Space

George Mason scientist Anamaria Berea leads team to design lunar cultural archive for the ‘Pioneers of Tomorrow’

Colleen Rich — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 21:02:59 +0000

George Mason scientist Anamaria Berea leads team to design lunar cultural archive for the ‘Pioneers of Tomorrow’ Colleen Rich Thu, 01/16/2025 - 16:02

The ASPIRE ONE Lunar Record launched early on January 15 as part of the Ghost Riders in the Sky Lunar mission from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with a goal of establishing a new theoretical framework for planetary-scale archival communication.

Note from team on ASPIRE ONE. Photo provided

Anamaria Berea, an associate professor of computational sciences at ��AV, led an interdisciplinary team that designed a part of the LifeShip payload—an archive to preserve our Earth’s cultural and scientific heritage. It will be placed on the Moon through Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Lander.

Firefly missions are part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative in the Artemis program.

The digital portion of the LifeShip payload, similar to the Voyager Golden Records, contains diverse content including videos, global aspirations, scientific materials, historical records, and cultural artifacts intended for future humans to access. Highlights include Daily Life video capturing global snapshots of contemporary life, an Aspirations video featuring individuals sharing hopes for the future in their native languages, and collections of images from UNESCO and World Heritage archives. A Getty images documentation of the recent COVID-19 pandemic is also included.

Firefly Blue Ghost will deliver the lunar record to the Moon's surface. Photo courtesy of NASA

“We basically created an archive that is housed on a 1GB microchip encoded with diverse content,” said Berea, who also has a PhD is computational social sciences from George Mason. “It is also engraved with NanoFiche, including Berea’s name and affiliation with ��AV.

If it lands successfully, the payload will be placed on the Moon after 45 days [early March] and live there for posterity.

“This portion of the payload includes the Apollo 11 launch code, various works of art and music, information about the Moon, Earth Constitutions, and more,” Berea shared. “Not only my face, voice, name, and work will be on the Moon for future generations, but ��AV’s legacy too.”

Learn more about Anamaria Berea’s work on George Mason’s Access to Excellence podcast.

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A New Space Race

Jeannine Harvey — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 17:32:23 +0000

A New Space Race Jeannine Harvey Thu, 10/19/2023 - 13:32

Are we in a space race for cosmic resources? (Episode 6)

On the sixth episode of Our Future, Transformed, Hakeem Oluseyi, astrophysicist and research professor at ��AV, speaks with Mason President Gregory Washington about how the race to exploit cosmic resources has geopolitical implications and why we had to start from scratch in our attempt to return to the Moon.

^{For billions of years, the sun has been depositing helium-3 in the lunar regolith. Maybe we could go to the Moon and mine the helium-3. And now we also know there’s water on the moon, right? So the key thing is our technology and our aspirations have come to a level where just as the United States has outposts around the world that make it easier to get where you want to go, The Moon could be that for Earth.”}

Read the Transcript

Transcript EP 6: Our Future, Transformed: A New Space Race

Gregory Washington (00:10)

The recent Artemis mission that saw a NASA capsule orbit the moon was a huge step in preparation for an eventual visit to our nearest neighbor. How they do it?

Hakeem Oluseyi (00:24)

All my career, from a graduate student on, I've been hearing over and over again how we could not redo Apollo, right? The technology and the knowledge are lost, but yet here we are doing it again, and we soon will see Americans on the surface of the moon again and, hopefully a permanent presence.

Gregory Washington (00:47)

I'm the kind of person that says, okay, we did that; we already went to the moon. Why go back?

Hakeem Oluseyi (00:55)

Well, because, you know, why climb Mount Everest? I think it's a mixture of several things.

