DANNY BAIRD
Every summer, fresh faces flood NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. They are the interns. Each new face comes with an idea to share — a contribution to make to the agency.
EMILY CAVANAGH
When you first walk through the gates, it’s intimidating, but awe-inspiring. There are so many buildings and so many brilliant people inside them. The people who work here have made history for over 60 years, and will continue to do so long after your summer internship is over.
DANNY BAIRD
As full-time employees, we try our best to make the interns’ transition to Goddard as easy as possible. The campus already looks much like the college campuses the interns are used to. Still, finding a cafeteria amongst the sprawling green lawns and stocky brick buildings can be a feat. Finding your office? Impossible.
EMILY CAVANAGH
Nonetheless, over time, you find your place.
DANNY BAIRD
Eventually, you can navigate your way to the dining hall — you know where the bathroom nearest your desk is.
EMILY CAVANAGH
You start to feel at home.
DANNY BAIRD
And that’s when the real work begins.
EMILY CAVANAGH
I’m Emily Cavanagh.
DANNY BAIRD
…and I’m Danny Baird.
EMILY CAVANAGH
This is “The Invisible Network.”
DANNY BAIRD
The Space Communications and Navigation, or SCaN, program office oversees NASA’s communications infrastructure and develops much of the agency’s portfolio of innovative communications and navigation technologies. In order to secure the future of NASA’s networks, they have developed a workforce pipeline, a program by which they train and inspire the next generation of NASA communications professionals.
EMILY CAVANAGH
The centerpiece of that effort is the SCaN Internship Project, or SIP. As intern ambassador for SIP at Goddard (and an intern, myself), I document the program in video and stills; I write about the interns and their projects; I facilitate events. Most importantly, I support the interns, ensuring that each student involved gets the most out of their summer experience.
Interns are expected to complete a summer project under a mentor. Interns also participate in professional development workshops and networking events.
Jimmy Acevedo, my mentor, serves as intern coordinator at Goddard:
JIMMY ACEVEDO
Our SIP interns contribute to SCaN in a wide variety of roles across many diverse disciplines from cybersecurity to public outreach. Our intern projects further SCaN’s mission as they pursue bold, new lines of inquiry, and they lend fresh eyes to the communications challenges of today. Past interns have enhanced network capabilities, patented communications technologies and improved the efficiency of agency operations.
Many of our interns have actually gone on to work for NASA, furthering the pipeline of new talent to the agency and then, in turn, becoming mentors themselves.
In return for their contributions, SCaN provides our interns with unique opportunities to grow their skills and interact with aerospace professionals. Our interns are encouraged to incorporate creativity into their design process. We inundate them with challenging ideas and new perspectives. And they network with current and future leaders as they build the connections that will define their careers.
Our interns leave the program with a better understanding of the unique contributions they can make — not only to NASA, but to the world at large.
DANNY BAIRD
What follows are interviews with this summer’s batch of SIP interns at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.
EMILY CAVANAGH
We’ve asked them to speak about their experiences this summer: what they’re working on and why it matters.
DANNY BAIRD
They’re an incredible bunch of young people with passion and expertise.
EMILY CAVANAGH
Students with as much to teach as they have to learn.
…
CAITLYN SINGAM
My name is Caitlyn Singam and I live in Bethesda, Maryland. I am a rising senior at the University of Maryland, College Park. I’ll be starting my master’s in systems engineering this fall and concurrently wrapping up my bachelor’s in biological sciences.
So, my summer project is lunar GNSS, and what that means is essentially looking at whether GPS signals and other similar signals can be used to navigate to the Moon. My work entailed largely using MATLAB and specifically a set of scripts developed by Goddard for MATLAB called the orbit determination toolbox to simulate GNSS — so that’s Global Navigation Satellite System — signal performance at altitude and at lunar distances. And so, essentially looking at signal quality, signal strength and satellite availability.
