(04-02-09) Malcolm Gibson receives a NASA Aeronautics Scholarship
Congratulations to 2008 Intern Advisor Malcolm Gibson who received a NASA Aeronautics Scholarship which provides him with a fully-funded 10-week summer internship at a NASA facility. This scholarship also provides
full-ride funding for the next two years.
(03-10-09) Jennifer Stanley Heads to Washington!
Congratulations goes to Jennifer Stanley, a NASA Space Grant Undergraduate Research Intern working with Anne Thwaits and Barron Orr of the "GTK Trainer" website. Jennifer recently learned she was selected for the highly prestigious Washington Center Postgraduate Professional Development Program for a internship with the federal government for the summer 2009.
(01-29-09) Airborne Metals Research by Fellow Theresa Foley
2008-2009 Graduate Fellow Theresa Foley was mentioned for her accomplishments in an article on the Superfund Basic Research Program at the University of Arizona website.
Read the Article! 
(12-18-08) All hail Chris Lewicki
In 1993 Christopher A. Lewicki a nineteen-year-old University of Arizona (UA) Aerospace Engineering sophomore received his first taste of NASA R&D through a 1993 AZSGC Undergraduate Research Internship and discovered an insatiable appetite for all things “space”! Through Space Grant he became an integral member of the NASA Mars Observer’s Gamma Ray Spectrometer and NEAR missions teams while his enthusiasm, growing expertise, and leadership qualities propelled him to the presidency of UA SEDS, SEDS USA, the NASA Academy at Goddard where his research received the summer’s top honors (1996), and a two-year Space Grant Graduate Fellowship to lead the first UA student satellite program (1997-1999).....
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(11-06-08) Reaching Out to the Hispanic Community
2008 Graduate Fellow Theresa Foley was featured in an Atmospheric Sciences article for her community
envolvement with the Hispanic Community in the Tucson area. She works with the UA Superfund Basic Research Program
(UA SBRP), US EPA and Sonora Environmental Research Institute, Inc (SERI), a Tucson community organization, to analyze
and translate airborne metals data into useful information.
Read the Article!
(9-15-08) Navajo Interns Featured in UANews Article
Three of our new 2008-2009 University of Arizona/NASA Space Grant Undergraduate Research Interns were featured in a UANews article that was release on Friday September 12, 2008. Erin Boyd, Adriana Riggs, and Jennifer Stanley, all of whom are Navajo Nation University of Arizona students show how important Internships are for undergrads.
Read the Article!
(7-10-08) UA Intern Features in UA News Article
We are really proud of Yuri Robeson, an exceptional student and wonderful
human being. Yuri credits her Space Grant experience with teaching her that
"everything is possible" and helping her discover and take advantage of a
wealth of opportunities along her educational path. Utilizing many NASA
education program "linkages"--a Space Grant Internship to a NASA MUST
Scholarship to NASA Zero Gravity program participation, to acceptance into
the NASA Robotics Academy--Yuri is well on her way to fulfilling her goal of
joining the NASA workforce!
(4-22-08) UA Intern receives Science Excellence Award
Astronomy & Physics major Mary Anne Peters has been awarded the College of
Science excellence in Undergraduate Research Award for 2008. She won
this award for her work with Astronomy Professor Laird Close on BESSEL, which is an
instrument for the Steward Observatory telescope. This instrument tested new
technology (in collaboration with OSC Professor Grover Swartzlander and OSC
graduate student Erin Ford) on-sky for the first time. This technology may, in
the future, be utilized to image planets in other star systems. This is
exciting because imaging extrasolar planets enables one to determine whether
there is life beyond the Earth.
For more information see the recent publication by Peters et al. which can be accessed at http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008NewA...13..359P
(2-20-08) '08 may prove to be a watershed year in large-scale physics
Eric Schwartz is a NASA Space Grant intern at the Arizona Daily Star. He is attending the American Association for the Advancement of Science general meeting this weekend as a student journalist with the National Association of Science Writers...
Read the Article!
Read the Original Article
(1-31-08) 2006-2007 Intern Brent Morgan, Rubik Master!
Read the Article!
Read the Original Article
(10-16-07) David Zahn - Weekly UA Success Stories!
2006-2007 UA Undergraduate Research Intern Daivd Zahn was featured in the University of Arizona's weekley success stories for his lab work with Dr. Yurkanin and he goals of attending medical school in 2008.
Read the Article!