Number one, there's the scientific research component, okay? But there's also the economic opportunity that comes from having bases off Earth so that we could potentially take advantage of the resources that exist in outer space, like comets. Our economy now depends heavily on electronics, which require these very rare metals, rare on the surface of Earth but not rare in the core of Earth, which we don't have access to. But luckily, when other planets were forming early in our solar system, they differentiated just like the Earth did and all the heavy stuff saying to the center, but then later, they collided with something. And so now we have chunks of core stuff flying around out there; we're calling it asteroids. And so there's one asteroid out there that is, you know, at a value of more than something like a quintillion dollars, right, that we could potentially mine. So there's a third reason, and this is one that people don't like to talk about, but I think that there are geopolitical implications.

Gregory Washington (02:07)

And that was going to be my next question.

Hakeem Oluseyi (02:09)

Yeah.

Gregory Washington (02:10)

Are we on the dawn of a new race, a new space race?

Hakeem Oluseyi (02:15)

I think we are. I think we're already there, in fact, right? You know, sub, excuse me, low Earth orbit, orbital parameter space is being grabbed. And you look at the same thing for the moon.

So the question I have is, you know, the analogy I make, is it going to be more like the North Pole or the South Pole? And here's what I mean. All of us nations that are competitors, we exist in harmony at the South Pole because there is no military or commercial advantage to be gained there that anyone sees. But you go to the North Pole, not if it has melted, those continental shelves have oil. So everybody's fighting over it.

Gregory Washington (02:52)

Right.

Hakeem Oluseyi (02:53)

So what is going to be the case with the moon? What is it going to be the case with orbit?

What is going to be the case with Mars? We don't know the answer yet, but the thing is, is that we know the problem could potentially occur. So there's two things you want to do.

You want to get your treaties done, right, to keep the peace, but also just in case you

want to go and grab what you can grab while the gettings good, right? And, you know, that's the reality. You know, we have not reinvented human beings. We have not reinvented nations.

We're still in a competitive world, right? We're still in a dangerous world. So, you know, it's like hope for the best, but plan for the worst is kind of the approach.

Gregory Washington (03:32)

What do we know about the moon now that we didn't know before?

Hakeem Oluseyi (03:36)

Yeah. So the moon, we learned so much more and more and more about the moon. You know, the big surprise when the Apollo astronauts went up there, and they got some moon rocks and brought them back to Earth, it was, oh my goodness, the moon is made of Earth, right? But then we started studying the moon more, and we learned, you know, it's very different than far aside from the near side. And then people started thinking about fusion, and they thought, oh, maybe helium-3 is a better fuel to add to the deuterium than tritium because it's less radioactive initially. You know, for billions of years, the sun has been depositing helium-3 in the lunar regolith. Maybe we could go to the moon and mine the helium-3. It's not clear that that is a solution, but, you know, and now we also know there's water on the moon, right? So the key thing is our technology and our aspirations have come to a level where, just as the United States has outposts around the world in places like Guam, that makes it easier to get where you want to go. The moon can be that for Earth, right? The orbit is one thing, and then having a solid base where the gravitational cost of getting off that body is far less, and if that body has its own fuel right there, then that can be very valuable for taking advantage of.

Gregory Washington (04:55)

Going to Mars.

Hakeem Oluseyi (04:56)

The outer solar system. Exactly. And, you know, I really think that even though we may never colonize Mars, some people think we may. I think space tourism is a real thing that may happen.

Gregory Washington (05:10)

Outstanding.

Hakeem Oluseyi (05:11)

Yeah.

Gregory Washington (05:12)

So what new technologies, in your opinion, have to be developed in order to make this a reality?

Hakeem Oluseyi (05:18)

So they're already doing it, right? So it all depends. If you look, I think one of the key elements is fuel. So the big problem that Artemis had is that it still uses liquid hydrogen as the fuel. Liquid hydrogen, think about that, okay? It has to be like negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit. It's so low density. So keeping it inside of a hose is very difficult. Think about it like this. If you look at the difference in density between lead and water, the difference in density between water and liquid hydrogen is even greater.

Gregory Washington (05:49)

Then lead?

Hakeem Oluseyi (05:50)

Then lead, comparing lead and water.

