Narration:

Transcript:

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Goddard has really played a lead role in the world

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in moving lidar from airborne and ground-based missions into space.

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I mean, the future is in the hands of the creative people,

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here and elsewhere, in industry, that can just take this

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and run with it.

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We've revolutionized how we look at our own world,

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and the future is wide open.

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Winds, aerosols, trace gases.

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I've been spending a lot of time and most of the past decade

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working on a lidar to measure atmospheric CO2.

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We've been flying that fairly regularly on aircraft.

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We've got this remarkable dataset

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that really proves, I think, our approach really works well.

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There's many other gases that are very important, you know,

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particularly with global warming, that lasers can help us monitor.

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Over all these years, we've

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developed these different techniques and

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lasers and detectors and put all

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those together into a

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recent system that we've just started working on:

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the Hazard Detection Lidar.

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Essentially a really precise,

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really fast lidar that helps land safely on a planet.

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You want to make millions of measurements in a second.

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You have to process and produce those data in real time.

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This technique is giving us better understanding of where we live,

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where we want to live, where we want to explore, in ways that are fundamental.

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So I look at it as: it's a measurement engineering success

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story, and masterpieces of engineering often lead to masterpieces of science.

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With MOLA-2 being on MGS being the most--

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--the ones I look back on most, ok, as being absolutely--it really shook me up as well.

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And I think they shook up the community as well.

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What you could do with a laser altimeter.

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And I'm amazed,

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I'm amazed at how much knowledge can be gleaned

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from this simple, relatively simple measurement.

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Just measuring, you know, time of flight.

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So you cannot just built just one lidar.

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You need a sustained team who's been building lidar

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for some time so you can pass on the lessons learned and so forth.

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To see that rocket go up

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with the thing that we had worked on for so long

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finally become a reality.

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I had my family with me.

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Many of the other scientists had their family.

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The reason many of us also bring our family there is

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because of the sacrifices our families had to make to make this a reality

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because of the long nights and being away and the amount of effort

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we had to put in.

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There's a lot of special pieces that that need to go into it

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and a lot of experience that is built through decades of doing.

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Across Goddard, they bring in new people to learn

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through mentorship and learn by doing on these projects.

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What I love about NASA, and in particular Goddard is still this way,

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but it is really a meritocracy, meaning

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it didn't matter what school you went to,

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what--actually what degree you had at some level, right?

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That just got you in the door.

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But how you progressed through NASA is really based on what you did.

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I never suffered from being--I

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never was not promoted or I never was was told

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I was doing a bad job or anything like that because I was a woman.

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I think Goddard has been a fantastic place to work.

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When you get to work on something

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new and exciting

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that is privileged.

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It's a privilege.

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Getting good people to work with you,

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knowing what risks to take.

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Those are key factors in success of all these things.

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It's working with the scientists.

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You're in the same team,

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you're in the same room,

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you're in the same meetings.

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You're down the hall from each other.

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You're in the same organizations.

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Our successes of the past

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are due to some very simple things.

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That is that Goddard

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is as a center,

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a people

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with an incredible dedication

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and devotion

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to their work.

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