Go behind the scenes with Taylor Pember, an electronics engineer at NASA Glenn!

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Hi, I'm Taylor Pember. I'm an electronics engineer at NASA Glenn Research Center. Let me show you a day in my life. As part of my job to support future missions on the moon, I work on comparisons between mission tested and simulated data for lunar communication systems.

[00:00:16]A big aspect of my job is to verify antenna performance in our anechoic chambers.

[00:00:22]This environment is very electronically quiet, so signals from other equipment can't interfere.

[00:00:28]To gather lunar-like data without actually going to the moon, we test in the most lunar-like environments possible on Earth.

[00:00:35]Typically, we travel to desert areas like Arizona and Nevada, where the environment is dry and dusty and the landscape is filled with craters. While we prefer to test in the desert, we need to make sure our technology works at home first.

[00:00:50]We conduct local tests in our very own mock-up lunar rover here at NASA Glenn.

[00:00:55]This is one of the tools I use to create and analyze simulations between satellites, lunar terrain vehicles, and astronauts either on the Earth or the moon.

[00:01:05]These simulations will be compared to the real mission data. In our brand new lab building, we use this ground station to communicate with satellites to validate our research projects.

[00:01:17]Separate from my work projects but still related to NASA, I found these two meteorites from the asteroid that flew over Cleveland in March 2026.

[00:01:26]Pretty cool, huh?

[00:01:28]And that's it. Thanks for spending the day with me.