Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Mason Peck at the World Maker Faire New York 2013”.
I’M Mason Peck, I’m chief technologist at NASA. I have the responsibility of determining the agency’s priorities in technology investment. So we in my office we try to choose the high priority high impact technologies to invest in for the next generation of space missions NASA’s at maker faire. Today, because we are engaging, what’s called an agency Grand Challenge, we have a grand challenge proposing to the nation to help NASA with planetary defense, we’re looking for ideas on new technologies for discovering and tracking and characterizing asteroids. We’Re also looking for new ideas for spacecraft that can go out and visit those asteroids and understand them better. There’S no imminent threat from asteroids, but we do know that there’s a large number of them out there. We have detected about ninety-five percent of the large asteroids that would be a threat to the planet, but we still only know about one percent of the asteroids that are that our earth crossing that could damage property or hurt people someday nASA has always been an agency. That’S focused on innovation and exploration, but in the last couple of years we’ve stood up new programs and some even have some new opportunities for funding for people who want to work with NASA on new technologies and that’s a key part of what we’re. After here.
We really are trying to reach out broadly to academia, industry and also just individual citizens, to make a difference in space and Aeronautics. One of my favorite things about the Maker Faire is all the energy and creativity that we see in the participants here and people. You have great ideas, they’re, very innovative. We want to see that same kind of innovation that same kind of creativity, put into space exploration by individuals, whether that’s in science or even building their own spacecraft, someday .
