FY 2010, 2011 Space Grant Fellow, Monica Ramirez, was awarded 2nd place for her abstract and 3rd place for her poster titled "A Greenhouse Study Assessing Potential Risk of Arsenic Exposure from Consumption of Home Produced Vegetables Near the Iron King Humboldt Smelter Superfund Site, Dewey-Humboldt, Arizona" at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences' EarthWeek 2012 event.

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 the chance to head to the South Pole in order to continue working with the South Pole Food Growth Chamber. Congratulations Lane! Lane is currently working towards a Master's degree in ABE.

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!"

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!

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.

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.