Read the Original Article
(10-10-07) Early Success for Space Grant Interns
Adria Brooks, 2006 UA Space Grant Intern and OSIRIS student Deputy-Principal Investigator, has been awarded a NASA Motivating Undergraduates in Science and Technology (MUST) scholarship. As part of this scholarship Adria receives a one-year tuition scholarship of $10,000 and a $5,000 stipend to participate in a summer research experience at a NASA center.
Congratulations Adria!
In May of 2006, 2005 UA/NASA Space Grant Undergraduate Research Intern Daniella Della Giustina, an engineering-physics major, was one of five students selected from across the nation to receive a prestigious $9,000 NASA Institute
for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Student Fellows Prize to investigate revolutionary ideas for space exploration. She will study the use of near-Earth asteroids for
radiation shielding during a human journey to Mars in her prize-winning project titled "The Martian Bus Schedule: An Innovative Technique for Protecting Humans on a Journey to Mars." An extension to this accomplishment, Dani has been named "Student Principal Investigator" for the Discovery-class Osiris Mission, and will engage and lead a team of Space Grant students in her radiation shielding research.
(7-27-07) Geniuses who will change your life
1999 Space Grant Fellow Margaret Turnbull was featuring in a CNN article titled, "Genuisnes who will change your life" for her research concerning aliens.
"Turnbull's mind-blowing patience has paid off. In 2015, NASA will be launching its Terrestrial Planet Finder, which will use space telescopes to look for planets beyond our solar system, and it'll start with the stars on Turnbull's short list. In other words, nobody's laughing at Turnbull's search for aliens now" (Eric Furman, CNN).
(6-8-07) Dr. Natasha Johnson was one of our first!
Dr. Natasha Johnson was one of our first UA/NASA Space Grant Interns. She graduated from the University of Arizona in 1991 with BS degrees in Math, Geology, Computer Science and Physcis. She is currently working at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Extraterrestrial Physics as a National Research Council Resident Research Associate and has written many publications to support her work.
View Dr. Natasha Johnson's Site
(6-4-07) Graduate Fellow Nick Rattray won a Fullbright
UA/NASA Space Grant Graduate Fellow Nick Rattray was awared a Fulbright Grant to study disability issues in Ecuador.
(6-4-07) Three UA Navajo Students Graduate With Ph.D. Degrees in Engineering
1992-93 Space Grant Undergraduate Intern Julius Yellowhair graduates from the University of Arizona with a Ph.D. in Optical Sciences.
Read the Article!
More Information
(4-30-07) Space Grant group helps build scientific knowledge
"I was responsible for analyzing MRI scans of patients with brain tumors using an
imaging software. I had to develop a new technique to look at areas of the brain
for changes in before and after radiation treatment in an attempt to detect
radiation effects." -Joshua Lucio
University of Arizona Space Grant Undergraduate Research Intern Joshua Lucio was featured in the Arizona Daily Star (4/18/07) written by Valarie Potell. Read The Article!
(11-20-06) Success Comes Early In Interns' Careers
University of Arizona Space Grant Undergraduate Research Intern David Zahn (2006-07) was awarded two distinctions soon into his first semester as an undergraduate research intern in our program.
The following link is to an excerpt from a letter from David to Susan Brew regarding his recent accomplishments and enthusiasm about the Space Grant program and how it has been a positive element of his semester so far!
Read David's Success Story!
University of Arizona Space Grant Undergraduate Research Intern Jenna Root (2005-06) was awarded 1st Place for her poster at the UA Student Showcase 2006. She competed in the Undergraduate Student Division in Agriculture and Environmental Sciences. She will be presenting her poster, "Assessing Carbon Dynamics of Coarse Woody Debris in Desert Grasslands" at the Annual Meetings of the Society for Range Management in Reno, NV in Feb 2007.
Launching UA Students from Research Labs to America's High-Tech Workforce:
The Arizona Space Grant Consortium is particularly proud of our statewide
fellowships programs. From 1994 to 2002, 999 undergraduate students have
participated in mentor-guided research internships in leading-edge scientific
programs. A great enhancement to an education, internships contribute to the
development of a technically informed, aware and sensitive citizenry--essential
to the success of U.S. space endeavors, as well as to broader national
priorities. 132 graduate students have received fellowships, propelling them
towards careers in America's technical work force. 22% are from groups
traditionally underrepresented in science and technical fields; 40% are women.