Gregory Washington (05:52)

Wow.

Hakeem Oluseyi (05:53)

Yeah. So that stuff is very, very difficult to work with, right?

Gregory Washington (05:57)

What's next for the Artemis program? This is a phase deal, right?

Hakeem Oluseyi (06:00)

Yeah.

Gregory Washington (06:01)

So what happens next?

Hakeem Oluseyi (06:02)

What we did is we sent a craft without humans, and there were a lot of sensors on board. And the thing that we're doing now, which, you know, why didn't we think of this before. The space environment and radiation affect female bodies differently than it affects male bodies. So they put mannequins on there with sensors to figure out how the radiation environment is going to affect females. But then, now, we're going to do the same thing with real humans next. And so I love the way that NASA says when the next step is going to happen. They say, not before 2024, not, you know, on this date in 2024, but not before a particular date. But after we do that, then we're going to put, just like we have an international space station orbiting Earth, we're going to have an orbiting space station orbiting the Moon. And then we're going to actually send humans to land on the surface of the Moon and start taking care of business. We'll build a new Moon base on the surface, and then after that, it can now serve as a staging area to go beyond.

Gregory Washington (07:00)

We have a number of our students in the audience. I'd like to open it up for questions. So, any questions you have would be greatly appreciated.

Student1 (07:11)

So how do you just forget how to go to the Moon? That's what I'm kind of confused about.

Hakeem Oluseyi (07:17)

Yeah, that was a long time ago. And you know, when you are, when you have a factory that builds things, you know, it's outfitted to do that. And when you no longer have that purpose, you repurpose that factory. You tear everything down. And also, if you think about it, in my lifetime, how did we store digital data? It started off with those big, big floppies, and it went to a smaller floppy, then a smaller floppy, then I had Jazz Drive and all these other things. I can't use that now. I used to have an old box of VHS tapes. What am I going to play that in? I'm a member of the Screen Actors Guild, all right? So now it's time to vote for Oscar winners. They send me DVDs. How am I going to watch those movies? Right? So, you know, things just get out of date. So keep that in mind as you develop new knowledge. How do you keep it? How do you preserve it? And how do you pass it on to the next generation?

Gregory Washington (08:12)

Well, we know our future is intact, and we know we have another place that we will all visit someday soon.

Hakeem Oluseyi (07:21)

Yes.

Gregory Washington (07:22)

So I want to thank you.

Hakeem Oluseyi (07:24)

Thank you.

Gregory Washington (07:25)

Thank you for spending time with us. And I want to thank all of you for the next episode of Mason, our future transformed.

Learn more

About the Series

Mason President Gregory Washington hosts a YouTube series titled “Our Future, Transformed: Mason Spotlights the World’s Grand Challenges.” The series features faculty experts speaking about some of the most debated and significant topics of our day with an audience of Honors College students. Experts in the first season discuss the key solutions to key issues, including water policies in the West, police reform, problems at our Southern border, clean energy, and getting more women into STEM fields.

Guest Bio

Hakeem Oluseyi served as the visiting Robinson Professor at ��AV from 2021-2023, and he is the president of the National Society of Black Physicists. He’s also the author of A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars.

In This Episode

Hakeem Oluseyi

Gregory Washington

Topics

Energy

News

Our Future Transformed web series

Honors College

Space

Communication major looks to the stars with NASA internship

Sarah Holland — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 20:45:14 +0000

Communication major looks to the stars with NASA internship Sarah Holland Thu, 08/31/2023 - 16:45

Ever since sixth grade, Ricky Chang looked up at the stars and wondered what could be out there in the vastness of unexplored space.

Photo provided by NASA

Now, he has a front row seat to interstellar research.

The brand-new ��AV alum spent the summer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as a Commercialization, Innovation and Synergies Office (CIS) intern. “I’ve always admired NASA, so it’s kind of like a fever dream” said Chang, who graduated in May with a bachelor’s degree in communication. “It’s really cool seeing all these knowledgeable and passionate people working on amazing projects. I haven’t met a single person who isn’t excited to be here.”

