.

Host: Okay.

Ian Brosnan: Yeah. Cornell is not necessarily known as the world’s largest oceanographic institution.

Host: There’s not a lot of oceans near Cornell.

Ian Brosnan: No, not a lot. But there was a small but distinct community of Earth scientists and particularly ocean scientists there, spread across the different departments. And I’ve known my advisor since I was a little kid, and he started a group and program on the West Coast to do the salmon survival work. So when I heard about it, I just gave him a call and — hadn’t talked to him in about 20 years, and thought it was a great opportunity, so I went.

Host: Nice. So go from salmon studies in Cornell to then, I’m guessing, you just saw it online of, hey, sign up for the PMF, the Presidential Management Fellowship.

Ian Brosnan: Right.

Host: You just applied for it, did the interview, and that was it?

Ian Brosnan: It was pretty interesting. So this job was never actually advertised.

Host: Yeah, because the PMF, it’s not necessarily — you don’t know what federal agency you’re going into beforehand.

Ian Brosnan: Right. Yeah, no, the series of hurdles you jump through in interviews — and even once you’re selected into the program, I think it’s still only about 60 percent actually get picked up while they have an active chance. But no, I got a call, “We have a position open. Would you be interested in it?”

Host: So they came looking for you.

Ian Brosnan: They did. Yeah.

Host: Funny, because I know a lot of people who are in the PMF program, they get in, they pass, they took their exam, they’re in.

Ian Brosnan: Right.

Host: And now they got to go sell their resume out to all these federal agencies of like, “Please, pick me up.”

Ian Brosnan: Exactly. And I think selling the resume is an important piece. I think a lot of people don’t do that. They just wait. So I was all over D.C., talking to different agencies. But this one actually did come out of the blue.

Host: Wow.

Ian Brosnan: And I think that’s probably because I think our HR folks in D.C. were critical in creating the program, and so they instructed the centers to get out and start actively looking.

Host: Wow. So they found you in this pile of new PMF employees.

Ian Brosnan: Right.

Host: And so, they called you up and were like, “How about coming to California?”

Ian Brosnan: Right. And my wife and I had been looking to come back west for a while. We were stationed together in Seattle for a few years, and I grew up in Portland, Oregon. So it was nice to be back on the West Coast.

Host: Yeah.

Ian Brosnan: Back in the mountains and the sea.

Host: Excellent. When you came over, did you continue doing salmon studies at NASA? Or what job did you end up landing into?

Ian Brosnan: I landed in the Earth Science division, cause we still had an NSF post doc I’d won at Cornell.

Host: That’s the National Science —

Ian Brosnan: National Science Foundation.

Host: — Foundation.

Ian Brosnan: Right. Pretty big, half-million dollar grant to do some technology development. And I wasn’t quite ready just to hand that over. I think nor was the lab I was leaving quite ready to take all that on. So we continued to do a little bit of work with them, a lot of fish surgery up in the Northwest, a lot of equipment deployments. And then once everything was sort of in place to track these fish with this new prototype technology, we sort of turned it over then.

So yeah, so I’ve done a little bit. I’ve published two papers since I’ve been here.

Host: Wow. What were those on?

Ian Brosnan: The first one was looking at survival rates going downstream of dams. So a big question right now is: Do we increase the amount of water we pour over the top of the dam to benefit salmon by moving them to the ocean quickly? But the negative side effect of that is you increase the amount of dissolved gas in the water. So when salmon sort of run that water over their gills, kind of a lot like the divers get the bends, it sort of bubbles out into their blood stream and can either kill them almost immediately in a stroke-type event, or it can basically create debilitating illness that makes them more vulnerable to predation and disease, so there’s a sort of secondary mortality effect.

What we were interested in — in 2011 they had a massive flood, and they had to spill to kind of preserve the integrity of the dams — we did natural experiments to look at that effect. So we found some effect at very high levels of spill.

Host: And I know some people would be like, “How is this NASA? We’re talking about dams and spillovers. How does the connection go on through?”

