Matz Heads to NASA!

This past week has been a whirlwind of random but very fortunate circumstances. As I mentioned in my last blog post, I went on a tour last Tuesday, August 1st. We went to the SHARP (Systems Health Analytics, Resilience, and Physics modeling) lab, where they create Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can help pilots, astronauts, and other NASA personnel make decisions quickly and effectively. For example, if something is damaged on a space shuttle, the AI can analyze the situation and provide a course of an action. Ultimately, the pilot or astronaut must finalize the decision, but the AI can make evaluating the situation much simpler and faster. It was cool to see the computer programs and equipment that make AI possible for NASA. On Wednesday the 2nd, we continued to work on one of our last prototypes for the summer. We once again used the FormLabs printer to create the prototype. Half of the mechanism worked, but the other half didn't fit together exactly right. We are still wor

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