 15. We're back. We're live. We're here at the one o'clock rock. Research in Manoa. We like to find out what's going on in Manoa. We like to talk to people in Southwest. That's the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, and HIGP, the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, and Seymour, the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education. And today we have a special guest. We have Amber E. Mai Hong, and she is an avionics person at the Hawaii Space Flight Laboratory at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. We have real science there, you know? It's really fabulous. So what is the Space Laboratory? Tell us what that organization is. It is a way for people who are studying at Manoa to learn more about space science. We collaborate between the College of Engineering and the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. So we have both engineers and scientists that work at HSFL, and we design small satellites there. Reminds me of that song in Oklahoma. Can the farmers and cowboys be friends? Can the engineers and the scientists be friends? Oh, yeah. In every scientist is an engineer, and in every engineer is a scientist. Do you agree with that? Yes. Okay. So what do you do, though, at the Hawaii Space Flight Laboratory? So I primarily work on instrumentation. I work on designing sensors, and I work very closely with the scientists. But I also do K-12 outreach with the Hawaii Space Grant Consortium, and I also work with the community colleges as well. Okay. What is outreach now, exactly? So it's like working with other people to bring science into their lives or trying to teach them more about kind of the cool stuff that we do. Because space is always really cool, and it's fun to learn about. So you talk to kids in school then, and kids in college also? Yeah. So for the kids in school, I bring like a science kit out, and I have them learn about science hands-on. So I talk about Landsat, which is the longest-running Earth-observing satellite program in the U.S., and we're funded through USGS. I go and I teach them about light and heat and what all of that has to do with satellites and how they can learn more about the Earth that we live in through satellite technology. And we can learn about kind of just some of the things that we can do that's really cool, both planetary and just learning about our own home planet. For the community college, I work on building small payloads that go on sounding rackets so they go into space for just a very short amount of time. Do it with the students? Yeah. So I'm like the mentor. The backyard and the back of the school? No, no, a little bit bigger than that. Okay. So the sounding racket payloads that we've been working on, they will experience weightlessness and they'll experience space for about five to seven minutes before they come back to Earth. So I worked with Prajakti Mua for two years with Winward, Kapiolani, Honolulu, and Kauai community colleges. And we got to launch our payloads last August and this August from Wallops Flight Facility. Where is that? Virginia. Oh, really? Oh, they go there? Yeah. We threw a group of students over and one of the pictures they sent over was us with the racket. And last year's experiment did very well. We were happy with the results. This year's racket, however, we weren't able to recover it so it's sitting somewhere deep in the Atlantic. Oh, it's too bad. Yeah. And they have to get another one. Yeah. So they're currently working on year three of that project. So what kind of, how big is the rocket? What kind of rocket is this? It's an expensive rocket. All rockets are expensive. Yes, all rockets are very expensive. It was a NASA experimental rocket. Like this? Yes, that one. Okay. So that's us in front of it. It's a Terrier rocket. It's relatively small compared to what we've been working on. But we had a lot of fun and this was supposed to experience space for about five to seven minutes before it came back down. Because it was experimental, NASA didn't charge us as much, but also there's an increase for the amount of failure that could happen. So they had been very lucky. The Rocksat program had been very lucky up until that point. They hadn't lost a single rocket. But for sounding rockets, about 80 to 90% success rate is very high. Yeah. And we had 100% success rate up until this August. Oh, too bad. It was unfortunate, but we're hoping that this year's rocket will... So who owns these rockets? So that one was a NASA project. So it was NASA kind of front in most of the money. But the Rocksat program itself was put on by the Colorado Space Grant Consortium. So we partner with other space grant consortiums as well to kind of do bigger projects. Colorado is one of the big ones who works with college students to get them to do space programs where they launch a payload into space. Whereas we fund various research projects at UH. So, you know, space education is really interesting, especially now. I don't think that Donald Trump when he was running for office was talking about doing support for the space program. In fact, I think he said something just to the contrary of that. Yeah. It's a very interesting and kind of scary time for us. But it is a scary time for all researchers at UH. And all Americans. Yes. But hey, I guess that's the way it works. Yep. Just trying to struggle. We do need to have a science aware community. And that's part of the reason that I really try to push science in classrooms is because a lot of my teachers were afraid of science. And I want to support those teachers who may not be comfortable teaching the science to their students. But I'd like to come in and just if they're willing to come into their classrooms and kind of talk to them about what I know and what I've learned. And I was very lucky to have great mentors and people to kind of teach me about different things in the science world and get me very