Ian Brosnan: NASA has got a definite interest in our science —

Host: Obviously.

Ian Brosnan: — but a lot of that focuses from looking at the Earth from space. So, we’re really just continuing the research. It was ongoing when I got here. And then wrap it up and move a little more towards research that I think is of closer NASA interest. So I’m bringing that technology skill set for tagging animals and sensors, and trying to bring that together with different groups here to understand — you know, Jing Li has this carbon nanotube sensor; it can do gas detection. How can we use that to understand the concentration of flux gases all over the world simply by putting that sensor on the back of an animal and letting it fly around the Pacific beach?

Host: Letting it do it for you.

Ian Brosnan: Right, exactly. So no aircraft, no pilot. Very low-cost sensor. All you really need is a grad student in the field.

Host: Wow. It’s one of those interesting things of all the planets that exist in our solar system and beyond, you know, like, we’re kind of sitting on one; it behooves us to understand what’s going on here, especially if we’re looking at other exoplanets and trying to see if there’s any comparabilities or just trying to see how — just to understand it better. I think it makes sense for us to know where we live and see how that compares to other places.

Ian Brosnan: Yeah, it definitely does.

Host: And then also the tech transfer of like, okay, how can you take this that we’re using or whatever.

Ian Brosnan: Yeah, that tech transfer piece is a really great point. I think a lot of that work that we do — because I think part of the reason why Jing Li developed a sensor was to be able to detect trace gases up on the space station during space flight. But how would ecological or atmospheric chemistry groups know that that instrument had been developed and was sort of available for tech transfer? So having different people come in through the center with different skill sets and different communities really gives you a chance to sort of say, “Oh, that piece that you have there, we could really use that over here,” and for a small bit of seed funding make that transfer and create a whole new line of research for folks.

Host: What’s your day-to-day like?

Ian Brosnan: So, when I got here, one of the things that was sort of a live topic was the idea of moving U.S. Geological Survey from their Menlo Park campus onto NASA Ames.

Host: That’s a cool thing especially in the Silicon Valley area. Of course you have the companies, you have these tech start-ups, big tech companies. Stanford. But you also have other federal agencies. It’s like here we are looking at space, and the U.S. Geological Survey that’s looking in the ground . . .

Ian Brosnan: Right. And that’s a really interesting point. They’re at the ground level. We’re on the space and air side. So we have this interesting opportunity as they come here to work, orbit to core.

Host: Nice. We’d worked with them before even in this area.

Ian Brosnan: We have.

Host: What kind of stuff have we worked with?

Ian Brosnan: We’ve had a long history, I think, with USGS nationally. They were heavily involved in the early lunar program, helping to map different planets. I think they still do that work with NASA, look at the visual imagery and create maps for rover use.

Host: Yeah.

Ian Brosnan: But particularly here between Menlo Park and NASA, about a million dollars have come in from USGS over the last couple of years.

Host: Oh really?

Ian Brosnan: Especially to sort of look at the technologies that we have and see if they can be applied to USGS’s particular problems. So I think there’s a group in TI that’s developing near-real-time —

Host: TI is like one of our technology engineering —

Ian Brosnan: Thanks. Right. That’s the — what is it? Intelligent systems area. So they do a lot of data mining work and algorithm development. And they’re looking at some of the imagery coming off our satellites to do near-real-time flood mapping by satellite. So if there’s a major hazard somewhere, USGS can turn to that algorithm and quickly develop flood maps for responders.

Host: Wow.

Ian Brosnan: Right. So that’s one example. The engineers — going back to the tagging work —

Host: Yeah, I was going to say, I thought that was something with tagging. That kind of fits over to some of the work they were doing.

Ian Brosnan: Yeah, so that’s sort of the third leg of this piece of work that Jing Li and I have been doing. We’re interested in the ecology and bringing that sensor in. But they’re also interested in developing new light-weight tags that they can integrate these sensors to. So you lower the weight and size and dimensions of the tag, you can tag a much wider range of animals. It’s about 5 percent of the body weight. So even a gram or two reduction opens up a whole new world of research.

