Surprisingly STEM: Wildfire Aeronautics Researcher

NASA aeronautics researcher Kathryn Chapman is part of a team out of NASA’s Ames Research Center working on improving firefighting and fire mitigation strategies using advanced aeronautics technologies, like drones. Growing up in Southern California, Chapman saw firsthand the devastation wildfires can leave behind. She and her team hope the technologies they are testing will help minimize such loss in the future by maximizing the efficiency of firefighting efforts on the ground and in the air.

What is said in the film

We have a lot of technology that we've developed for different aeronautics applications, that it allows us to take technology and really make sure that we're helping firefighters do their job, giving them better support, better tools to use, and really also help hopefully start to affect the outcomes of some of these really large, destructive fires that destroy people's homes and really impact the communities that we live in. Aeronautics is really the piece that can help a lot of those kind of visions of the future come to be reality. My name is Kathryn Chapman, and I'm an Aeronautics Researcher at NASA Ames. Right now, I work on the project, it's called ACERO, the Advanced Capabilities for Emergency Response Operations. What we're doing is looking at the current state of wildland firefighting, looking at the tools and technologies that firefighters use to do their jobs.

This is really important because wildfires are just getting larger, more destructive and more frequent. But a lot of the current technology and tools and techniques used to fight wildfire has remained pretty- pretty unchanged for the last several decades. Some of the biggest issues in firefighting have to do with degraded visual environments, which is when there's a lot of smoke in the air and you can't see, or at night. And also communication. So degraded visual environments, uh, these are times when planes can't fly.

traditional aircraft with a pilot. It's really unsafe for them to be flying in these conditions because they, they can't see what's around them that well. If we could start to expand some of those operations into the smoke, into the night time with drones, where we're not putting a human operator at risk, that would be huge because it would allow us to- to double, maybe even triple the amount of resources that are on a fire and could really allow for some big strides to be made without having to put more people at risk. Another big issue in firefighting is communication. Drones are helping to solve the problem of communications by serving in a couple different ways.

They can be used effectively as a cell tower in the sky to bounce signal between different remote areas, and allow people to communicate on a fire that wouldn't otherwise be able to do that. They also allow for a lot more complex data than a radio would. Right now, almost all communication that happens on a fire is over radio. But if you begin to have drones, you begin to have this infrastructure. You're really able to share much more information with intent and location and fire behavior, which then allows you to plan a lot better and have a good common operating picture between everyone on the fire.

I grew up in Southern California, and I was just very used to fire being a part of everyday life-- You know, I know in the East Coast, people have snow days. Where I grew up, we had fire days. And, I think it's really important to me, working on this project, because it feels like I can see such a clear, tangible application of what I'm doing and how it's going to affect my life and affect the lives of people around me, and that means a lot to me. That's something that's really important to me, is having this kind of community benefit element to the work that I do. I obviously didn't go to school expecting to be researching fire.

I don't think a lot of people do, but it's- it's something that when I started to learn more about it, it really seemed important to me. I think kind of in the back of my mind, I always had the idea of NASA being a cool place to work, but it never really seemed like a place that was gonna make sense for me. And, you know, eventually, between my experience, in kind of, aerospace related research, I ended up getting a job here. You know, if you want to get into aeronautics, if you want to really pursue this in the future, I don't think there's any one skill set that really makes you able to do aeronautics research. So many people I work with have completely different backgrounds, and I think the- the just really important thing is being able to communicate what you think is important.

Being able to maybe work with other people who have a different background than you, and make sure that you can take your specialized knowledge and make it useful to someone who doesn't have the same specialized background as you. Really, the thing that has helped me the most in working at NASA and working in aeronautics is just being able to communicate with people well, and I think that's oftentimes a really undervalued and underrated aspect of STEM as a whole. STEM isn't one thing. There are so many people who have non-STEM backgrounds and non-STEM roles who still work at NASA and support the NASA mission. Focus on what you think is interesting and keep kind of following where your curiosity is leading you.

And I think that's really a good way to find some really interesting niches that maybe you wouldn't think about working in, but end up being a great fit. ♪♪

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