interested in science and space science at a very young age. Well, let's talk about that. You had an epiphany of some sort. You woke up one morning and you told your parents, I think, I've got to go into science. I know this is my life. What happened? So when I was really little, I wanted to be an astronomer. I think in preschool, I had told my parents that. Really? Oh, yeah. And then I realized that astronomers needed to get a PhD. And I was terrible at school. So I decided that that was not the route I was going to take. But somewhere around seventh grade, I think I realized that engineering was a really cool field. My mom's been in a wheelchair since I was about eight years old. So I kind of wanted to go into biomedical engineering. And going through high school and stuff, I joined the robotics club. I did all kinds of like electron marathon, building electric cars and trying to just like tinker with things. You were really inspired, eh? Yeah, I really wanted to do something. I was very good with my hands. I'm pretty awful at school. I grew up on the Big Island. Where? In KL. Okay, out. I'm from KL, yeah. Okay, yeah. So it was tough and it was really challenging, but I really wanted to do it. And I was very determined. Some of my elementary school teachers said like, oh, you know, you've got learning disorders. You're never going to make it. And I told them like, you know what? I'm going to prove you wrong. And so that was kind of like the driving force all through K through 12. Um, was like trying to be the person that I, the best person I could be. Um, and trying to... You know high school? YKL. Oh, YKL? Oh, okay, okay. So I was part of a robotics team. I know that school. Yeah. Um, and then in my senior year, I had applied for a bunch of colleges and my parents literally laughed at me and they were like, there's no way you're going to a four-year school. And I was like, why are you laughing at me? You should be proud of me. But they were like, no, I don't believe that you're actually going to go. So I came to Minoa and it took me five and a half years, but I got my bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. Um, and all of that was... I was in choice of fields, really. It was the only one that had a lot of labs in it. So a lot of hands-on. I was, like you said, I'm really bad. Hands-on engineer. I could... Bad at theory. Great at doing hands-on stuff. So I worked really hard at that. Um, and with that, my ultimate goal was to be an instrumentation engineer at the... At one of the observatories back home. My goal has always been to move back to Hilo so that I can give back to the community that has given me so much. Um, and it was really challenging to find, like, um, internships and stuff that were very hands-on, but every summer I made sure that I interned somewhere new so that I got a feel for the different fields. Um, I got to intern... Around the telescopes there in Camarilla? Yeah. So I interned as a high schooler at, um, Joint Astronomy Center. Uh-huh. And I did, like, a programming project for them. And after my freshman year of college, I went to Canada, France on an Akamai workforce initiative. Camarilla. Yeah. And I loved it there. Um, and then they said, well, you know, you need to get better at circuit design, you need to get better at programming. And I had already been part of, um, UH's satellite program, um, or small set program with Dr. Wayne Sheroma for, at that point, about a year. I got involved in it on, like, day three of college. So it was a lot of fun. You were all in. I was. I was a very, I'm a very project-based learner. Okay. So, um, I, um, got involved with this project. I did small sets for about three and a half years, um, with Dr. Sheroma. I participated in the nano set six program. Um, I got to intern downtown here, um, at an optical engineering firm. Which one? Um, Novosol. Sure. Novosol and Bishop Square. Yeah. Okay. Um, and then I did a few outreach programs where I helped, um, create kits for teachers that they could borrow and use in their classrooms. Um, and even my last summer, um, before, right before I graduated, I worked, I started working for HSFL. Um, and I had already been working with, um, Hawaii space grant consortium. Um, since my freshman year as a student assistant for Art and Marine Cumero, who are, um, who are the people who started robotics in Hawaii. Um, they've been great mentors to me throughout my entire life. Art was my, um, vice principal in like elementary school. Um, I got to kind of do a lot of these hands-on things. And after I graduated, HSFL picked me up as, um, apionics engineer to continue my work on, um, sushi or the super ultra compact type or spectral imager that Paul Lucy and Rob Wright have been working on. Okay. Well, it teaches me a couple of things. One is I, I think the water in, uh, Hilo and Kao, it's different because there's so many per capita, so many scientists that I have met who've grown up in that area. I don't know what it is. And the high schools, you know, are, they're really interested in science and they generate people like you. That's fabulous. Hey, shout out to Hilo and Kao. The other thing is, the other thing I get out of it is that here's living proof, uh, with Amber, that you don't have to like school to like science. Right? Yes. I was pretty awful at school. I, I'm both dyslexic and ADHD, so I have a hard time focusing on like a lot of schoolwork and a lot of my teachers, either they loved me or they hated me. It really depended on their teaching style. So it was a lot of fun. At the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding, you know. We're going to take a short break, Amber, and we come back. We're going to talk turkey. We're going to talk turkey. We're going to talk turkey. I said that. I can't believe I said that. We're going to talk about avionics. Whoa, we're talking about real science. We'll come back. We'll see. Aloha and welcome to