Few organizations in the country manage such a broad set of information and communications such as NASA. With the data that arrive from the Voyager probes outside the solar system, the images of the Mars explorers and the messages and scientific data of the International Space Station and the 10 NASA field centers throughout the country, the agency manages some 113 Data Petabytes, 5 times the amount stored in the Congress Library. The person responsible for all this is Jeff Seaton, NASA Information Director, which supervises a budget of one billion dollars and 700 employees throughout the organization.
Seaton has been in the space agency since 1991, when it began as a robotics engineer. In 2004 he assumed the position of director of Technology at the NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia, ascending until he became the CIO of that center. In 2021 it was already the entire agency. Since he assumed the position, Seaton has focused on modernizing NASA’s digital infrastructure, which has taken him to the Forbes Cio Next list of this year.
Recently, Seaton sat with Forbes to talk about some of the challenges of IT management (information technological services), for the space agency. Below are some of the most prominent aspects of the conversation, which have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Keep the spacecraft of seniority safe
We have our Voyager spacecraft that are further from this planet than any other entity created by the human being. There is no way that we update your computers. … And we have to do everything possible to mitigate any potential threat because the things that were designed 30 years ago could never anticipate the environment in which we are today. So we have a lot of creative people in our mission space that is thinking about that all the time.
Protect NASA Missions Data
Today we know that some of the threats come from basic vulnerabilities. So we have encouraged people to do things like multifactor authentication, to implement encryption when possible and patch our systems. Actually, part of my work is to insist on the importance of basic aspects as we strive to achieve the success of the mission and incorporate them into our way of working … “If we collect data, our scientists and researchers want to have the security that these data have been validated and are reliable. Therefore, protecting the data and systems that generate them is of vital importance for our entire community. ”
The effort of several years to renew NASA’s website
We had thousands of websites … So from 2019, we put a look at the global footprint of the web and focused on what interests us most. And we could, after several years of effort, display a more modern and more centered web presence. That allowed us to focus NASA’s message in a way that the general public could appreciate and understand.
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Why NASA launched a streaming service
NASA has a great history of offering content through traditional television. So we had NASA TV, but the world is moving beyond traditional television media; Streaming media is where the real content and emphasis were. And so, last year, we launched NASA Plus, which is a streaming platform that makes it possible for anyone to have a network connection to access NASA’s video and programming contents, as opposed to people who could have a cable television supplier. Modernizing the distribution mechanism and offering it to many more people around the world has been another significant change.
About NASA’s history with AI
We have been using AI years. I started my career in the early nineties and my first office partner … I used neural networks to try to determine the optimal trajectory of robotic devices. We have been in NASA’s missions for years. In our Artemis campaign we plan to use artificial intelligence to explore the lunar surface. Today we have robots on Mars that use AI to navigate when they receive orders from land. In addition, we use the AI to analyze the data and images that collect the spacecraft, both in space and on earth. This mission centered is integrated into the general life cycle of the project.
How NASA uses generative AI
The generative AI is a kind of black box. That is why we consider that humans will always be important. We can use the generative AI to accelerate part of the work we do, but we still have that validation step at the end.
NASA is very good to experience, so we hope that in the next 12 to 18 months we will continue to experience these generative capabilities as they are deployed. Of course, the government can be a bit slower to adopt some of the technologies because we have to have certain guarantees that technology is properly protecting US data. We may be a little slower than other companies, but I don’t see it as something negative, because we can also learn from others as we advance.
Creation of computer skills for Artemis, the NASA program that returns human beings to the moon.
We have many partners. On the one hand, NASA’s internal work and, on the other, the evolution of the commercial space sector. And both are trying to find out how we can have a sustainable presence in another body of the solar system. This entails all kinds of challenges. Think from the point of view of communications and computer networks. … So we are collaborating with many of our partners to answer some of the questions we know today and identify others that are yet to arise. This will help us to continue exploring beyond the moon and even Mars. And that is really exciting. We are explorers, and one of the most exciting things about Artemis is that our exploration legacy continues.
This article was originally published by Forbes Us.
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