ISAS Academy Two: Day 6

 The students' day began with a presentation from a former ISAS student. Abigail Sevier attended the ISAS Academy it’s very first year, in 2010. She is currently a senior at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. This summer she has an internship at NASA Langley in Virginia. She talked to ISAS scholars about the opportunities ISAS opens up to you.

Abigail Sevier teleconferenced with ISAS students.

 The Boise State University SPHERE (Synchronized Position Hold, Engage Reorient, Experimental Satellites) coordinators talked to ISAS scholars about how they could from a Zero Robotics team. The presenters were a graduate student, Nilab and an undergraduate student, Marina. They and their team are the link between the MIT Zero Robotics Program and high schools and middle schools around the state of Idaho. The challenges for both teams change annually, but always involve programing a spherical robot to accomplish a selected task in space. Winning teams get to send their codes to a SPHERE on the ISS for testing. This year’s challenge is keeping a meteor from hitting earth.

Students had the opportunity to learn about Zero Robotics.

Soon afterwards students had the opportunity to participate in a teleconference with Dan Isla who is a Boise State University graduate and Systems Engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. Dan Isla worked on the Assembly Test and Launch Operations Team (ATLO) for the Mars Rover Curiosity and talked about the seven minutes of terror landing, the rover's activities on the planet and its instrumentation. Students had their last chance to talk to an expert about their mission before tomorrow's presentations, and they also asked questions about the road to a NASA career including opportunities at BSU and other colleges and high schools in general.

Dan Isla presented to the ISAS scholars, allowing them to ask him many questions.

The students had the opportunity to participate in workshops that provided a hands on approach to different career fields, including: measuring snow, DNA detection, antibiotic development, cryptology, robotics, and metal casting. The students worked with college students, graduate students and professors to complete different experiments in these areas of study. Experiments varied from changing pennies to appear gold, to making alloys, to programing a rover to find water on Mars.

One of the 6 workshops allowed students to mix chemicals to make golden pennies.

ISAS scholars finished the day working hard to meet their morning deadlines. Power-Points and posters were finished, edited, and in the poster’s case, printed. Teams had the opportunity to practice giving their presentations as they well tomorrow at the luncheon. It was rewarding for everyone to see how much they had accomplished this past week at the ISAS academy.


Don't forget to check out the Facebook and Twitter pages for more pictures, videos and other ISAS related posts and media.

Camille Eddy (ISAS 2012 alumna) and
Holly Palmer (ISAS 2013 alumna)
ISAS Social Media Mentors