NASA quickly fills chief technologist slot

Cornell University professor Mason Peck has been tapped to serve as NASA chief technologist, space agency officials announced Tuesday, following last month's exit of Bobby Braun, the first person to hold the position in a decade.

Peck will start work in January 2012 on incorporating the space agency's new high-tech investments and innovative research into future missions. He also will work directly with the commercial aerospace industry, a community that will take on greater responsibility for vehicle launches now that NASA has ended its space shuttle program. Braun has spent almost 20 years in business and academia as an engineer, including stints at the defense and space arms of Boeing Co. and Honeywell International.

One of Peck's current Cornell projects, a satellite mission slated to launch in 2013, will demonstrate how one satellite can diagnose the structural health and configuration of another. This capability is expected to aid human flights in the coming decades, according to the university. NASA on Monday revealed plans for a 2014 unmanned test flight of its new Orion space capsule. Orion is designed to carry astronauts to the moon and possibly Mars.

Peck will be responsible for advising the space agency on the societal benefits of NASA's in-house technologies.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement, "his passion for education and his accomplishments in spacecraft design and robotics, along with his experience in the private sector, bring the skills I've come to depend on from my chief technologist."

While in the private sector, Peck worked with NASA on its Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System and Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites.

Peck will serve through an intergovernmental personnel agreement with Cornell University. His Cornell research group's flight experiment in microchip-size spacecraft currently is aboard the International Space Station. Braun also worked at NASA through a similar arrangement with Georgia Tech, before he returned to teaching there in October.

Peck holds a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a master's degree in English literature from the University of Chicago.