STEAM Spark - Think STEAM Careers, Podcast with Dr. Olufade

Embracing the Inner Nerd: Michael Taylor’s Journey from Geeky Pastimes to Transformative STEM Education at NASA

• Dr. Ayo Olufade • Season 2 • Episode 12

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Speaker 1:

Good evening everyone. This is Dr Ayolo Fade. I'm the host of STEAM Spartan STEAM Career Podcast, a podcast we are honored to be speaking with Michael Taylor. He's a scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. He's going to be talking to us about one of the kits that they have that is open source, that can be used in the school system and even by parents to inspire and to assist their children who may be interested in STEM. Michael considered himself to be a nerd. Many of our students children don't like to be considered nerds. I don't know why not. Nerd is good. Probably, as you can see, being a nerd will help you get paid a lot of money why not? Apart from just being smart. It is a pleasure to have him, but I want to ask him. I really do want to ask him. So, michael, you like being. I know you're a scientist. You're good at what you do. You also consider yourself a nerd, so why do you consider yourself a nerd?

Speaker 2:

I think we're all nerds to some degree. We get into various things. People who are really into sports can be considered sports nerds, especially if you start getting into the statistics and all that. But I myself, like I said, I enjoy getting into various different things. One of the things I've obviously gotten into is earth science and this particular project that I'm working on, the Stella.

Speaker 1:

Project.

Speaker 2:

I like to play, of course, the role-playing games and I like the science fiction and all that sort of stuff. And of course, at a certain point you just decide to own it and do the things that make you happy, as long as you're not hurting yourself or anyone else. And again going to the drawing from the nerdy, I really liked the quote from Tyrion Lannister. You own it and people really can't use it against you. You like what you like, you're interested in what you're interested in. The sky's the limit and it just there's so much out there that you can really delve into, that can make you curious about your world and various other avenues, and you never know what it's going to relate to later on.

Speaker 2:

I wouldn't have gotten where I am if I wasn't very interested in many different aspects of computers, for instance, because all of those skills that I learned over the years from even working at a Starbucks for so long and making coffee and learning how to delegate and talk to people and all that. I wouldn't have gotten where I am today without all of those skills along the way that I've learned. And again, I took a lot away from Starbucks itself. I make my own lattes and espresso drinks at home.

Speaker 2:

Now, because of all the skills that I've learned, you get into something. And that's where, if you really get something, and that's where if you really get into it pretty hardcore, if you start doing like a baseball card collection or something like that you're starting to get into that, which is nerd. So that's why I consider myself a nerd, because I really do get into various different things and really try to understand as much as I possibly can. Once you answer one question, it leads to two more, so you can never know it all, but you try to absorb. I can go on many different tangents.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for sharing a little bit about yourself, about being a nerd. That's very inspiring, at least for me. So have you always been a nerd, or this is something that started for you at a later time in your life?

Speaker 2:

I think I've always been a nerd. I can't identify the exact time that it started, but there were many movies and shows and books and just things all around that drew me into it. I got really into paintball at one point and I really loved getting all the little doodads that you could with paintball and dismantling my paintball gun and cleaning it out and putting it back together to see how I could make the paintballs fly out of it and all that and then you know, like I said, lots of fantasy, lots of sci-fi.

Speaker 2:

There were many different influences Star Trek, star Wars, all the fun stuff. We had the Marvel cartoons in the morning. Saturday morning cartoons were definitely a big hit with me, nice.

Speaker 1:

So let me ask you this If you were to have a dinner with one of the nerds scientists you're a scientist from history or today who would it be?

Speaker 2:

and why I don't know that one's a really tough one.

Speaker 1:

Many good ones, right yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, Some other classics. I don't know if I could answer that Leonardo da Vinci. If I could understand him, I think we'd have to talk about the language, just because the imagination, the artistry, I mean it's just a renaissance man. That's really what I think of when I think of Leonardo da Vinci. So probably him.

Speaker 1:

He is a genius, so multifaceted.

Speaker 2:

You know just astounding how many things that he was good at.