Host: They have these animals who have these small light tags are out gathering data for you.

Ian Brosnan: Exactly.

Host: And not only, you know, where the animals are, but their environment and what they’re walking through.

Ian Brosnan: Exactly. So animals is a subject of research interest. We want to know where they go, where do they nest, what do they migrate through, what are they exposed to as they go? And then the idea the animal also is a research platform. So you may not be that concerned about what the animal is doing, but you’re really interested in the environment it’s flying through.

Host: Yeah. I was going to say, when you were talking about the U.S. Geological Survey — and also NASA, of course — normally when you think of USGS, you think of like earthquakes and things like —

Ian Brosnan: Right.

Host: How does that match in with like tagging animals and looking at it from the satellites? Flood mapping?

Ian Brosnan: This is a bit of federal government history, right? If you look back, how many times have we brought agencies together and sort of mushed them into one new larger agency? So this happened I think I heard last night. National Geospatial Intelligence agency, who also have now a presence in the Silicon Valley, they’re a mapping agency and a visual imagery agency that were brought together probably about 10 or 15 years ago. USGS is similar. They were U.S. Geological Survey to begin with, and then they brought in the National Biological Survey. So, integrated all of Department of Interior science under that USGS hat. As a function of that, they do the traditional earthquakes, they do the traditional water research and hydrology. But they’ve also got that strong biological component.

The other thing that’s, I think, a benefit to that is, you know, as we sort of look more and more at the natural world, we realize we can’t look at any single silos, right? It’s not just geology; it’s the overlying ecology, and the two that affect each other. So having them together I think gives them an opportunity to work across those traditional boundaries.

Host: Yeah, it’s cool. I mean, you think of the federal government as this behemoth — this big organization made up of all these different agencies and these different entities. It makes sense you have scientists who are working on stuff. You can keep them in their silos working by themselves with their own teams, or you can start cross-integration and everybody can kind of start sharing their data.

Ian Brosnan: Right.

Host: Let alone when you look at science and it’s also a matter of sharing it with like universities, with other people, to kind of get that overarching — the big picture look, I guess, and more hands in it.

Ian Brosnan: Exactly. That’s really what we’re trying to push with the USGS move, right?

Host: That’s right. You said that they were up at Menlo Park, but they’re coming over here to Moffett Airfield, you know, right near Mountain View.

Ian Brosnan: Right, exactly. So they’re not far now. I mean, depending on the state of the traffic, it’s a 15 to 30-minute drive.

Host: But it’s also nice when you can share office space.

Ian Brosnan: Exactly.

Host: And be in the building next door.

Ian Brosnan: Right. And we know well that, you know, as you move people closer and closer together — they’re in separate campuses, you move them onto the same campus, or you move them into the same building, or you move them onto the same wing of the building or the same floor — your probability of having these collaborative opportunities basically goes from almost nothing to nearly 100 percent.

Host: It’s also social-wise. It’s like, it’s the person you hang out with, the people that become friends, and then so when you’re doing your work it’s such an obvious thing of like, “Oh, I know Bill over there.”

Ian Brosnan: Right.

Host: Or, “I know Susie. She’s working on this thing.”

Ian Brosnan: Exactly. Yeah. You have those water cooler conversations or that conversation over lunch, and you talk about, “Oh, I’ve got this new initiative and I’m looking to do some lab work with it, but we don’t really have the skills here, and I don’t know where to go.” And maybe somebody else around the table says, “You know what? We’ve got that exact piece of equipment that you need, and we can help.”

Host: Oh cool.

Ian Brosnan: Yeah. So really looking forward to those, as you say, those sort of community opportunities to pop up in the conversation.

Host: The “synergy” buzzword of bringing people together.

Ian Brosnan: Exactly. Right. But then, I think, those are the things that will pop up naturally in conversation. But we’d also like to take it a little bit bigger than that and see, you know, are there areas where we can work orbit-to-core collaboratively, not just in these kind of small opportunities? Could we, for example, launch some different airborne missions to look at earthquake faults to understand better, say, is the Cascadia Fault one long continuous fault or a series of small ones that are likely to go in little bits? That scientific question, which I understand hasn’t really been well-resolved. Really, it drives how the nation is going to prepare for and respond to a massive earthquake like that.