The CIS Office finds government and industry partners to work with on space research and exploration. “NASA sets the policy, while private industry advances the technology,” Chang explained. “CIS helps the aerospace community to understand what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and—hopefully—want to be a part of it.”

His work was predominantly content marketing: creating video scripts, developing communications plans for university outreach to partner on the upcoming Artemis II launch, and writing employee spotlights.

“You don’t usually associate communications with NASA. Everything thinks, ‘oh, engineers, scientists, telescopes,’ things like that,” Chang said. “So to get the internship with my background in media production and communications was so exciting. There’s a chance for me to work in this field I’ve always admired, after all.”

Like his interest in the great mysteries of the galaxies, Chang’s interest in media production started in his youth, filming and editing videos of himself and his friends as they rode their BMX bikes. At Mason, Chang further developed his skills through a concentration in media production and criticism and working on podcasts for WGMU.

At his internship, Chang was encouraged to utilize those skills through media production projects: He scripted, produced, and recorded voice-overs for a series of short videos that will be embedded on NASA’s website. “I’m working my way up to be the voice of the countdown,” he joked.

“My communication degree has helped a lot in navigating this internship,” he said. “In this program I do a lot of communicating, and I’m seeing the theories I learned play out in the workplace. I’ve taken writing classes where I learned how to write across media, which helps when writing pieces for NASA that need to be concise yet persuasive. All the media production courses I’ve taken led to me creating and doing voiceovers the NASA videos. My professors gave me a really solid foundation.”

Ricky Chang, left, sits in the control room at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Photo provided by NASA.

This internship is the first foot in the door for Chang, who is seizing every opportunity he can to secure a future career at NASA. “I tried to meet with every multimedia person I could, so that if one day I apply for a full-time position they’ll remember me,” he said.

It seems his work has paid off. While Chang’s time at Mason concludes with the completion of this internship, his time at NASA is just beginning: He’s accepted another internship for the fall, where he’ll be working directly with NASA engineers in the Engineering and Technology Directorate (ETD).

“I want to work somewhere that lets me feel creative and supports my multimedia background, where I can really contribute and make an impact,” he said. “NASA gives me those opportunities and so much more.”

Get some tips for finding your own internship

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Summer Internship

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Department of Communication

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Space

Berea serves on NASA's UAP panel

Colleen Rich — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 20:37:13 +0000

Berea serves on NASA's UAP panel Colleen Rich Tue, 06/20/2023 - 16:37

Last fall NASA selected ��AV’s Anamaria Berea to participate in its independent study team on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). The 16-person panel was asked to “identify how data gathered by civilian government entities, commercial data, and data from other sources can potentially be analyzed to shed light on UAPs” and recommend a roadmap for future analysis.

Mason researcher Anamaria Berea at the NASA UAP panel on May 31, 2023. Photo by NASA

An expert in data and computational science, Berea has been working closely with the panel to carefully express the possibilities—as well as the limits—to open-source data from NASA, FAA, NOAA, and other government agencies, when studying this phenomena. While she has aspirations that this could spur a new field of study with standardized data collection, she appreciate the value of scientific rigor and has cautioned against rushing to conclusions with a high standard of evidence. The team expects to release its final report by the end of July.

Working with NASA

This is not the first time Berea has shared her computational and data science skills with NASA. After being the first woman to earn a PhD in computation social sciences at Mason, Berea saw an ad where Frontier Development Lab (FDL), an artificial intelligence (AI) research accelerator partnered with NASA and the SETI Institute, was looking for data scientists. She applied and got selected.

Her first project with NASA was within the eight-week summer challenges of FDL. The lab brings together data scientists and subject matter experts in space and earth sciences to focus on major challenges by applying data sciences, particularly machine learning and deep learning methods, to space science problems, such as the shape of asteroids, finding exoplanets, and astronaut health, among others.