Speaker 1:

So is it important to really have someone like that as a role model? Do you think that someone like that inspired you to pursue the line of work? Yeah, I'd say so.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and again, there's many different role models. Not all scientists I would take all aspects of. There's definitely a few. And again, I think part of the appeal to me is a well-roundedness, the multifaceted ways that Leonardo is basically a genius. And that really appeals to me, because I don't know. I just like to dip my hands into many different pots and see what I can come up with.

Speaker 1:

So that actually leads me to the next question what sparked your interest in science and technology and how did you find yourself at NASA? Got it?

Speaker 2:

That was a very interesting and long story thing, so even as a kid, one of the things I used to do was build my own computers as well. So I was very interested in computers, especially nowadays or wherever, and at the time you'd walk into one of these PC places and grab your graphics card, your hard drives, memory and all that. It was relatively easy to put together. The software portion of it not so much, sometimes, depending on your configuration. Electricity, electrical components always held a fascination for me Chemistry, just seeing what things did. Of course, you have to break some things in order to figure things out and take stuff apart and put it back together. So you have the whole engineering aspect of it as well, which is just a joy, and I can literally listen to some NASA engineers talk about stuff all day long.

Speaker 2:

Basically, again, I took all the computer courses. I didn't find exactly what I wanted. I knew I wanted to do something with computers, but I also like being active. I can't stand sitting and hermiting myself for more than like a few weeks at a time without having to need to get out and not look at a computer screen for a while. Basically, I went to college community college, basically and took all their computer courses that they had. Then I went to college community college basically and took all their computer courses that they had. Then I tried to get a job after that and realized that it was a bit tougher with an associates to get the kind of job that I would want.

Speaker 2:

And so I went back to school and my best friend thankfully he had already graduated, but he graduated with a degree in economics. While he was getting his degree he also said that one of his final electives that he took was geography and he said that if he had his choice he'd go back and take more geography because he loved it so much. So I took both and I really liked geography a lot. He was right, that was the course for me.

Speaker 2:

And then when I had one of those teachers named Dr Ralph DeBoia who's just absolutely amazing, just very inspiring, and he offered a course it was a 14-day course, full, three credits, and it was out doing field studies, so you're camping. You were out doing field studies and I was also a Boy Scout and I love camping. So that hit me right where I was at and I was like, as soon as we got out there and we're doing all the field studies and then coming back and analyzing the data. I was like this is what I want to do and that really, I think that really solidified things for me and basically I went the GIS route. From then on, I just took all the GIS courses I could. So I took those courses and I loved them and I went straight through to graduate school as well, and I think it was when I was in graduate school I was still working at Starbucks at the time for all through school the counselor posted up an advertisement for NASA.

Speaker 2:

Now at the time I had been a network engineer beforehand, so I knew a lot more about that. So I applied to the network engineering job and I applied to the NASA job and honestly, I thought I was going to get the network engineering job and didn't think that I had a chance at NASA, though I did think. I did have a pretty good interview and come to find out they were looking for someone who did have these versatile sets of skills so a bit of graphic design, some GIS and some web design and all that and because I had taken a myriad of different classes and all that, I fit the bill and shoot. I've been here at NASA for 16 years now Best place I ever worked.

Speaker 2:

Easily you can get humbled every day. You definitely, especially every now and again. That imposter syndrome sneaks up on you every now and again Because again you're working with some just amazing people. I get fulfillment out of it because it really feels like I'm helping make a difference and doing something positive for the world, and that's that kind of satisfaction. So I'm grateful to be here at NASA and doing what I'm doing.

Speaker 1:

Now you're an outreach scientist, correct?

Speaker 2:

Uh-huh, like I said, that's the title.

Speaker 1:

So what do outreach scientists do? That's a good question.

Speaker 2:

I try to work with the scientists to bring the science to a variety of different audiences, whether they be lawmakers, educators, students, so on and so forth, and we try to make basically the information and the data accessible so that people understand what we're doing, understand why NASA is looking into this and that and so on and so forth.

