Tea and Poster

The Student Internship Program (SIP) allows college age students to participate in a 10-week, competitively funded research project at GSFC. The interns select projects from their field of study through the Director's Discretionary Fund (DDF). These projects aim to be innovative and challenging in design.

On Tuesday, July 30, 2002 NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center held a Tea and Poster event that displayed these student projects to the general public at GSFC.

Emily Woodward, an undergraduate student studying Aerospace Engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) was one of many participants at the Tea and Poster event. She began working for NASA GSFC at the beginning of May 2002 and has been working on her project since June. As an intern for Code 693, Laboratory for Extraterrestrial Physics, Woodward has developed a method for using an infrared spectrograph to study and test the volume of water that exists on a specific planet.

“This technology explores the possibility and widely accepted fact that if there is water on a planet, then it is more likely to have life on that particular planet. Infrared technology is a crucial step in learning if there is life on other planets. This particular internship has given me the opportunity to get my hands dirty in a field that I has always been a strong interest of mine,” said Emily Woodward.

For his project, Gabe Ladd from Boston University proposed an instrument package to be used on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The instruments would determine how turbulence behaves at almost ground levels. His proposed package consists of five instruments and is both feasible and affordable. "My internship here has been a great experience," said Ladd. "NASA is the fountainhead of scientific endeavors. It seems like there's always a 'will be' but never a 'could have been'."

During his ten weeks at Goddard, Luke Van Roekel from Concordia College in Minnesota examined the risk associated with the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite N (GOES N) by looking at what has happened with other spacecraft and what could potentially happen. "It's about making sure you've thought absolutely everything through," said Van Roekel.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student, James Tolbert, spent his summer interning for NASA GSFC’s Office of Aerospace Technology. While working with the Topographic Engineering Center in Alexandria, Virginia, Tolbert has designed a Technology Inventory Database. This database, if applied correctly, will be able to retrieve data in the form of photographic images and organize them within a specific database. Upon retrieval of that information the Jambalaya system will take that data and convert it into a 3-d visualization process. This element can be crucial to data retrieval techniques in space because it allows the observer the opportunity to compare and contrast imaging data with the actual experimental data and store that information in one particular database.

James Tolbert, describes his summer at NASA GSFC as, “a tremendous learning experiment. The Student Internship Program has strengthened [his] desire to work at NASA. The diversity of fields is truly remarkable because NASA isn’t just about space experimentation anymore. There are opportunities in all different fields of study available through Goddard's Student Internship Program.”

Information about the Student Internship Program can be found at: http://university.gsfc.nasa.gov/SIP/index.html.