Jennifer Inman helps spacecraft enter the atmospheres of other worlds. She and the Scientifically Calibrated In-FLight Imagery (SCIFLI) team use a bunch of instruments on board a plane while it’s flying, follow a space vehicle’s reentry that’s traveling thousands of miles an hour (think Mach 25) from space back to Earth and find it through a field of view as small as a straw. Then, the SCIFLY team has to observe and keep the spacecraft in the middle of the field of view to gather the data necessary to study.  Together on the podcast, Beth and Jennifer talk heat shields, re-entry, Orion, Artemis, Hollywood film makers, and heat imaging and the surprising fact that parachutes on reentry vehicles can be quite challenging, and where she’ll be watching the historic spaceflight mission scheduled for May 27, 2020!  About NASA’s Forward to the Moon 20204 Mission: “As we talk about going back to the moon, it occurs to me WE haven’t been to the Moon… our generation has not been to the Moon..it’s important for US to figure out how we’re going to go to the Moon.” -Jennifer Inman on the Casual Space Podcast  Did you always know you would work for NASA one day? “When I was 6 years old, I knew I wanted to be an astronaut, a Mom, a teacher, and a waitress on roller skates. If it can’t be MY boots on the Moon, I’m going to daydream and work towards getting others there.” About studying space and science in school: “I took physics on a whim and fell in love with it. It was all the beauty of calculus with answers that had connections to the real world.  Once I got to quantum mechanics and relativity, I was hooked! I just loved the way I could look at the universe around me and have my understanding expanded, and just be in awe of the understanding of the universe we find ourselves in.”    Where to find Jennifer and her work at NASA:  https://www.innovationnow.us/index.php/2019/03/25/meet-jennifer-inman/ You’ve GOT to learn about SCIFLI:  https://www.nasa.gov/feature/langley/how-the-perfect-picture-advances-spaceflight https://scifli.larc.nasa.gov/team-members-organizations/ The SCIFLI team is based at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA. In 2007 the HYTHIRM team was formed at the NASA Langley Research Center through the support of the NASA Engineering and Safety Center in order to determine the feasibility of obtaining high quality thermal imagery data of the Space Shuttle during hypersonic atmospheric reentry flight. The outcome of that study convinced the Space Shuttle Program Office to fund the HYTHIRM team to attempt to accomplish the goal of acquiring a single thermal image of the Space Shuttle during reentry. After returning with hundreds of thousands of frames of imagery acquired over an eight minute period of reentry, and after processing that thermal imagery to show that high quality measurements were not only possible but could provide unique and unexpected results, the HYTHIRM team conducted imaging operations on six more Shuttle reentries, the SpaceX C1 Dragon capsule reentry, and more. Every mission has been successful in meeting or exceeding the acquisition and processing of the desired data.  SCIFLI for Scientifically Calibrated In-Flight Imagery. The goal is to pursue the development and deployment of state of the art remote thermal, visual and spectral imaging capabilities from land, sea and airborne platforms over a multi-band spectrum.   How the Perfect Picture Advances Spaceflight The researchers working on the Scientifically Calibrated In-FLight Imagery (SCIFLI) team acquire engineering quality data images of spacecraft launches, reentries, flight tests, and parachute tests from aircraft- and ground-based imaging systems. The SCIFLI team comprises members from multiple NASA centers, industry, academia, Department of Defense, and international and commercial partners, and together they support human spaceflight, improve aerodynamic models, and ultimately reduce mission risk. “Our job is to get engineering data