And so I did that, and I compared data from actual flights. So, MMS and GOES-16 actually had GPS receivers onboard. And so, I compared the data from those flights with the simulation results to make sure the simulation was working. And then, once I was confident in the results there, moved on to the actual lunar simulation.
So, I used the Artemis III trajectory, specifically part of it that’s — it’s called the near-rectilinear halo orbit, or NRHO. It’s just a halo right in front of the Moon, between the Earth and Moon, actually. So, I looked at that part to see what the satellite availability, signal strength, all those metrics — see what it was.
And the results seem to be very promising!
BEN CROOP
My name is Ben Croop. I grew up around Philadelphia, but I’m currently going to school in Orlando. I’m doing my Ph.D. in optics and photonics, which is basically physics with light, so lasers and that kind of stuff.
The nature of my project is related to deep space communications. Something out in space needs to communicate with something back on Earth and one of the main problems with that is atmospheric turbulence, which kind of can degrade your signal when you’re sending something that far and going through the atmosphere.
The main part of my project is modelling that turbulence and then we’re — that’ll allow us to kind of mitigate it, or overcome that, in the real world. If you don’t account for these effects, you can’t really do communications with objects in space. And if you can’t communicate properly, you might lose your spacecraft, your satellite. You might not be able to get the data you want.
NOAH COWPER
I’m Noah Cowper. I’m a graduate student at the University of Wyoming, studying physics.
AIMEE HATFIELD
I’m Aimee Hatfield. I’m an engineering physics student at New Mexico State University.
JACOB PLOWMAN
I’m Jacob Plowman. I’m studying astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Wyoming.
NOAH COWPER
Tthe nature of our project is that we were tasked to develop a quantum communications protocol and be able to test it on high altitude balloons to simulate space. We’re doing this as a proof of concept of quantum communications.
My goals for the project were to develop the communications protocol, simulate it and be able to create entangled photons.
JACOB PLOWMAN
My goal on this project was to develop and program the flight protocols, as well as the balloon payload.
AIMEE HATFIELD
My job was to design the optical comms stations for the transmit and receiving payloads.
JACOB PLOWMAN
Our team totaled seven interns. We all worked together and collaborated to make a proof of concept plan for the entire summer — created all of the diagrams, all of the initial codes and all of the simulations for this project so that, next summer, when and if we all come back, we can just hit the ground running with construction and testing and then, hopefully, launch.
AIMEE HATFIELD
Working together was a great experience because it really resembles how a group of people would work in the real world. And so, it was really a great learning process and a great experience to be able to have.
NICK SIA
My name is Nick Sia. I will be a first year master’s student in aerospace engineering at West Virginia University this coming fall. I am a Cleveland native and this is my second time interning at Glenn Research Center. My project this summer deals with analyzing the communications links to and from the power and propulsion element, which is the first module of the Deep Space Gateway set for launch in 2022.
And, the main thing we’re really concerned with this summer — especially with my project — is to make sure the antennas on board are in a proper position so that they don’t have to point through the propulsion plume. That becomes problematic because, having to propagate a radio signal through the propulsion plume creates kind of an additional medium, or another “thing,” the signal has to transfer through.
While usually that’s not a big issue with things like clouds or anything like that, with an ion propulsion plume, it actually could cause the signal to miss Earth entirely.
SAM DELAUGHTER
Hi, my name is Sam Delaughter, originally from Latham, New York, and I’m a Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying computer science in the advanced network architectures group.
My summer project is to automate compliance with security controls defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. So, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is a government organization that defines lots of things — standards for security, for chemical safety — all sorts of things.
A lot of this project was just sort of figuring out what systems we have in place for our security right now and what our automation needs are, figuring out how to get access to different systems, how to interface with them. And then, eventually I ended up writing a script that will let us do some bulk imports of new information into the system so that people can use it more easily.