Host: Absolutely.

Ian Brosnan: And that’s something USGS doesn’t necessarily have the history and the experience in doing those kinds of airborne campaigns, or developing the necessary instruments, but we do.

Host: There’s no reason for them to reinvent the wheel and relearn it.

Ian Brosnan: Exactly.

Host: We can work together. We can provide them —

Ian Brosnan: Right. And they’ll see the solicitation come up, right? But now, instead of just seeing the solicitation, try and understand how to respond to it, they can see these solicitations and say, “Oh, you know what? We have the partners next door who’ve done this before and can help us get there.”

Host: What are you seeing kind of the future of the advantages of working together?

Ian Brosnan: I think the big one for us is going after some of the hazards research. So earthquakes, earthquake modeling. Really bringing not only kind of the airborne science skills we have at Ames, but also the supercomputing resources to those complex models.

Host: Which is also relevant because we have a FEMA disaster response team also located at Moffett Field.

Ian Brosnan: Exactly, right. So if you think about disaster response occurring at several levels, there will be the initial first responders, life safety folks out there doing the work on the ground. But there will also be a bit scientific response behind it, which USGS will be closely involved in. And then NASA can play a key role in understanding how USGS is going to respond scientifically and help them provide new technologies, new tools, new research in order to support that function.

In one respect, you could think about a major hazard here in the California area as earthquakes.

Host: We all have a vested interest —

Ian Brosnan: Right.

Host: — and understanding in how that response is going to go.

Ian Brosnan: Exactly. But think, too, the amazing thing that could happen is that response could be led — scientifically could be led out of Moffett Field with NASA and USGS working closely together. So that’s one of the visions that we have. Not just the fundamental research, but the applied research and the immediate response.

Host: So when something goes down, it’s a group effort.

Ian Brosnan: Right. And people know to come here. Like, “Ah, the thing has happened. Let’s tap into what’s happening at NASA and USGS and see how it can help.”

Host: It almost kind of follows the Silicon Valley kind of model… Ideas outside the box. It’s like the thinking that you probably wouldn’t have ever thought of before.

Ian Brosnan: Right. And I don’t think people have — I mean, probably the idea has been floated. There’s not that many new ideas under the sun in disasters at this stage. But I think we’re now kind of coming to the point where that idea will come to fruition and a lot of things hopefully will sort of stem off of that.

Host: All right. Tell us a little bit more about your day-to-day. Obviously trying to move and bring scientists together, that’s not your whole day job. What are you working on right now?

Ian Brosnan: I got to say, it feels like a lot of my day job is trying to figure out how to bring scientists together.

Host: [Laughs]

Ian Brosnan: Because there’s a lot of little things. We want to work together. How do we do that? Well, we have some ideas, but we need a little bit of seed funding in order to get over the threshold that we could write a larger proposal. So, okay. Listening and responding to that, we’re like, okay, let’s see if we can draw some seed funding from the center and from headquarters, get those things going.

Host: I’m sure there may be things on their side as well. They have this great project but they just haven’t been able to get off the ground. And you weren’t able to talk before, and now you can figure out, “Okay, hey, we have this asset, we have this.” Some of the ideas that were just kind of thought not possible, but for some reason together you’re able to pull it off.

Ian Brosnan: Exactly. And then also thinking about how do we connect people who haven’t had that opportunity yet? So we’ll do a big event coming up in February. We’re going to do two pieces. There will be a big capabilities fair in the morning where we’ll have scientists come out and say, “Here’s what I have as an instrument. I could fly the Alpha Jet,” which is one of the experiments we have going on in the Earth Science division.

Host: One of the first interviews for the podcast — for people listening, go back — I think it’s episode three or so with Laura Iraci talking about AJAX.

