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innovator: Smiling man in dark attire bent over at a blue work table, manipulating gray, shiny equipment with bundles of wires descending from the top.
Electrical engineer Scott Hesh works on a sub-payload canister at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility near Chincoteague, Virginia. The cannister will be part of a science experiment and a demonstration of his Swarm Communications technology.
Credits: NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility/Berit Bland

Scott Hesh, an electrical engineer at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, was announced Nov. 2 as the FY22 IRAD Innovator of the Year, an award presented by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“An electrical engineer with an insatiable curiosity, Scott Hesh and his team have worked hand-in-glove with science investigators since 2017,” said Goddard Chief Technologist Peter Hughes. “He developed a technology to sample Earth’s upper atmosphere in multiple dimensions with more accurate time and location data than previously possible with a sounding rocket.”

  • Related: NASA Sounding Rockets Launch Multiple Science Payloads

    Newly proven technology developed at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility near Chincoteague, Virginia, turns a single sounding rocket into a hive deploying a swarm of up to 16 instruments. The technology offers unprecedented accuracy for monitoring Earth’s atmosphere and solar weather over a wide area.

Two men (one clad in an off-white lab coat, the other in dark attire) with blue gloves manipulate a small silver-gray cylinder about the size of a 1 liter water bottle into the body of a silver sounding rocket cylinder, about 18 inches wide.
Engineers Josh Yacobucci (left) and Scott Hesh test fit a science sensor sub-payload into a Black Brant sounding rocket at Wallops.
Credits: NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility/Berit Bland

The Internal Research and Development (IRAD) Innovator of the Year award is presented by Goddard’s Office of the Chief Technologist to individuals who demonstrate the best in innovation.

“Scott has this enthusiasm for what he does that I think is really contagious,” Sounding Rocket Program technologist Cathy Hesh said. “He’s an electrical engineer by education, but he has such a grasp on other disciplines as well, so he’s sort of like a systems engineer. If he wants to improve something, he just goes out and learns all sorts of things that would be beyond the scope of his discipline.”

Mechanical engineer Josh Yacobucci has worked with Scott Hesh for more than 15 years, and said he always learns something when they collaborate.

“Scott brings this great perspective,” Yacobucci said. “He could help winnow out things in my designs that I hadn’t thought of.”

“For his interdisciplinary leadership resulting in game-changing improvements for atmospheric and solar science capabilities,” Hughes said, “Scott Hesh deserves Goddard’s Innovator of the Year Award.”

By Karl B. Hille
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

View the full article

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