Speaker 2:

In this particular case, I'm doing Landsat. I'm talking more about earth observation, remote sensing and trying to get those concepts across so that people digest them and understand why we're looking at this and what we're looking at and how we're doing it. And we have new products coming out or say next, which is due to come out late 2030, where it's going to be the next evolution of all of these different avenues that basically, just you know again, it's been around for since 1972. So for over 50 years, and the multitudes of earth science applications are just exponential. It's I pretty much just tell folks, whatever earth science niche that you're in, take a look and do a search for it and Landsat, and nine times out of 10, you're going to find tons of papers that Landsat has that has something to do with that earth science niche that you're interested in. That's what I do is try to again help folks understand the need for remote sensing and Landsat earth observation, what NASA does with these Earth observations and why they continue to do it.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for that. So I know that NASA has developed an instrument called STELA, and STELA is open source.

Speaker 2:

We're actually moving from life to light assessment. Oh okay, life to light. Yeah, and that's because we have so at this point. Oh okay, life to light.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and that's because we have so at this point. It's the Stola project itself has become multidisciplinary. If you will, can you tell us what it is and the origin, if it is possible, please? Yeah, sure.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So Stola started out as, basically, we had an intro to remote sensing activity that we do and it uses a spectrometer. It used to use a old handheld spectrometer and they discontinued that spectrometer and then so we went out looking for a replacement and we're like, hey, we're NASA, we got scientists, we got engineers, let's ask around. And eventually we landed on Paul Murrell. He was developing something somewhat similar to what we were looking for, but we gave him some more constraints and then he developed the Stella 1.0, which is a handheld analog to Landsat, and what that means is basically and we're not trying to say that it gets you the quality data that Landsat does it is an intro to understanding some of how Landsat collects data and all that sort of stuff. In your hands.

Speaker 2:

It's a very pared-down version of a remote sensing tool. An entry point that's. The origin story of it is that it spun out from this sort of a thing and then from the activity. So the Stella 1.0 came about and it measured visible light, near-infrared surface temperature and some weather data and it records it on an SD card. Now what you can do with that is you can start to measure the health of vegetation, you get a spectral response and it comes down as is collected, as irradiance and that's reflected light off of surfaces and with that light, like I said, you can start to tell different properties of things how much red, how much green, how much blue, orange, so on and so forth is coming in from those various different sources. But with that we can really start getting down, and I was talking about plant health, which is something that they're doing over here.

Speaker 2:

If we're looking at this image in particular, these are two high school interns. These are two high school interns. They were juniors in high school and they built 40 of those Stellas as a loaner program to go out across the country and for basically as a loaner program, and it's still going on today. And then the gentleman behind them is our CalVal guy for the Stella team, jesse Barber, and he's got on his back an ASD field spec which is a it's a very high end spectrometer, okay.

Speaker 2:

So if you were to do like a hierarchy of things and I like to equate Landsat as, say, like the atomic clock of basically it's the pinnacle of, like calibration and validation, it is just the one, the gold standard, basically for earth observation calibration, validation up in the sky, standard, basically for earth observation calibration, validation up in the sky.

Speaker 2:

And if it were the atomic clock, the one that Jesse is holding might be like a Casio watch and the one that the high school interns are holding might be a sundial. Okay, again, you have a very, you have a very high quality instrument in Jesse's hands and all that, and then you have the highest quality, which would be Landsat. And again there's it's basically just an entry point to start understanding stuff like what Jesse's doing with that particular one and then what Landsat's doing. But they're all measuring basically wavelengths of light that's being reflected off of these plants, in this case corn, okay, and with that, like I said, you get to tell different properties of the corn and for this case, one of the things that we're putting on there is our wavelengths outside of the visible, as well as the stuff that you can see.

Speaker 1:

I was just so fascinated that you can tell the health of a plant just by measuring the wavelength of light. That's pretty amazing.

Speaker 2:

And, like I was saying, so yeah, you got the visible light, but then you have the near infrared and the near infrared is stuff you can't see and, like I said, I can go deeper into that. But basically, as that near infrared reflectance goes down, that means the plant is stressed and you can't really see that before it starts turning yellow or brown. We can measure that, drop that in the near infrared and hopefully get to the plant and be able to take care of it before it starts turning yellow or brown, at which point it's, generally speaking, dead and dying. We're starting to at the very least. That's pretty amazing. That's pretty cool If you imagine it from space, if you're looking at farms and all that, farmers would be very interested in that sort of thing Can you take us through all of this instrument that we're looking at, sure.

