Mark Stahl, NASA engineer, will take us on an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of the X-ray lab facilities at the NASA Marshal Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Alabama.   Mr. Stahl has been with NASA for over eight years. In that time, he has performed a wide range of task including X-ray optics manufacturing, optical polishing, metrology, and flight hardware testing and assembly.

The NASA Marshal’s Optical Systems Design and Fabrication Branch provides manufacturing and testing of conventional and x-ray optics.  They have contributed significant components and expertise to numerous ground breaking space observatories including Chandra X-ray Observatory, High Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C) and the James Web Space Telescope.

To round out the presentation for STEAMfest we’ll look at an experiment in laser diffraction that you can do at home … measuring the width of a human hair with a laser pointer.