Goddard's Innovator of the Year: Scott Hesh

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 is being honored for groundbreaking work developing a sub-payload dispersal system that tracks and consolidates communications for 4 to 16 science packages ejected from sounding rockets.

Since 2017, Scott Hesh and his team worked hand-inglove with science investigators to develop a technology to sample Earth’s upper atmosphere in multiple dimensions with accurate time and location data.

“Scott has this enthusiasm for what he does that I think is really contagious,” said Sounding Rocket Program Technologist Cathy Hesh. “He’s an electrical engineer by education, but he has such a grasp on other disciplines as well, so he’s sort of like a systems engineer. If he wants to improve something, he just goes out and learns all sorts of things that would be beyond the scope of his discipline.”

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

“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 deserves Goddard’s Innovator of the Year Award.