UA Intern in Driver's Seat of Mars Exploration Rover (MER):
Chris Lewicki, was a 1993-94 Arizona Space Grant Intern, and a 1997-1999
Graduate Fellow--not to mention the first student manager of the UA Space Grant
Student Satellite Program. He now serves as a member of the Mars Exploration
Rovers Assembly, Test and Launch Operations team at JPL. In 2003, two new and
powerful Mars "Robotic Geologists", developed by the MER team, will be sent to
the red planet. With far greater mobility than the 1997 Mars Pathfinder rover,
these rovers will be able to trek up to 100 meters (about 110 yards) per day
across the Martian surface. These missions continue NASA's quest to understand
the role of water on Mars. Chris is MER Mission Flight Director for the Impact to Egress phase.
Chris is responsible for actually "steering" one of
the rovers! How cool is that!?!?! For full details on this mission, along
with a lot of great pictures, please go to http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/1106_b231.cfm.
View an article covering Chris's most recent trip to Arizona, where he was the featured keynote speaker for the 2005-2006 Arizona/NASA Space Grant Undergraduate Research Intern Annual Symposium! This link is featured in our articles page.
Also check out NASA's Offical Marsrover website.
From Space Grant Internship to a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics:
1992-93
Intern Warren Brown, and AZSGC's first student to attend the NASA Academy at
Goddard, recently reported: "I'm at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics, now a post-doctoral Fellow. I'm working on some spectrographs
and observing star streams (...remnants of past galaxy mergers) in the outer
parts of the Milky Way. I stayed in Cambridge because of a significant
other, who recently became my wife. She is of Greek descent, so it
was a Big Fat Greek Wedding! We even went to Greece for the
honeymoon."
Space Grant Intern Artist Helps Scientists Envision Titan:
UA Space Grant Intern Mark Robertson-Tessi, along with mentor Ralph Lorenz, have been exploring Titan, Saturn's largest satellite. Specifically, Mark's internship has involved studying the landscape of Titan, then rendering images of what the landscape may look like. Below are a few of the images, along with detailed descriptions. Click on each image to view the full-size version.
2012 - Back to Titan. An autonomous airship exploits Titan's thick atmosphere
and low gravity to explore the near-surface environment. The airship
communicates direct-to-Earth with a large electronically-steered phased-array
antenna. Here it uses its thruster fans to hold position in the gentle breeze
that is whipping up waves in an ethane lake.Having profiled the depth of
the lake with a ground-penetrating radar,the airship is acquiring surface
material with a tethered sample acquisition device to analyze it for prebiotic
compounds.
Alternate Reality. In this rendering, the Huygens probe (shape model derived
from various sources) is about to splash down on the Saturn side of Titan,
rather than on the antisaturn side we will actually visit. (In fact, Saturn's
proximity to the horizon shows we are close to +/-80 degrees longitude : the
orientation of the rings as near-vertical shows we are close to the equator.
The sun's position relative to Saturn shows we are close to summer solstice,
although from this image you can't tell north from south...) Titan's atmosphere
really should be this transparent, at least at some wavelengths accessible to
cameras, if not to the naked eye.
A scientifically-inspired artistic rendering of Titan's hypothesized landscape.
Seen from a viewpoint 50km up, the planetary curvature of Titan (radius 2575km)
is evident. A 60-km impact crater, to left, has an updomed floor and a central
pit, as seen in craters of this size on the icy satellite Ganymede : On Titan,
however, the crater has partially filled with black hydrocarbon liquids -
methane and ethane. A few other craters and tectonic landforms litter the
landscape, which is only weakly modified by erosion. Distant clouds hover at
around 20km altitude.
National Space Grant Student Satellite Program:
The Arizona Space Grant Consortium is working to spearhead a National Space
Grant Student Satellite Program. Across America, Space Grant students are
learning from the ground up—literally—by designing, building, flying and
operating a broad range of spacecraft. Students come to our programs with an
interest in Space, but with different levels of skill, knowledge, and
experience. Missions of growing complexity provide opportunities to acquire
baseline skills and then to build on them. They range from the simple—building
soda-can “satellites” or small payloads for launch from small rockets or
balloons—to building sophisticated satellites. We call this strategy
“crawl”, “walk”, “run” and “fly!” Our goal is to make aerospace history and
send the first student-built satellites to Mars. These programs bring together
University, Industry, Military and Government Resources to Train America’s
Future Scientists and Engineers. Space flight projects are an unsurpassed
vehicle to engage students in exciting high-level science, engineering and
technical learning. Students attest to the fact that these learning
experiences—many on the leading edge of technology—provide opportunities,
knowledge and skills they do not receive in the classroom.