Speaker 2:

So, from left to basically in the lower left corner is the Stella AQ, which is the Stella air quality inside of an acrylic case. That was an idea for a possible housing for the Stella AQ, and it measures CO2 particulates in a 2.5 and a 10, as well as relative humidity and barometric pressure and all that that came about from Paul Murrell and Dr Nissa Rain. It's a fantastic instrument to especially start to discuss things about proper ventilation and particulates harmful particulates, especially in a 2.5 and a 10, which dust and smoke and all that. Okay, and then going on from there is the Stella Q2. That one's actually the newest Stella that we've put out. Basically, the newer spectrometer sensor that we're using is 410 to 940 nanometers at 18 different bands, going from violet, which is the 410 nanometers, all the way up through red, which is around 650, 680 nanometers, all the way to near infrared, which is pretty much anything beyond about 680. It's very cheap. It doesn't require any soldering. It's got a 3D printed case right there, which is a drone case that you can use, and I use it for demonstration purposes and all that. It's not required. I've had it on a paint stick and it works pretty well. I've had it on a paint stick and it works pretty well. I do the drone case, though, in particular. It's quite nice. But yeah, like all these plans and even the air quality, one doesn't require any soldering. It just requires there's some quick connects that are on there that you can connect them with, and so we teach you. Basically, we give you the steps on how to build it and then how to program it and how to use it, and we're still developing more stuff on how to use it in different activities and all that.

Speaker 2:

The next one over is a discontinued model, and that one is 2.0 because it's got no screen, as you can see on there. It straps to your phone, it's got a Bluetooth and it connects to your phone via. It's called Bluefruit, which is the bluetooth version from adderfruit, and again, we don't recommend any one vendor or anything like that. This is how we built ours and all of this open source. All the plans are available online. You can grab them all in the center. The center is fun. The center is a data viewer, so open data viewer. It's available on Chrome and right now the Stella 2.0, 1.1 and 1.0, the only ones that really work with it at the moment. We're trying to incorporate the rest of them as we go along, but we don't have so much time with the programmer at the moment to be able to do so and update it.

Speaker 2:

But basically what it does is, as I said, the light comes in and is gathered as irradiance. But with this we can, and some of your measurements and all that. So if you measure your distance from the material that you're taking the measurement of, and all that, and you've done a calibration proper field calibration you can convert it into radiance and then reflectance and with that, once you get it to reflectance, you can really start to compare it between different sensors, between different instruments and see how well or not these perform. And that's really a powerful tool. What is good data versus bad data? What kind of readings are you getting? Are you getting the same readings from this instrument as this one, and why, if not? So on and so forth. Along with that, once you convert it to reflectance, we also have some spectral indices on there, in this case mostly vegetation indices and one wetness indice and DVI.

Speaker 2:

It's very widely used. It's a fantastic to see. It actually was developed under Landsat in the 70s by a gentleman named Jim Tucker, landsat in the 70s by a gentleman named Jim Tucker and it's really, at its core, serve a ratio between the amount of red absorption which the plants need, that's, their food coming in, and the amount of near-infrared reflectance. Okay, and so the closer it is to one at the top there, the denser, healthier vegetation. Closer it is to zero, that's more like bare ground, and then, as you get down into the negatives, that's going to be closer to water. Okay, but it gives you an indication of the density, productivity and health of the vegetation. And so what you're seeing there, displayed on there, is the timeline of basically NDVI, and that would be at the top right quadrant of that screen.

Speaker 1:

Okay, basically.