The Savvy Chick Show on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm the weekly host at 11 a.m. Honolulu time. I'm very excited for the next six weeks. We have the Aspire series, which is all about the coolest careers I could find and interviewing and getting insights from these amazing people who want to share it with you and help you live your dreams. Look forward to seeing you on the show. Aloha. I'm Ethan Ellen, host of likeable science here on Think Tech Hawaii. Every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., you'll have a chance to come and listen and learn from scientists around the world, scientists who talk about their work in meaningful, easy to understand ways. And you'll come to appreciate science as a wonderful way of thinking, way of knowing about the world. You'll learn interesting facts, interesting ideas. You'll be stimulated to think more. Please come join us every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii for likeable science with me, your host Ethan Ellen. Bingo, we're back. I promise you we'd return like MacArthur, and we came back. And here's Amber E. Mai Han. She is with the Hawaii Space Flight Laboratory at UH Minoa. And we're talking about launching next-generation careers to space with Amber E. Mai Han. So you're an engineer in the avionics field. I guess the first thing that comes to mind is what's avionics? What is that? Circuit boards. So I do a lot of circuit design and then fabrication and, of course, testing. I got to do extensively a lot of subsystem and system-level testing for our satellite. That was Hyakasat that we launched last November. OK. How do you spell that? H-I-A-K-A-S-A-T. OK. Hyakasat. OK. And I had a lot of fun doing that. I always, my whole dream was to have a job that I could go to and say it was fun. So I got to do a lot of testing. And that's like, I feel like a big part of my engineering side of my job is just kind of like making something, and that takes a while, but not so long. And then trying to figure out all of the things that could possibly break it, or if it's already broken, how to fix it. Oh, wow. You sound like the space central in, what is it, Houston? But wait, so you studied this at the College of Engineering and you study electrical engineering there, yeah? Yes. So what courses and what disciplines feed into avionics? I guess electrical engineering itself would feed into avionics, but there's more. What else goes into avionics? Electrophysics. A lot of stuff I learned on the job, or like I learned from robotics, like circuit design and programming. We had a couple programming classes that we were required to take, but not a whole lot. So a lot of it was kind of learning as you go, as well as circuit design. You don't have specifically a course about circuit design. We learn like the physics behind circuit design or how a signal gets processed from one point to another, but we don't actually learn like, how do I connect all of the dots and what components or what pieces do we put in to make everything work together? And we don't have too many classes on that. It's more of like a trade school level thing, but it was something that I definitely needed to, a skill that I needed to learn and kind of work on as I continued. Circuit design itself is pretty complicated to me. I mean, a circuit, my God, how do you design, first you have to design what you want out of it, okay? Then you have to design what pieces are involved, what transistors, what have you, capacitors, all those things. Yep, our chips, our computers. And then you have to connect them and what? Tell me, tell me. So we have all of our chips and computers and we get our design requirements from our scientists and they're awesome and crazy and expect a lot out of our boards. And then we have to put all these components onto our board and all of this is done on the computer. So at first it looks like spaghetti and you have to make like a diagram of how you're going to connect everything. So you can see what you're doing. Yeah, to create that layout. And then you have like the outline of your board and you have to get all of those pieces to fit like a puzzle in there. And then you have to make sure that you don't have like things that are crossed wrong or we're not connecting part A to part C when it was really supposed to be connected to part B. Easy to make a mistake, huh? Pretty easy, which is why it's pretty fun to try to troubleshoot those things. But you can tell with the smoke, right? Oh yes, definitely. White smoke, the magic white smoke is always a tell-tale sign that something went wrong. So then you put all the capacitors and what do you call it, transistors on the thing. Now you're going to do it with your own hands, right? Your hands on, right? You're going to take the design off the computer and you're going to go down to Radio Chef where there is no more Radio Chef. Go down to a place like Radio Chef and get all the necessary components. Tell me how you do it. Online shopping is a lot of fun now. Online is better, okay. So because of the parts that we use, we don't typically have all of them in stock on Island. So we order from Digi-Key or Mauser or some other electronic stars. And we also get our circuits printed because we have multiple layers and that's not really something which has the capacity to do right now. So you can get the actual connections on a circuit board. Like those green ones that are in your computer. Also mail order, yeah. And then you plug in your components into that same board. Then you have a stencil and you put a solder paste onto it so the glue on. And then you put all the components on and we don't have a pick in place so we have to do all of that by hand. So you put it into an oven and like two minutes later it makes a noise and it pops out and you have a circuit board that sometimes needs a little bit of tweaking a little bit of cleaning up because the solder paste just kind