I first heard about NASA's College Freshman Intern Program in an e-mail sent to all of the physics majors at the University of Maryland in College Park. Now, I used to dream of working at NASA when I was very young, but as I grew older I thought that NASA was too fun to possibly be a real job, and I pretty much forgot all about it. When I received the e-mail, my old dreams came back to me, and I immediately set off to fill out the application and get the necessary letters of recommendation. For those letters, I asked my high school mentor and my first college math teacher. Both were happy to write them for me, and in no time I had the application in the mail and I went back to my regular homework as I awaited the result.
A few weeks later, I received word that I had been accepted into the program. I was pretty excited and quickly filled out the additional forms that had been sent to me (just a little warning: government work and paperwork are inseparable, so if you're thinking of a job at NASA or any other government agency, be prepared to write your name, sign your signature, and check little boxes over and over and over again). I was so into the idea of working at NASA that I read just about everything I could find about the LISA mission, which I heard we would be involved with during the program. Unfortunately, those plans had been changed by the time I started work, but I still learned a lot, so it was certainly not time wasted.
On the first day of the program, I woke up bright and early (5:45 AM), took a quick shower, put on a blue polo shirt and khaki pants, and ran off to the College Park Metro station to catch the train to Greenbelt. From there I took the T17 bus to Goddard Space Flight Center and checked in just after 8:00. I filled out some more paperwork, received my temporary badge, took a bagel and a muffin from the breakfast counter, and had a seat in an empty auditorium in the visitor center as I waited for the other summer interns to arrive. Before too long the room started filling up, and some familiar faces welcomed me. Two fellow physics majors from College Park, one of whom I had known since elementary school, were also participating in the program.
While we were sitting and talking to each other, Nate, the leader of the program, pulled all of the CFIP members together and welcomed us to Goddard. There were a total of six boys and six girls in the group. Nate went over the schedule for the day, then we left for orientation with the rest of the summer interns. At orientation, we were introduced to all of the various summer intern programs offered at Goddard. These included the NASA Academy, the Student Intern Program, and a new robotics program. Most of these other programs last for 8-10 weeks. After watching a presentation on the wide variety of missions that Goddard supports, we left early for lunch and then drove off to the building where we would be spending most of our time over the next two weeks.
The program was being housed in a large conference room in Building 26. Shortly after we had settled in, our speakers arrived. The first was the deputy project manager for SDO, the Solar Dynamics Observatory. He gave us a very detailed overview of the process of designing a space mission, using SDO as an example. His presentation showed the various forms that the spacecraft went through as its design evolved, highlighting the compromises made by the various subsystems such as thermal, communications, and power. The second talked to us about the importance of scheduling during mission design and pointed out some of the non-science roles that had to be filled when planning a space mission. Finally, at 4:30 PM, my first day at Goddard came to an end, and I caught a university shuttle bus back to my apartment.
I woke up Tuesday morning around 6:30 AM, showered, and caught the 7:30 university shuttle to Goddard with plenty of time to spare. A number of us ate breakfast together in building 21, then we left together for our conference room, where a day full of presentations awaited us. The first was by the systems engineer for the Hubble Space Telescope. Before that, I had never known there was such a thing as systems engineering. Basically, it involves knowing a little bit about all the various subsystems in a project (in this case, a satellite) and being able to make compromises with each of them to meet the overall mission budgets. This brings up another point - I learned that budgets in large projects involve much more than money. There is a budget for every resource, the most important being mass, power consumption, and time. The systems engineer must keep track of all of these budgets and make sure that the decisions made by one engineering team will not have an adverse effect on the work of other teams. Though that type of work did not especially appeal to me personally, I still found it interesting to learn about, and it seems like a great occupation for someone who loves engineering but maybe isn't as skilled in the technical side of things.
Our next presentation was by the hardware engineer for Hubble. This was probably my favorite presentation of the program. The speaker was able to rekindle my childhood interest in space exploration and asserted that working at Goddard was "the coolest job in the world, other than being an astronaut". In addition to relating to us the many duties of a hardware engineer, she also gave us an idea of the various education and career paths that could lead to a job at NASA. She herself was a contractor working for Lockheed Martin, which was able to pay for all of her higher education. A bit unintentionally, she also gave us a glimpse at how busy and dynamic a job at Goddard can be, for her emergency pager kept going off during her presentation.
Our last presentation before lunch was by a EEE parts engineer, who is basically responsible for everything electronic in the satellite. Throughout his presentation he emphasized the need to pay attention to radiation in space. In the past, astronauts had tried taking their laptop computers into space, only to find them broken by the time the shuttle had finished its first orbit. He also mentioned attempts to qualify laptop docking stations for space flight, with the result most resembling the behavior of a hand grenade. He stressed the importance of having a radiation engineer, often a physicist, for all space projects. Being a physics major at the University of Maryland, I took note of this potential career.
After lunch, we spent two hours learning about the flight dynamics of satellites. Flight dynamics involves all the various orbits utilized by a satellite throughout its lifetime, as well as methods for controlling the "attitude" of a satellite (basically, what direction it points in). The presenters used a computer program called STK to demonstrate in 3D how a satellite might travel from the Earth to the Moon. Since I had done some work in flight dynamics in previous summers, this presentation was quite appealing to me.
Accompanying this talk was a small exercise in calculating fuel requirements for a space maneuver. To help us through the calculations, we were each given a copy of the book Space Mission Analysis and Design (SMAD III) to use as a reference for these two weeks. The book is nearly 1000 pages in length and is full of equations, tables, and charts to help in the mission design process. I was quite happy to receive the book and began reading it immediately. After the program has finished, I may seriously consider purchasing my own copy.
Finally, after all the formal presentations were over, we went on a tour of the Scientific Visualization Lab. This is where the data collected from satellites is made into pictures that can be studied by scientists or shown to the public on TV in the form of weather maps, animated globes, and 3D models. The lab was one of the most high-tech rooms I have ever been in, with nearly all of the computers running the free Linux operating system, placing less of a financial burden on us taxpayers. The presenter was quite engaging, and we were all stunned by the images that we saw. The day ended with an unplanned visit to NASA's own TV studio, where interviews with scientists and engineers are filmed to be aired on all the major news stations in the country.