Speaker 2:

NDVI and that would be at the top right quadrant of that screen. In the lower right quadrant of that screen you're seeing the air temperature and the surface temperature. And the surface temperature is going to be wildly quite a bit more erratic than the ambient air temperature and so you're seeing that. But you're seeing one of the fun things is that as that NDVI goes down and you're hitting that bare ground, you're seeing the surface temperature spike. So that's a fun little thing there and that can translate into doing some fun things with, say, urban heat island effects and all that Start measuring different materials versus plants and so on and so forth. But yeah, going further around the horn there, the one on the paint stick is also a Stella Air Quality, so we don't need to really go over that. But basically I just wanted to show those in some different formats and show that basically we're trying to keep things at a hierarchy of entry points so that if people don't want to solder and all that, they can still create an instrument of their own. If they do want to solder, they can try and create, say, the Stella 1.1, which is the next one over and that's our flagship at the moment. That is a great analog to Landsat over there and it's going to give you three different modes that you can take measurements with. It's got a touchscreen on there. We've had it flying on drones before and that basically strips the thing down to a pcb board. And we have a like a drone housing that you can put a 3d print out if you want to and pop it on a quadcopter, and we've had them on quadcopters, like I said, for about a year and a half and then, yeah, so that one's going to be again the flagship. Finally, we have the heliostella.

Speaker 2:

That was developed for the heliophysics folks. They basically I ran into a fellow, an internal, basically gathering, showing off the various different tools, activities and stuff that we have, and he's very interested in the Stella. So we organized a meeting and in that meeting was Paul myself, alana Resnick and Pat Haas. Pat Haas was the guy I ran into and basically they were like oh, do you think you could add this? Could you add this thing on there? And Paul's doing it right on the fly as we're talking about it, because he's amazing again and helping them build out a heliophysics instrument. And that's how this thing was born and again it's got a beautiful case and all that. We have a PDF, basically, where you just print it out and you can slap it on a piece of cardboard. And you can build that on a piece of cardboard.

Speaker 2:

Now I turned on the little reference lamp which is that glowing portion of it, but basically that's a half of a ping pong ball that acts as a diffuser sunlight and all that. So it's a fun, cool little piece of technology and, like I said, a lot of these things just make you curious about the world. So that's one of the powers of the air quality one. Like I said, I've had that in my car putting windows up, putting windows down, turning the AC on. I wanted to see what the particulates would be like, the airflow was like, how much CO2. And it's made me much more conscious of whether I've had my window open or not, or how I'm feeling inside of a room and whether I think it's because of the CO2 buildup and such.

Speaker 2:

The Stella 1.1s, the spectrometers I use them on so many different materials. I want to see what kind of readings I get off of different things, what kind of light, and if you combine it, say in the 1.1, where you've got the surface temperature on there, it's really fascinating, especially checking out just like ceiling tiles or different types of concrete or whatever. And then the heliophysics shoot paul again, who made this thing. He took it out at the path of totality for the past eclipse and he wanted to see if the uv would be scattering. And what he was finding with at least that machine, is that the uv wasn't scattering when he, when, when the eclipse was in totality there, so it was. It was pretty interesting wow it.

Speaker 1:

It seems to me, while you were describing how paul came, oh, he came up with this. I don't know. Do you ever? Do you remember the show called macgyver?

Speaker 2:

oh yeah, no, literally you talked to this fellow and, like I said, he's a marvel of a person and yeah, so he, like I said, he's a marvel of a person and yeah, so he, like I said, it's just, yeah, he has some of the most fascinating stories and it's about even seemingly mundane things.

Speaker 2:

He was telling me fascinating stories about a screw. I think of a screw, I think of a drywall screw. He was telling me all about how much torque and how much, basically how much shear that it can withstand, and all this he's like it's for a nuclear sub under the water and it's for the nuclear reactor and I'm like, oh, now I get why you need such an unbelievable, just such tight tolerances and all that. I'm like that makes sense, but he's worked on it. It's hard to find something that he hasn't worked on. He's just one of those. Yeah, like I said, he's one of those guys Very amazing to work with.

Speaker 1:

Wow, just listening to you it's really fascinating and it's interesting to just listen to you to get a little perspective as the kind of people that work at NASA. As you have said earlier, I probably will feel a little bit of imposter syndrome. So, with these great people, great mind.

Speaker 2:

As smart as you think you are, there is always someone smarter, and you just got to like I said, but it is like I said. It is fantastic, though.

Speaker 1:

Our students may feel intimidated. So how will they overcome this? Because there are a lot of internships right at NASA. It's a great place to work. You get to work with all these great scientists, engineers, all these great people like you and like Paul.