Ian Brosnan: Exactly. So, Laura might come in with her poster and just hang that, and have a chance for USGS folks to walk around and say, “Oh, we’re really interested in collecting that measurement here. Maybe we could apply together to a grant.”

Host: Is that mainly federal people who are involved in this, or –?

Ian Brosnan:I think both the poster session and the capabilities fair are going to be focused broadly on the Earth science community in the area.

Host: So anybody.

Ian Brosnan:Yep. So anybody should be able to come. And then we’ll have a website up. We don’t have it ready yet. But we’ll have a website for people to come online, enter in the capability that they have, what size poster they want to host, what they think the field of research on their poster is on, or their capability fits to. And then we’ll pull all that together.

Host: So anybody who’s interested in that field, who’s working on it, can not only come in and look at the poster themselves, or if they have something they want to show off, “Hey, let’s all work together and figure it out.”

Ian Brosnan:Exactly. Yep. So I think last year we did this, we had over 300 people. USGS and NASA were heavily represented, but we had folks in from the private sector, from the NGOs, non-governmental organizations, show up. We had a few folks from academia there as well. So we really caught the full spectrum.

Host: Excellent. Once you have the site up and running, we’ll add that to the notes —

Ian Brosnan:Yeah, absolutely.

Host: — so that people know to hyperlink on over.

Ian Brosnan:So day to day, it really is a lot of talking to folks, getting them interested, getting them excited about the possibilities. And then the other side of my day is trying to get a little bit of research done. So writing a proposal on —

Host: You’re keeping it old school.

Ian Brosnan:Exactly.

Host: Not just like schmoozing and connecting people. You got to go do some research.

Ian Brosnan:Right.

Host: Get some dirt under your nails. [Laughs]

Ian Brosnan:Exactly, right. And that always keeps you fresh and makes you understand sort of where the state of the science is, what the challenges are, what’s popping up. So we’ve got a couple of projects running, thinking about how we might bring some of NASA’s technologies to bear on that scientific collaboration question. But how do people find out if they’re going to be in the field? And this is probably more coordination and collaboration. But if you’re ready to go into the field, you know, it would be really nice if somebody was on the ground doing some measurements as I fly my aircraft over, and I could hand them an instrument to carry with them and just collect some data. Now you’d have to kind of wander the halls and figure out who might be out there.

Host: So many missed opportunities.

Ian Brosnan:Right.

Host: But just an increase of collaboration and coordination, as you said.

Ian Brosnan:Right.

Host: To make that stuff easier.

Ian Brosnan:Yeah. And we have tools and technologies here. Like the Earth Science division runs MTS, which is a situational awareness tool, to know where all their aircraft are flying. The Mission Tools Suite is what it’s called. But what if we could use that to be sort of forward-looking and predictive, where you enter in all of your aircraft requests. But then if somebody else comes along and says, “Oh, you know what? I’ll be in the Railroad Valley. I wonder what’s going overhead,” they can type in the date and time and, boom, pop up and see, “Oh, Laura Iraci is flying the AJAX over the valley that day.”

Host: “And they’re measuring these things.”

Ian Brosnan:Right.

Host: But going back to the tagging, it’s like you can get information on the ground in combination —

Ian Brosnan:To what’s in the air.

Host: So orbit-to-core.

Ian Brosnan:Exactly.

Host: Working together as a federal agency.

Ian Brosnan:Right. Yeah, and I got to give John Stock credit at USGS.

Host: Awesome.

Ian Brosnan:He’s the Innovation Center director. That’s actually the term he came up with. But it really captures what we can do together, right? It’s collaboration and coordination in the space, in the air, and on the ground, and below.

Host: For anybody who’s listening who’s interested in getting involved with this stuff, we’ll add into the show notes the websites/links where you can get all the information. Also, we are on Twitter @NASAAmes. We’re using the #NASASiliconValley. Very fitting as we’re pulling federal agencies within Silicon Valley together —

Ian Brosnan:Absolutely.

Host: — to kind of help coordinate. Thanks for coming, Ian.

Ian Brosnan:Yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate the time.

[End]