“The idea is—can we come up with some artificial intelligence algorithms that can solve a big problem,” said Berea, who is an associate professor in Computational and Data Sciences Department in the College of Science.

Berea’s first challenge with the lab focused on forecasting solar flares and solar winds, which can impact the lives of the astronauts in space, as well as electronics and power grids on Earth. Then she became a mentor to an astrobiology challenge that was simulating the exoplanetary atmospheres based on metabolic networks.

Berea, who is currently affiliate faculty member with the FDL lab, was also a mentor for a challenge that designed a semi-supervised algorithm for unlabeled Earth Observation images, to automatically identify major atmospheric events in satellite imagery.

“The satellites are taking lots of pictures, but they are not labeled. We don't know what those images are without human input,” she said. “We are talking about petabytes of data that are basically impossible for the human researchers to search manually. The challenge for us was to create an algorithm that will automatically identify types of phenomena—such as a hurricane or sandstorm—in these satellite pictures.”

Another challenge she mentored last year was to create a knowledge graph, using natural language processing algorithms, to discover scientific datasets across all NASA SMD (Science Mission Directorate) fields, as well as in European Space Agency (ESA) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) repositories. For example, a scientist looking for a dataset on a specific star can find these datasets not only in astrophysics tagged data, but also heliophysics or planetary sciences.

The Science Behind the Search of Extraterrestrial Life

Berea is also an affiliate of the SETI Institute. For the uninitiated, SETI is an acronym for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Berea said, when it comes to searching for life on other planets, there are two signatures of potential life to look for: one is using biosignatures (present or past signatures of microbial or cellular life), the other is technosignatures (present or past signatures of life that developed technology in some form).

“Finding a biosignature means that you’ve found biological evidence of some sort that you can say ‘it's life,’” she said. “It can be microbial, it can be vegetation, or it can be nothing like we are used to seeing on Earth.”

“Looking for a technosignature means that we are searching for evidence of technology that might have been developed by a potentially intelligent species that is or was at some point out there,” she said. “And the technosignature can be the imprint of the satellites that are orbiting a planet, or a radio or optical wave that is out of the normal natural spectrum. Another technosignature might be an artifact from a dead civilization somewhere. The difference is that a technosignature means that there is some technology that has been developed, present or in the past, by another civilization.”

Berea said one of the big misconceptions is that if there is a discovery, it's going a specific point in time. But the truth is it will take years. “First you get the data, then you need to analyze the data, and then of course you need to have conversations and debate the discovery with so many scientists from so many fields.”

As an example, she uses a meteorite discovered during the Clinton administration that some scientists believe shows traces of past microbial life on Mars. It's been two decades, she said, and they are still debating the data and analysis from that meteorite. “The whole scientific process of validation, verification…you need to be sure when you make such a big announcement. It is a long process.”

Berea acknowledges that many scientists and much of the general public are inclined toward believing there is life is out there.

“If you're thinking just in probabilistic terms, the probability should be really high,” she said. “But the question becomes—how do you identify ‘life’?”

Berea said the search comes down to two issues. The chances of having two civilizations that are comparable in terms of technological development at the same time is one problem. The second problem is just how big the universe is.

“It's so big that any signal that we are sending now can take between hundreds and thousands of years to reach other parts of the galaxy and vice versa. The sheer vastness of the universe is the biggest barrier to actually finding something.”

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Electrical and Computer Engineering seniors excel in space and satellite student competition

Tama Moni — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 13:28:09 +0000

Electrical and Computer Engineering seniors excel in space and satellite student competition Tama Moni Wed, 06/08/2022 - 09:28

In This Story

Peter Pachowicz

A team of seniors from the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department combined their knowledge and skills to win the Space and Satellites Professionals International (SSPI) student prize competition.