Speaker 2:

And, yeah, I've failed at quite a few things. You charge ahead and you learn from your mistakes and things do feel intimidating and out of reach, but right now things are within your grasp. You have so much information and you can start to filter it and narrow it down to things that you're really interested in and really go for it and learn that. You're going to have a lot of stumbling blocks. There were multiples. I got laid off as a network engineer. I again didn't know what I wanted to do.

Speaker 2:

Right away out of high school I stumbled around and did some jobs and went to community college and again just didn't know what I wanted to do. After community college I still didn't know what I wanted to do and I went down and lived in Texas for a year thinking I would be doing an apprenticeship, which fell through. Then tried to pull myself together and went back to school and, like I said, you never know where you're going to end up. You're going to fail a lot too, and something that I tell my kids about 99% of science is failure. But you learn from it and you get something from it and you start to understand these things.

Speaker 2:

It's tough but again, if you really work at it with the resources, especially today. You can still be intimidated, but you got to try to persevere through it and realize that a lot of these folks, we're going to make some mistakes and all that. That and that comes with the job, but we try to work with each other. My daughter right now she's having a little trouble in math and I offer my help and all that, but I know that as a parent it's hard for her to get help from me sometimes because she gets frustrated with me or whatever.

Speaker 2:

No one can frustrate you like a loved one really so I'm like, well, we have all these resources and here's how to get them. I keep telling her the smartest people are not the ones who know everything, they're the ones who are able to figure out stuff and find the information that they need when they need it, and all of that it's it's digging through that stuff and I'll send her to some of the various like math things so she could re-watch it, like youtube or something like that. Re-watch it to add her leisure, what's never going to change pace or get mad at her pause, you know, whatever she can do it at her leisure strategy. If I can help fill in any gaps, I'm there for, but it's just. Things are going to be intimidating and there's going to be, and more often than not, there's quite a few people out there who can help break it down so that you can understand it, okay. But yeah, we deal with that type of stuff all the time and it's pretty interesting.

Speaker 1:

Great strategy. Thank you so much for sharing that. That is actually useful for the parents that are listening. So these kids in the lab. So now they're soldering, take it, they're putting this, they're building stella so they're building the stella, they're, they're well.

Speaker 2:

So that is, yeah, sabrina, and she's showing a young lady basically how she troubleshoots the stella. So right there she's probably. I believe she's checking for continuity, okay, when they're seeing if there's any bridging, that's happening, and that's basically when a piece of metal is crossing to another piece of metal that it shouldn't, and creating continuity there and disrupting the instrument from getting the signals that it needs to, and that's basically what she's doing, and so they did that with quite a few, so they made a few errors on these things.

Speaker 2:

As you go along building these, you start to understand a bit more about electronics, a little bit more about electronic engineering and instrumentation. And again, seeing that, hey, as good as you think you are at engineering and all of these engineers, and again I can tell you stories. Possibly I'm not going to at the moment, but there's stories. Engineers make mistakes too and scientists make mistakes too. It's part of too. It's just it's part of being human and it's part of being able to find and fix those mistakes as well. And you're going to build an instrument. You might build 10 of them and one of them decides that it's just not going to work the way you think it is, even though you built the other nine and you feel like they're perfect, that's. But you get to have a lot of fun troubleshooting, testing it out, learning some about programming, learning something about the engineering.

Speaker 2:

Christina, the other intern. She was very interested in the engineering aspect of the whole thing as well. I was like we're getting some sun glare on the screen. Maybe you can go into CAD and design the sunscreen for this particular thing, something that can attach to it and block out the sun from some different angles so you could see it. And so she went in there and she was actually building this thing out. She didn't get full time to complete it but she did get it to attach and she had a nice little flap on there.

Speaker 2:

But it was, she was trying different things. She went through many different models trying to get it to attach, just right, and all that. And then Sabrina actually she was interested in chemistry and this thing has a little cuvette mount, because Paul's a crazy genius and also Jesse Barber had mentioned you could probably do some liquid spectroscopy with that. I was like, okay, I'm going to build that into the next model. So the 1.1 has a little slot that you can exchange and pop a little cuvette on there. And yeah, we had some scientists come down and they were setting up some fun little experiments.

