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.

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.

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."

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 visit the Mars Exploration Rovers site.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Below 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!

As I mentioned when I saw you, and as you requested, I'll reiterate by email that I have just been awarded the Magellan Circle Scholarship from the College of Social and Behavior Sciences. As you may already know, it is not one of the larger scholarships, however, as I learned long ago, any ladle that dishes out gravy is sweet (one dollop on top of another and before you know it you have an entire bowl full)! On Friday I am invited to attend an award's luncheon at the Arizona Inn for recognition and to meet my benefactors, who happen to be John Westly Miller and his wife Lorraine Drachman. You may have already heard of them: he is a developer working on some of the residential revitalization in Armory Park and she is from the Tucson renowned Drachman family. How lucky can I be? I have said many times that it is my desire to go to the Medical School right here at U of A, and to remain here in Tucson afterwards and practice neonatal care. I can not help but feel that the "powers that be" have heard this and want very much to see it happen. In addition, I was asked to invite an advisor, faculty member or mentor, and since my Anthropology professor Dr. Brian Silverstein had written me a letter of recommendation, he was the likely choice. I really look forward to the luncheon and meeting the benefactors - and a free meal - in style - oh boy!

In addition, as if that were not enough, 3 weeks ago I got notice from the International Scholar Laureate Program Delegation on Medicine that I had been selected to be one of 80 delegates from universities all over the country to spend 17 days this coming summer in China and Tibet studying eastern medicine. I had actually found the notice too good to be true and so ask Drs. Barron Orr and Karna Walter (when I saw them at a recent scholarship meeting at the Honors College) to authenticate the notice if they could. Although neither of them could actually do so, they agreed that it did indeed look authentic, and referred me to Dr. Patricia MacCorquendale - Dean of the Honors College - for her opinion. I went the next day to see her, and although she herself had not previously heard of the ISLP, she noticed in the papers that they were endorsed by the Golden Key International Honor Society of which she happened to be a member, so she gave it her blessing. I quickly joined Golden Key thereafter and have proceeded with the hope that it is legitimate, and in fact just today returned a scholarship application designed to offset the cost of the trip. Assuming I will go, we will visit hospitals, universities, orphanages, clinics etc., as well as all the usual tourist sites, in an attempt to familiarize ourselves with eastern medicine. My friends know that I am much more into holistic, integrated and natural medicine (like Chinese medicine) than I am into pharmaceuticals, so this should be an especially rewarding trip. There is also the possibility of getting course credit from the U. By the way, did I previously mention that the College of SBS agreed to give me course credit for the NASA Space Grant Internship? That is so far for this semester, with the possibility of additional credit for spring semester as well. Am I blessed or what?

You may know that as a NASA Space Grant Intern I am doing C14 and Be10 dating of terrestrial meteorites and lunar samples down in the NSF lab on campus, where U of A has the giant Acceleration Mass Spectrometer. I simply love it!

If you are interested in more information about the ISLP I will be glad to send you a web address. Again, as always, so good to see you and I hope I didn't bend your ear too far.

Cordially, David Zahn

An image from a brain scan may look like a gray mass to the untrained eye. But Joshua Lucio is able to detect the slightest change from image to image.

Lucio isn't a doctor, a professor or even a graduate student. He's a University of Arizona microbiology senior who's spent seven months looking at MRI scans taken before and after patients with brain diseases underwent radiation treatments.

Lucio's work is done through the Arizona Space Grant Consortium, which involves dozens of UA students and is led by Michael Drake, head of the UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

The statewide program brings together the UA, Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and 23 affiliate members, said Barron Orr, associate director of UA's program. The UA is the lead institution for the state consortium, which receives nearly $600,000 from NASA each year to fund educational programs geared to provide people the opportunity to learn about science and engineering, Orr said.

Participating groups make significant contributions to support the consortium's programs. With the projected contributions for 2007, the state program's budget is more than $1.2 million, Susan Brew, manager for the state and UA programs, said in an e-mail.

"Statewide, the flagship program is a large undergraduate research-internship program that supports 141 undergrads in 2006," she wrote. "In addition, 14 graduate students at UA and ASU receive fellowship support to engage in research programs, and at UA, to design and implement an educational-outreach program related to their graduate work."

There are more than 60 UA undergraduate interns working on a variety of topics this year, including microwave spectroscopy, documenting vegetation change using photography and working in public affairs for the Phoenix Mars Mission lander project. The lander will launch in August and is scheduled to reach Mars in May 2008. There's even a spot for a science-writing intern at the Arizona Daily Star. Six graduate students spent the year developing and implementing scientific outreach projects.

The Arizona Space Grant Consortium was created in 1989, a year after Congress passed the National Space Grant Act. The national program now includes consortia in all 50 states, plus Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. Arizona has been ranked in the top category each time the program has been reviewed by the national program.

In addition to supporting science programs, Orr said, the program tries to expose historically underrepresented people to science, technology, engineering and math.

"The transfer of knowledge between the scientific community and the public is essential," he said.

Lucio's work may affect the public one day. He said the project he's working on is a new technique that could have wider ramifications.

Lucio is one of more than 830 undergraduate students who have gone through the intern program in its 18 years. Students apply based on their interests, and those who are selected are matched with a mentor to work on a specific project.

Lucio worked mainly with cells in previous internships but said this experience has been exciting because the project is very new.

"We as interns are put in the driver's seat," he said. "You might not know what you're getting into, but in the end you're doing something."

1992-93 Space Grant Undergraduate Intern Julius Yellowhair graduates from the University of Arizona with a Ph.D. in Optical Sciences.