Space Grant Internships Leads to Science Writing Dream Job and a Lot of Fun:
In 1998-99, Thomas Stauffer was awarded a UA/NASA Space Grant Science Writing Internship at the Arizona Daily Star--Arizona's second largest newspaper. This experience led to the career of his dreams. Here is Tom's story:
The NASA Space Grant internship in science writing helped prove to me once and for all that time is not constant. Under the mentorship of Jim Erickson, I wrote more than 80 science stories for the Arizona Daily Star and quickly realized that writing about science was what I really wanted to do. When my internship ended, the Star offered me a part-time job as a police reporter, which expanded to full-time when I graduated in May of 2000. Fast forward to January 2001: Jim has moved on to the Rocky Mountain News, the Star needs a science reporter, and on the basis of my Space Grant experience, I get the job! (Exclamation points are frowned on in the newspaper business but I had to make an exception back there.) Less than two years after my internship began, here I am writing about the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft landing on Asteroid 433 Eros, realizing that as corny as it sounds, time really does fly when you're having fun.
Intern Comes Full-Circle at UA:
Dante Lauretta was a University of Arizona/NASA Space Grant
Undergraduate Research Intern in 1992. We knew we could expect great things
from Dante. In 2000, after completing a Ph.D. from Washington University, and
serving as a postdoc at Arizona State University, Dante was hired to the UA
Department of Planetary Sciences/the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory--home
department for Space Grant in Arizona. Dr. Lauretta's research interests
focus on the origin and chemical evolution of the solar system. He studies the
chemistry of the solar nebula, the cloud of gas and dust from which our solar
system formed, by combining theoretical and experimental modeling of these
environments with characterization of primitive meteorites. His main research
interest is the formation and alteration of minerals in the solar nebula and on
meteorite/parent asteroids. This work is important for identifying pristine
solar nebula condensates in primitive meteorites, determining whether chemical
reactions had enough time to reach equilibrium in the solar nebula, understanding
the origin of complex organic molecules in the early solar system, and
constraining the initial chemical inventories of the terrestrial planets. He is
also currently working on the application of inductively coupled plasma-mass
spectrometry to geologic studies. Currently, he is studying the extent of Hg
isotopic fractionation in natural systems. This project represents a
potentially new stable isotope system with applications in meteoritics,
geology, biogeochemistry, and environmental studies. And to bring Dante's
story to full-circle, he serves as a research mentor for our UA Space Grant
Undergraduate Research Internship Program!
Intern Designing the "New Space Shuttle" at Boeing:
Germán Fuentes, a 1999-00 Space Grant intern for Dr. Lesser graduated
with a degree in Electrical Engineering in 2002. We were very pleased to
receive a note from him this summer, to update us on his activities:
"I wanted to say thank you for the opportunity given to me 3 yrs. ago and offer a disposition of service to you and your program. Looking back, the Arizona Space Grant Consortium gave me a start in the space business and I am grateful for the early exposure.
My job at Boeing as an engineer focuses on the X-37 project. X-37 is an unmanned, experimental, space plane designed to test new technologies and progress towards NASA's vision of an Orbital Space Plane. I work with the avionics portion--specifically the communication systems. My day-to-day activities include writing test procedures for the communications system and then running the tests to see if our equipment is functioning properly. The work is exciting and I enjoy the Boeing atmosphere very much--Southern California isn't so bad either!"
Intern Heads to the Bottom of the World!
Lane Patterson, UA/NASA Space Grant Undergraduate Intern from 2003 to 2004 for Gene Giacomelli and recent Agriculture and Biosystems Engineering graduate, is moving south. Way south! His Space Grant internship enabled him to work with the South Pole Food Growth Chamber. Due to the hazardous conditions of the South Pole, including below zero temperatures and absence of soil, researchers at the South Pole rely on frozen food stores for the 8 month periods that they live in isolation. A recent initiative by the National Science Foundation put it upon the University of Arizona’s Controlled Environment Agriculture Center to develop a state-of-the-art growth chamber. Lane’s involvement and contributions on this project (which is also intended to be used on Mars as the Mars Inflatable Greenhouse) has allowed him that chance to head to the South Pole in order to continue working with the South Pole Food Growth Chamber. Congratulations Lane!
View Lane's 2003 UA/NASA Undergraduate Research Internship Program Symposium presentation
View Lane's first trip to the South Pole to work on the "Greenhouse"
View Lane's second trip to the South Pole to work on the "Greenhouse"
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