Kelsey Schneider, the team’s leader, says they designed a satellite radar system to extract and transmit data from one antenna to another. Schneider says the satellite radar systems at space stations contain large and expensive antennas for this purpose. She says space stations use the Synthetic Aperture Radar System – SARS – to monitor a planet’s environment.

“The goal was to build a low-cost, low-size, weight and power synthetic aperture system,” Schneider said. “Our antennae was only about four inches in diameter.”

She said the satellite radar system transmits electrical waves and transmits data when the radar detects an object. Then the electrical waves bounce off the object and get sent back to the radar system. The radar then transmits the data through the antennas. They used a computer algorithm to convert the received data into an image.

Schneider said the hardest part of the competition was finding a balance between the technical and non-technical language used to explain the project to an easy-to-understand presentation. “You can’t be so nontechnical that it just doesn’t make sense,” Schneider said. “You don’t want it to sound silly.”

The competition featured a variety of competitors, ranging from graduate students to PhD students both competing as teams and individuals.

“We just felt really grateful. There were a lot of other really good projects and presentations we got to see. So, we were just really honored that they chose us out of the other teams.”

The competition was hosted by SSPI, who had reached out to Electrical and Computer Engineering professor Peter Pachowicz and Jay Deorukhkar, a PhD student and teaching assistant in the ECE department.

Deorukhkar was assigned to the team’s senior design class. While looking for projects to nominate, he reached out to Qiliang Li, a professor in the ECE department, who is the faculty advisor for the senior design projects.

As for how he feels about this team’s win in the SSPI competition: “Since we did not compete last year, it was great to see them participate and win this year."

The team also won the ECE award for their senior design project. The competition took place on May 12, 2022.

Topics

Space

satellite

Radar

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Working on spacecraft and 3D-printed solar cars, junior accelerates his career at Mason

Mariam Aburdeineh — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 19:15:24 +0000

Working on spacecraft and 3D-printed solar cars, junior accelerates his career at Mason Mariam Aburdeineh Tue, 01/25/2022 - 14:15

In This Story

John Shortle

Syed Abbas Zaidi

Michael Riggi, president of Mason's solar car team, Hypernova Solar, poses with Orion, a solar car his team revamped. Photo provided by Hypernova Solar.

Since Michael Riggi was about six years old, his father and brother would take him to a “Cars and Coffee” show in Great Falls, Virginia, on weekends. Being around classic automobiles and luxury vehicles, Riggi said he developed an appreciation for cars, and other machines that go fast, including planes, boats, and rockets.

Riggi developed an appreciation for cars at a young age. Portrait by Michael Riggi.

Now, as a junior at ��AV, his career path has also been racing forward.

The systems engineering major working on an accelerated master’s degree is the president of Hypernova Solar, a student organization creating what they believe will be the world’s first 3D-printed solar car.

Ultimately, Riggi said he aspires to work in the aerospace industry. His work with Hypernova Solar combined with his degree helped him land an internship with the global aerospace, defense, and security company, Northrop Grumman, he said.

“[Systems engineering] is in high demand in almost all tech industries,” Riggi said.

“Mason is one of the only schools I found in this area that offered a system engineering major, and Mason’s program was ranked higher than [the University of Virginia]’s,” he said. “I chose Mason off their great program.”

When Riggi interned with Northrop Grumman in summer 2021, he said he worked on spacecraft that go up to the international space station—in particular, the Cygnus Mission. Riggi said his tasks involved taking measurements, estimating error, and creating a CAD model of the thruster.

Riggi interning at Northrop Grumman. Photo provided.

“We made a tool that allowed Mission Control to quickly throw in measurements of the motors to see how it affects the angle of the spacecraft on-the-fly, so they can steer the spacecraft,” Riggi said.

“The qualities about Michael that impressed me and my colleagues [at Northrop Grumman] were his imagination and ability to tackle a task that was initially beyond the scope of his previous experience,” said Roseann Alvarez, systems engineering manager at Northrop Grumman. “He shows plenty of growth potential and will be an asset to any future employer.”

