Summary: Our guest today is Dr. Butler Hine, the Flight Project Manager and Chief Technologist for Engineering at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Butler is also a senior research scientist and a colleague of Ken and Dawn at IHMC.<br> <br> Butler is currently the project manager for NASA’s Arcus mission, which is an X-ray observatory that has a possible launch date of 2023. The mission will include a high-resolution X-ray grating spectrometer that will study the hot gas that is the dominant component of the normal matter in the Universe, much of which has not yet been directly seen.<br> <br> In today’s interview, we discuss:<br> <br> [00:03:57] How Butler became interested in astronomy and started building telescopes as a youth.<br> [00:08:37] How Butler wound up managing the robotics lab at NASA.<br> [00:11:55] The challenges of trying to change the thinking of the science community about ways to adapt technology to science.<br> [00:17:34] Artificial intelligence and data mining.<br> [00:26:59] The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer mission, also known as LADEE.<br> [00:30:07] The concept of modularity in spacecraft design.<br> [00:41:58] The scientific goals of NASA’s Arcus mission, which Butler is currently managing.<br> [00:45:58 The complexity of developing a robotic platform for space or lunar exploration<br> [00:51:24] The future of robotic space exploration.