MEGHNA SITARAM
I’m Meghna Sitaram and I’m from Chatham, New Jersey. I’m a rising senior at University of Maryland, College Park, studying physics and astronomy. This summer, I created a testbed to help evaluate a certain component that we are using for a commercial off-the-shelf optical communications ground station.
Using commercial off-the-shelf parts is important because it could make the ground station much more replicable and make a more inexpensive ground station.
GRACE MERRY
My name is Grace Merry. I am from Zanesville, Ohio, but I have been living in Cleveland for the past three years for school. I am studying animation with a focus in 3D modelling. I don’t really have a single, big project. It’s more of working on smaller projects throughout the whole summer. All of them are 3D modelling or animation based.
I built a couple 3D models to be used in some VR demos that educate visitors to the center. So the thing about building models, or just any kind of artists’ work in general, is it’s kind of the bridge between all the science stuff and the general public. These images and models kind of make it easier to understand because it’s something you can physically see.
MONICA SARAF
My name is Monica Saraf and I am from Herndon, Virginia. I’m currently at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia.
I worked on a recommendation for what cloud platform the Near Earth Network should use in order to move their data storage from local to the cloud. The NEN has a lot of high data rate missions, which means that they have a lot of data that they’re bringing down from space. And, in order for them to be able to store that, they have to have an easy, accessible way to maintain all of their data. And that’s why I was brought on to this project.
In the future, I plan to work in a field where I can combine both my passion for cybersecurity and my passion for biotechnology so that I can help people with devices like pacemakers and things like that, where they have to have security for their devices — which isn’t necessarily in existence right now, because it’s not given as much importance as it really should be.
…
EMILY CAVANAGH
As the summer comes to a close, students return to their universities with technical and professional skills under their belts. More importantly, they leave knowing they’ve had a positive impact on the agency’s mission.
DANNY BAIRD
On July 20, 2019, NASA celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing — the Apollo missions. Many of the interns’ mentors were a part of the Apollo generation, those inspired by trailblazing Americans soaring through space and Neil Armstrong’s immortal words:
NEIL ARMSTRONG
That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.
EMILY CAVANAGH
This intern class has seen the Apollo footage and heard Armstrong’s words. They understand the importance of the Apollo missions to NASA’s history, but 50 years have come and gone. They look towards the future.
These interns will know Artemis, NASA’s next-generation missions to the Moon. The Orion capsule, which will carry Artemis astronauts to and from the Moon, looks much like Apollo’s command and service module, which served a similar purpose in 1969. Its destination and appearance, however, are where the similarities end.
When NASA returns to the lunar surface we will leave more than flags and footprints. The agency will create a sustainable human presence there, using the Moon as a stepping stone towards Mars and beyond. Expanding humanity’s reach into space, NASA will return with new knowledge and opportunities. Compared to Apollo, the science will be more advanced; the technology, cutting-edge; the data, richer.
The Artemis generation will know a different Moon than Apollo, far from grainy analog footage shown on tube televisions. They will know a Moon delivered in high-definition digital video, live to their televisions, tablets and phones.
DANNY BAIRD
And who knows? A SCaN intern might just be the one focusing the camera.
…
The Invisible Network is a NASA podcast presented by the Space Communications and Navigation, or SCaN, program. This special edition of the podcast was written, produced and recorded by NASA interns Emily Cavanagh and Victoria Woodburn with me, Danny Baird.
The episode was released in October of 2019, at the close of International Space Week. Editorial support provided by Matthew Peters. Our public affairs officer is Peter Jacobs. Special thanks to SCaN policy and strategic communications lead, Barbara Adde, as well as intern coordinators Jimmy Acevedo and Tim Gallagher.
The next season of this podcast will begin release in the coming months. Be sure to subscribe and reconnect with “The Invisible Network.”
For the full text of this episode and related images visit nasa.gov/invisible. To apply to SCaN Internship Project opportunities make a profile on intern.nasa.gov and keep an eye out for projects that interest you.
We hope to work with you soon.