Speaker 1:

We had some scientists come down and they were setting up some fun little experiments. Yeah, because when you were sharing Elliot, this idea actually came from spectroscopy. I remember in college in the lab we used a lot of specs for a lot of measurements. It's pretty interesting how he's able to look back and now it's going to build a little cuvette or have a cuvette attached to it to measure, let's say, liquid sample, or maybe, especially if you want to test the water, and again, one of the things that I should mention is that these are all educational tools, so right now they are not proven scientific.

Speaker 2:

We're still in the process as scientific tools, possibly proven scientific. We're still in the process as scientific tools possibly. So right now, like I said for the liquid spectroscopy, we're still figuring out how good or how bad this particular sensors are. And I did want to mention again all of our folks on the Stella team. I'm the Stella team lead. Paul Moreau is the lead engineer and creator of Stella. I'm the Stella team lead. Paul Moreau is the lead engineer and creator of Stella.

Speaker 2:

Then you have Dr Petra Campbell, who is our lead scientist. She was actually out in the field with the interns when you saw them all in the corner and all that. She actually was the one who was taking us out there and recording down information from the spectrometer. As well as Jesse Barbara. He's our CalVal guy Again, fantastic. All around. All of these folks are fantastic. You have Ross Walter, who is the programmer. He's the one who in one of the previous slides he did the data viewer right there. So he's the one who programmed that, okay. And then you have Dr Nissa Rain. She's no longer a team member, but she'll always be a team member to me. But she's the one who developed the air quality and she is coming up with some fun activities for that as well. And then you have Dr Paige Williams. She just got her doctorate and she has been flying yeah it's fantastic.

Speaker 2:

She's been flying these things for about a year and a half and teaching her students with them, and all that on quadcopters. So she's our drone specialist, but she's also again a scientist as well. She's my boss and she's fantastic and she's actually the impetus for us getting to the Stella and getting to Paul and and coming up with quite a few of these different little mechanisms and designs and activities and all of that. So she's fantastic. And Alison Nussbaum, laura Rocchio and now Madeline Gregory is on our team.

Speaker 2:

So many different people to help come make this what it is and, of course, chris Nye, who is our PI and civil servant and lead scientist for the Landsat 8 and Landsat 9.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much. We really appreciate the introduction and at least now we know your team. It takes a collaborative effort to bring great instrumental kits like this to reality. But this is more for learning, educational purposes, correct, as you've said?

Speaker 2:

At the moment it's got a big checkmark with outreach, with education. We'll find out with how it does science or not. So that's what we're aiming to do and, again, like I said, find out basically how good or bad the data is that we receive from these things. So we're doing that via calibration. We have multiples of these looking at the same thing, basically like, in this case, a calibration sphere in order to calibrate them one against each other as well as against other sensors and see how well they do. And we have to come up with some new techniques for some of the calibration, for some of these things as well, and we're trying to make it right now. We're trying to work on a sort of a classroom calibration so that people anywhere could hopefully be able to make their own calibration lab and get similar results.

Speaker 1:

That'd be cool what we're getting.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's the goal and to get to understand, of course, the need again for calibration as well. Why do you need a Landsat? Why do you need such a precise, accurate instrument out there? And they'll start to discover that. Why you want such a? Because you want to know. The thing that you're looking at is exactly what you think it's you're looking at.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much. I appreciate you, sir. You're doing a phenomenal work out there. Thank you so much for building wonderful tools like this for our students to inspire our students to learn, learn to become a STEM scientist, technologist, engineers, mathematicians. I think this is a wonderful, great tools to use. Is there anything that you want to add, especially for students, or anything that you feel like is vital that students and teachers and parents including parents, because a lot of parents homeschool their children too that you feel like they need to know about your technology?

Speaker 2:

First off, I would say check out the Stella GitHub or community forum as we're calling it, because you can get a lot of information from there troubleshooting activities, ideas and you can post up your ideas and all that. And then you also have the Stella website. Right now it's under the Landsat website, but if you just do a search for Stella and say Landsat, you're going to find exactly where you need to go and all that to basically take you step-by-step on how to build them and all that you can also. Right now the Helio Stella and the Stella AQ are only up on the GitHub, so you're going to have to look there for those For students, parents, teachers, anything you know.

