Matz Heads to NASA!

The week of July 24th was equally exciting as the previous week. We started off the week by meeting with Dr. Cagle at 9:30 AM on Monday. She made sure we were all up to speed, and then my roommate Alexandra gave her final presentation since she was leaving the following day. Unfortunately, Alexandra's departure meant that I also had to leave our room on the 25th; if I wanted to stay in the room by myself, I would have had to pay double the amount of money that I had been paying for rent. This wasn't feasible for me financially, so I decided to find a new roommate. The search was successful, as I found another Smithie named Sunnie to room with. However, her original roommate was not leaving until the 30th. So, I was without a room for 5 days during this week. That in itself was an adventure. I checked out of the room on Tuesday morning. That day, the design team was heading to San Francisco State University to use an Instron machine. Dr. Cagle wanted us to determine the mate...

Hello everyone! I want to apologize for being so quiet on this blog lately. I have been super busy here at the NASA Ames Research Center. The past two weeks have been full of exciting work, tours, and adventures. The week of July 17th was very full. As I mentioned in my previous post, I was able to use the laser cutter on Monday the 17th to create my own NASA Ames namebadge. See my previous post for an image of that! On Tuesday the 18th, the Smith College, Idaho State, and TechEdSat programs were given a tour of the Sierra-B Hangar. The Sierra-B is a small, remote-controlled aircraft that is used for missions into dangerous places. NASA does not want to send pilots into the Arctic, or near the dust plumes of an active volcano. Instead, they send remote-controlled vehicles to these places to collect data. There were several different sized remote-controlled aircraft in the hangar, the largest of which was the Sierra-B: Sierra-B aircraft Smaller remote-controlled aircraf...

Last week was such a fun week! It was a pretty chill week in terms of work; the design team and I basically just spent our time printing our prototypes, reaching out to people around the Bay Area that could serve as resources for Dr. Cagle's project, and working on our own independent CAD projects (for example, I CAD'ed a fidget spinner from scratch using Fusion 360). However, the Smith students were offered the opportunity to go to lots of cool lectures and tours over the course of this week. As I mentioned in my last post, we went on a tour of the 80x40 wind tunnel on Monday. The fun and adventures only continued as the week progressed. I began last Tuesday by going to a lecture entitled "Satellite Formation-Flying for Future Space Science and Exploration." The talk was given by a Stanford professor named Simone D'Amico, and it was about how we can pair two or more satellites to accomplish mission objectives. He talked about the rendezvous of the Gemini 6 an...

Last week was a short week in terms of work. After the four-day weekend for the 4th of July, I only had to work on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. My design team and I spent basically all day on Wednesday in the Singularity University iLab, working on 3D printed parts for Dr. Cagle's project. We were able to successfully print a few parts using the FormLabs printer. This particular 3D printer operates using a liquid resin. A platform lowers into a bath of the liquid resin, and a UV light is used to cure the liquid, layer by layer, into the shape that you want to print. I found that the FormLabs printer is very user friendly, and the resolution of the prints is exceptional. The FormLabs printer is an awesome tool that we have access to for Dr. Cagle's project. On Thursday morning, I went to a lecture about how humans adapt in space. I was expecting the talk to be about how humans psychologically adapt to being in space; after all, it can get awfully lonely up there. I also t...

I am finally back on the NASA Ames campus after a long, exciting weekend away for the 4th of July! The week before I left, I mostly did a lot of internet research to gather information that could be useful for the design of Dr. Cagle's product. I combed over a lot of patents, articles, and other documents to gain information. I also went to some really cool lectures: Mars Geography & Exploration, hosted by NASA and the SETI Institute How to incorporate electronics into fashion, with Kitty Yeung Taking advantage of your internship & career opportunities at NASA, hosted by George Gorospe of NASA Ames I learned so much at the lectures, and it is so awesome to hear about different people's projects. Finally, on Friday I got meet Elle Stapleton, who works full time at the Singularity University Innovation Lab. (I mentioned Singularity in a previous post; they are a think tank here in the Silicon Valley that runs a summer program for post-docs.) She showed us ...

As you all can tell, my second week here at the NASA Ames Research Center is now complete! It was kind of a weird week in terms of structured work time, but overall I really feel as if I've made some headway this week! On Monday, our group of Smith interns gave a big presentation to our supervisor, Dr. Cagle. This presentation was the culmination of a project we've been working on for the past two weeks. Dr. Cagle wanted us, as a group, to design our own version of the product that she's been working on. Before Monday we had never actually seen the product as Dr. Cagle has engineered it. The point of designing our own prototype was to familiarize ourselves with the literature, and to get our creative juices flowing. Dr. Cagle ended up loving all of our ideas! But when she unveiled the product as she created it, we realized that our prototype looked nothing like the actual product. Dr. Cagle was totally okay with this, though. She loved how creative and in-depth we had g...