of flows wherever it goes. Okay, so that's one thing that goes wrong. I mean you can have the solder paste flow in the wrong direction and get a short circuit. Something like that. But what else can go wrong when you're testing? And how do you test and how do you find out whether you made a mistake somehow? So a lot of what could happen is if you crossed wires or you hooked the wrong thing up to the wrong pins which means that you would have to cut the trace and hopefully that trace was on one of the top layers. So you could just cut it with an exacto knife scrape it off and solder to a different point using like a jumper cable. I hope you realize you're getting invaluable information from Amber today. So this will stand everyone in good stead to understand how to do this. Okay, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so that's like one of the things that could go wrong. You could have shorted something and not realized it and then plugged it into power and then you smell of course the magic white smoke so you have to figure out which component is shorted and which one needs to be replaced. Because you burned it up already. Yeah, because you've burned it up already or you figure out like where exactly the problem came from. So the good is once you send out your design and you order all your parts you stare at your design again and go where did I possibly go wrong and you double check everything just to kind of make sure that everything logically makes sense. So sometimes the mistake would be in the original design itself. You can't be sure that it's going to work because you saw it on the computer screen. You always have that element of human error. Yeah. The original design or you can make an error in actually connecting the components up to the right pins on the circuit board. Just another question is you get these components and the connecting boards on the mail order but they're not expensive are they? You don't have to pay a lot of money for this because this is the 21st century, right? Well some of it depends how many layers your board is. So a four or six layer board costs maybe like $40 to $60. With all the pieces? That was just one board just it printed. For the components, one component one tiny little chip that's like a computer chip could cost $120. Ooh. It starts running into money now. It depends how complicated your board is we're trying to move into FPGAs which is like a more powerful computer chip and a lot of phones are using them now a lot of higher end computers are using them we're trying to space technology is always about 10 years behind so we're trying to bring that space technology a little more into the future. So avionics though you said avionics was creating circuit boards but circuit boards for aviation for space flight? What we do is small satellites so it's all those circuit boards for the small satellite design so we've got a computer we normally order our communication systems because those are a little we want to make sure our radios work so our computer can screw up our like our instrument can be a little weird but we need to make sure our power and our communications are flawless so we make sure we order those two pieces we've been kind of trying like different ideas some people in the military that we've been talking with have said that they do software-defined radios so we're kind of thinking about doing going that route. What's a software-defined radio? It's using that FPGA like I was telling you so you can Yes. The national labs are doing amazing work with this technology so we are thinking about incorporating it into some of our next designs but for right now we have been ordering some of our parts and making just like our solar panel boards like instruments so what I do is I work with scientists and they give me their requirements like this is what I want this camera to do but it doesn't do all of those functions yet so I need you to make the controller that will do the calibration system for my camera so I get to do that That's pretty complicated Let's talk about that as a case study for a minute. So I have a camera the camera is on the satellite taking pictures and you're going to control what the lens aperture and the speed and the focus and what have you maybe the direction of the camera with a circuit board is that the idea? Well fortunately for us most of the cameras that we purchase have all of that controls kind of build in so we just need to interface with them so it's just kind of creating a board to interface their board to our computer system for example with Suchi that was the ultra-compact hyper-spectral imager that I worked with Paul Lucy and Rob Radon also I worked with Sarah Kreitz who now works for JAXA in Japan but that when we needed to build the calibration system so it's a hyper-spectral imager so we needed to take images both before and after their their lens stack to kind of show any deflection so that we could calibrate the images that were taken so we had a lens or a lens cover that we would heat up using capton heaters so we got to play with this really expensive thermal paste so it's basically like epoxy just a thermally connected thermal paste we got to figure out how to not get that thermal paste into the very thin shutters and that was a big challenge but it was a lot of fun you'll learn that here on Thinkbook about thermal paste we learned a lot from you you know when you started talking about your experience in the schools I said she's really focusing on the schools and it's challenging and it's valuable but you know that's more important than now I feel differently now you work in avionics really you're amazing Amber I'm a juggler I have to juggle everything do anything and everything Amber Imai Han engineer at the Hawaii Space Flight Laboratory University of Hawaii at Minoa you have dazzled us thank you so much for coming down thank you for having me it's been a pleasure thank you