Home alone, jumping and screaming with joy, Kendrick Roberson, 19, aerospace engineering major, was shocked to find he was accepted in to the NASA research program.
“It was awesome,” Roberson said.
Roberson is one of three Mathematics, Engineering and Science Achievement (MESA) students to be accepted in to the program.
Leaving at 6 a.m. last Wednesday, Roberson and Brett Lopez, 21, math major, attended one of the two locations of the program at the Marshal Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., Lopez said.
They were put into teams, and worked on putting together a rover, a robotic self-operating machine that will take samples of a planet and its climate for NASA to analyze, Lopez said.
Along with building the device, they also put together a budget that calculated how much money is needed to build the rover. They will also work on a proposal presentation that indicated when and how long it will be in space, Lopez said.
Having gone to the Johnson Space Center in Houston in October, Vito Iaia, 22, physics major, enjoyed learning and meeting new people at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“I enjoyed meeting a lot of people with the same drive and aspirations as me,” Iaia said. “I was surrounded by people who are both more and less qualified than I.”
While at the convention, Iaia and his team he was with, created the rover out of Lego-like tools and created a storyboard that would be used to present it to NASA, Iaia said.
Teams were awarded for tasks completed and good presentations, and ‘fired’ for poor presentations, Iaia said.
They found out the programMESA and applied through www.ncast.com. To qualify, they had to go through four lessons to prepare for the program that consisted of abstract, timeline and budget training; as well as proposal and line drawing, Iaia said.
All agreed that the budget was the hardest part of the application process because of the difficulty of figuring out what parts would be needed for the rover and how much they would cost.
“You can’t publicly access the cost for the equipment. I looked at missions similar to mine, but they were 20 years ago, so you have to estimate the costs of equipment and take inflation into account,” Lopez said.
While at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Lopez said he had an opportunity to see old equipment and space shuttles from past missions and network with others. He said he enjoyed talking with other engineers about the industry.
Roberson made the most of his time as he worked with other engineering majors which is what he aspires to be.
“I would rather do something I’m passionate about,” Lopez said.