Speaker 2:

These are a fantastic again open source, off the shelf, low cost way to introduce remote sensing concepts. You've got, as Matthew Pierce calls it, an authentic STEM experience. You've got your mechanical engineering, you've got your electrical engineering, you have programming, you have math, you have science and it helps merge all of those. And you can go even further than that and make it a true collaborative effort for data collection and learning about field studies and then writing, if you wanted to write, say. I think there's a few students out there who are writing like tech manuals on how to use these things, and you can imagine that's using quite a few different skills to come up with this and learning some of the math formulas and all that sort of thing. So it's, but you can make it as fun or as simple as you want for a lot of these things. One of the simplest ones that we were looking at was just having a few in a classroom and put a popcorn machine over in the corner and you turn it on and it's called basically measuring at the speed of smell, a Paul Murrow coined term for that. But yeah, and then maybe you do it again the next week and you have the window open just a slight. So you again very simple, quick, easy, fun. But they start to discover things, especially if they're writing down, say, the numbers, and they're seeing how fast it takes to get there. And then it gets them curious how fast is it if we open up the window and the door, so on and so forth.

Speaker 2:

Same thing with looking at different spectra and all that. What does shining a red light on a red piece of paper do to the spectra? What does shining a green light on a red paper due to the spectra. What does shining a green light on red paper due to a spectra? What happens if I put water in between this and that? Very simple projects and activities just to get folks curious about their world.

Speaker 2:

And then the helio one again taking it in and out of the shade. We're using some gel filters over top and again it affects everything. So if you're thinking about wildfires and the smoke affecting how much incoming solar radiation is coming in and all that sort of stuff, you can play around with the heliophysics and then you can merge a few of them too. They all help complement each other into gaining better understanding of the Earth. So incoming solar radiation versus reflected solar radiation what's going on there? So if you pair up the heliophysics and the spectrometer, what happens when it gets really hot and you're very close to the road, say with the air quality instrument, and what kind of spectra are you getting bounced off of there and is it contributing to that heat, and is it doing it over time and so forth. So you can really start to make it build it out very complex.

Speaker 2:

But what you got to understand is again, we're doing a lot of this stuff from space with a lot of these different satellites. So it gets you that nice bridge taking it up into. Okay, now how does this associate with NASA technology? How does looking at watercolor associate with PACE, which is a new satellite that I launched up there? Or Landsat, looking at the different land or the coast or the earth?

Speaker 2:

Pace also does aerosols, so you can marry that a little bit with the air quality one. But it's seeing that data that's being collected and understanding that we can measure that and that we can tell stuff by those measurements is really the concept that we're trying to get across. A lot of this as well as helping people become their own engineers or scientists. So someone who's more interested in science learns a bit more about engineering, someone who knows a bit about engineering learns more about science. But you get that sort of connect where you can really start a dialogue between those folks. So there's that engineering-science split quite as much, but they're getting all of it at least a taste.

Speaker 1:

So if a teacher, parents want to reach out to you, how can they do that?

Speaker 2:

You can do that by contacting me at michaelptaylor at nasagov, or you can again, if you have ideas about Stella or whatever, leave it on the GitHub. Okay, and yeah, I should have more time to dedicate to Stella coming up. So yeah, that's a good way of getting ahold of me is my email or through the GitHub at the moment, Thank you so much, michael, I really appreciate your time. Oh yeah.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much, folks. Thank you so much for listening to STEAM SPACs, think STEAM Sparks, think STEAM careers podcast. I am Dr Ayolofade and it's really a pleasure to be talking to Michael, the outreach scientist at MasterGuarded here in Maryland.

Speaker 2:

Such a pleasure to talk with you again, doctor. I hope to see you. Are you going to? I'll ask you in a bit, but I hope to see you again soon. You will, you will, you will definitely.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much. Have a wonderful evening, sir, you too. Thank you. Please subscribe to this station if you like. You know the show. I guess what do you call it? The show? You know the type of podcast that we're bringing. I hope it's useful to you. Thank you, everyone. Have a wonderful evening. It's useful to you. Thank you, everyone. Have a wonderful evening, good night, good night.

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Dr. Ayo Olufade, Ph.D

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