NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Internship

Throughout the internship, I was able to meet and connect with so many different people, including many astronauts. This is Koichi Wakata, the first Japanese commander of the International Space Station.

I initially became an OSTEM intern for the spring at Marshall Space Flight Center, with my internship beginning in January. Throughout the year, my internship was renewed twice and I continued to intern at Marshall throughout all of 2023.

I stayed on the same team throughout my entire internship, working to develop and test new technologies for upcoming lunar missions.

My main project focused oncharacterizing the electrostatic properties of lunar regolith, and designing a system to use the properties to our advantage during a lunar mission. For this project, I designed and led testing of test setups making use of lunar regolith simulant to better understand the electrostatic properties. Including test setups designed to harness static electricity from lunar regolith simulant using large-scale capacitors.

During my work on the test setups, I created over one hundred different parts in CAD using Creo, which were subsequently 3D printed, tested and designed upon iteratively to better adapt the parts to the needs of each test setup. 

Additionally, I took on an additional project to design, test, and use experimental setups to track lunar regolith particles on the micron scale using spectroscopic sensors and laser measurement systems. This project began my learning of Arduino microcontrollers, which became very useful during successive internships.