’m astronomer Amy Mainzer.

You'’ve probably seen a printer that can print things on a flat piece of paper.

But what if you had a printer that would actually let you print in all three dimensions at the same time?

I'’m here in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory'’s 3-D printer lab where we can do just that.

So I'’m here with Don Scudamore.

Don, can you tell us a little bit about your job and how the 3-D printer works?

- I'’m a manufacturing engineer here at JPL.

This portion of my job is the model shop, and we do 3-D printing in here.

The way that a 3-D printer works is, it builds on a tray and builds your plastic part one layer at a time.

[funky music] - So the 3-D printer kind of grows this whole part?

- Exactly.

On this one, you can really see the layer on this comet.

- Wow!

- You can see each layer.

- Oh, yeah.

So we actually just send the shape from the computer to the 3-D printer, and it just grows it.

- If you can model it in 3-D then we can print it.

This is the comet-- actual shape, not the actual size of the comet-- from the Rosetta mission, and this Philae lander just landed on there.

- So we'’ve used 3-D printers to help us understand how to fly missions to comets and even land on them.

- That'’s correct.

- You can imagine, someday, the astronauts will be on the space station printing all the things that they need to fix the station.

Who knows?

Someday, maybe we'’ll be living on Mars and using 3-D printers to print spare parts, like this wheel here, or even food.

You could even maybe someday print pizza.

Ooh, pizza.

Is it time for lunch?