3 NASA Innovator of the Year and IRAD Poster session

Goddard’s Office of the Chief Technologist has named engineer Scott Hesh as this year’s FY22 Internal Research and Development (IRAD) Innovator of the Year, an honor the office bestows annually on individuals who demonstrate the best in innovation.

An electrical engineer with an insatiable curiosity, Scott Hesh developed a sub-payload dispersal system that tracks and consolidates communications for 4 to 16 science packages ejected from sounding rockets. Since 2017, Hesh and his team worked hand-in-glove with science investigators to develop a technology to sample Earth’s upper atmosphere in multiple dimensions with increasingly accurate time and location data.

“Scott has this enthusiasm for what he does that I think is really contagious,” said Aerospace Engineer Cathy Hesh, NASA’s Sounding Rocket Program Technologist.

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

FY22 IRAD Poster Session Sparks Collaboration

“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, Scott Hesh earned Goddard’s Innovator of the Year Award.