“Based on Michael’s performance and his contributions to the [Commercial Resupply Services] program, I would highly recommend Northrop Grumman recruitment of Mason interns and graduates in the future,” she said.

Riggi said he’s excited to intern again with Northrop Grumman in summer 2022.

“There’s something about being on the cutting edge of technology and science that I really love,” he said. “[My internship] helped me realize what traits I value in a workplace and helped me realize specific parts of my education to focus on because I’ve seen what’s actually needed in the workforce.”

In addition to opportunities in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, Riggi said he has enjoyed learning from supportive Mason professors including John Shortle, Abbas Zaidi, and Colin Reagle.

“Michael embodies the ideal of a systems engineer, being able to assemble and lead a large team of students with diverse skills to design, build, and test a complex system,” Shortle said. “He’s a great ambassador for the discipline and will be a great asset in the workforce.”

When he’s not leading Hypernova Solar, Riggi said he enjoys going off-roading and taking photos.

When he's not leading Hypernova Solar, Mason student Michael Riggi enjoys going off-roading with his truck and taking photos. Photo by Michael Riggi.

Photography by Michael Riggi.

“It’s really a great way to blow off steam and relax,” Riggi said, suggesting diverse activities help keep his life balanced yet exciting. “If there’s one thing I hate, it’s being bored.”

That’s another reason he appreciates the opportunities at Mason.

“My favorite part of Mason is the community,” Riggi said. “The diverse student population has taught me so much and helped me make so many friends, the amazing faculty have been so helpful, and the community of Fairfax is very diverse and a great space to explore.”

Riggi (front left in green) with members of Mason's solar car team, Hypernova Solar. Photo by Shelby Burgess/Strategic Communications/��AV

Topics

Systems Engineering and Operations Research

Space

space exploration

experiential learning

accelerated masters

diversity

Don’t Look Up? MPA Student Krystal Azelton Does Just That—to Keep Space Safe

Andrew J Schappert — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 19:42:00 +0000

Don’t Look Up? MPA Student Krystal Azelton Does Just That—to Keep Space Safe Andrew J Schappert Mon, 01/24/2022 - 14:42

Master’s in Public Administration student Krystal Azelton works to keep outer space sustainable.

You don’t think of outer space as a place that requires measures to maintain its sustainability. But it does, and Master’s in Public Administration student Krystal Azelton is busy at work trying to see that space “remains usable, peaceful, safe, and secure for the long term.”

Azelton serves as director of space applications programs for the Secure World Foundation, a Colorado-based nonprofit with offices in Washington, D.C., that acts, according to its website, as “a research body, convener, and facilitator to promote key space security and other space-related topics and to examine their influence on governance and international development.”

About a dozen employees at Secure World Foundation advocate for a domain with no inhabitants other than the increasing number of “space tourists” and the astronauts orbiting the Earth in the International Space Station (ISS).

Which is a case in point: In December, the ISS had to swerve to avoid a collision with debris from a U.S. rocket. This followed the postponement of a spacewalk that sent ISS astronauts scurrying for cover as hundreds of thousands of uncatalogued pieces of debris headed their way. That incident was blamed on a Russian rocket that intentionally destroyed a Russian satellite; NASA condemned the action.

See? Space needs an agency like Secure World Foundation, the only U.S. nonprofit focusing on space sustainability, Azelton said.

Azelton says her career path became more down to earth, so to speak, when at age 17 “I came to understand I was probably not going to be an astronaut.”

After earning an undergraduate degree at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, she performed political development work in Sudan and Afghanistan, among other locales. While she enjoyed politics, space continued to appeal to her.

“I like science, but I didn’t want to be a scientist. I like learning about science and reading about it but I didn’t want to be in a lab,” she said.

Her interests brought her to NASA, where she was able to combine her government and project management skills while exploring space—specifically, the politics of it. That led to her current position at Secure World Foundation, where she represents global space issues to policy makers.

