Houston, we have a podcast.

Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, episode 264, Nacho Average

Experiment.

I'm Gary Jordan, and I'll be your host today.

On this podcast, we bring in the experts, sciences, engineers, and astronauts, all to

let you know what's going on in the world of human spaceflight.

Today, we'll be talking about Nachos, no, not that.

It's unsurprisingly an acronym that stands for Nanosatellite, Atmospheric, Chemistry,

Hyperspectral, Observation System.

This instrument could make it easier to monitor volcanic activity and air quality in cities,

neighborhoods, and power plants here on Earth on a much smaller scale than what's previously

been measured.

Nachos launched earlier this year on Northrop Grumman's 17th resupply mission to the International

Space Station to monitor atmospheric trace gases like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.

Nachos has since been deployed from the International Space Station into a one-year journey

in lower orbit, and in fact, they were able to launch another Nachos CubeSat into orbit.

So to discuss the Nacho experiment, we have Nachos principal investigator researcher and

task lead with the Space and Remote Sensing Group at the Department of Energy's Los

Alamos National Laboratory, Steve Love.

Steve received a bachelor's degree in physics from Washington State University, where he

then went on to earn his PhD in physics from Cornell University in 1991.

He joined Los Alamos National Lab immediately thereafter.

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