Just as she decided to earn a master’s degree in public administration, which is a degree that focuses on developing leadership and organizational skills, the pandemic locked out students from classrooms. The silver lining? She usually travels 30 to 60 percent of the time for her job, she said, and COVID-19 kept her at home to study.

When classrooms reopened, Azelton was all too happy to attend in person: “I want to know my fellow students and meet my teachers… I’ve been pleased with how [administrators] have been able to accommodate my schedule.”

Once she graduates, the master’s degree will help her reach her next level of professional success while also creating a drive to “learn more and explore more in depth” what she’s learning in the classroom.

Bottom line for her: “The Schar School is a good fit for me. And it’s an excellent value for the money, to be honest.”

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Master’s in Public Administration

Schar School News January 2022

Science

Space

Sustainability

Film and problem-solving inspire mechanical engineering student

Anonymous — Fri, 16 Apr 2021 12:35:14 +0000

Film and problem-solving inspire mechanical engineering student Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/16/2021 - 08:35

When Paul Cipparone was choosing a major, he saw two choices: film and engineering. While seemingly unrelated, Cipparone chose mechanical engineering, but he still finds ways to channel his creative energy into forging his unique career path and building new skills.

“I chose engineering because I like problem-solving and finding creative solutions and angles to innovate new things,” he says. “Engineering also offers transferrable skills that can be applied to other fields.” But in addition to film and engineering, Cipparone strives to add more of these skills to his toolkit.

Cipparone’s first internship was at the American Society for Mechanical Engineers (ASME), doing policy work. “I knew nothing about policy. I didn’t know how a bill was made or what ASME did in the policy space,” says Cipparone. But he didn’t let that keep him from pursuing the opportunity and completing the internship.

“I’m a big fan of trying completely new things and taking risks.” And if you put in the work, there is a big reward—learning a new skill, he says.

Similarly, Cipparone took a nontraditional route to get an internship at SpaceX this past summer. He saw an article on LinkedIn about getting internships at top companies, and he took a chance and contacted the author. “He said the best way is to reach out to as many people as you can in the sector you want to work in at a company, so that’s what I did.” And SpaceX was his top choice.

A Northern Virginia native, Cipparone always had an interest in space, but SpaceX sparked his interest in the engineering side of space exploration. “SpaceX and Elon Musk’s work with reusable rockets was so new, and it’s something people thought was impossible to do. It is actually what inspired me to pursue engineering,” he says.

So, he got to work reaching out to people at SpaceX and eventually landed a dream role working as a space engineer at the company in Texas. “It was a risk. There were a lot of people who didn’t answer, but it only took one,” says Cipparone.

As for film, Cipparone hasn’t given up. “I’ve had the chance to take some cool film classes while at Mason, and I hope to one day become a filmmaker too,” he says.

Cipparone doesn’t see a limit to what he can learn in his lifetime, and he urges fellow engineers to keep their options open. “I don’t think we need to be confined to one thing, art or engineering. I want to do everything I can."

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mechanical engineering

Space

student organizations

Mason researchers lead a team that discovers three galaxies set to collide

John Hollis — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 19:48:39 +0000

Mason researchers lead a team that discovers three galaxies set to collide John Hollis Mon, 09/30/2019 - 15:48

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Space

George Mason scientist Anamaria Berea leads team to design lunar cultural archive for the ‘Pioneers of Tomorrow’

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A New Space Race

Are we in a space race for cosmic resources? (Episode 6)

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Communication major looks to the stars with NASA internship

Get some tips for finding your own internship

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Berea serves on NASA's UAP panel

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Learn more about Data Science programs at Mason

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Electrical and Computer Engineering seniors excel in space and satellite student competition

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Working on spacecraft and 3D-printed solar cars, junior accelerates his career at Mason

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Don’t Look Up? MPA Student Krystal Azelton Does Just That—to Keep Space Safe

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Film and problem-solving inspire mechanical engineering student

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Mason researchers lead a team that discovers three galaxies set to collide

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