“I really want to go into space, and here I suddenly have this opportunity to throw a question at an astronaut and get it answered.” ![]() “I had always wanted to ask an astronaut something, but I didn’t know how to go about doing it,” said Luppen, who is entering his senior year as an astronomy physics major at the University of Iowa. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lyle Tavernier | + Expand image When JPL intern Zachary Luppen heard about the ISS downlink – and that he would have a chance to ask an astronaut a question – he already had pages of questions lined up.Ĭhristopher Jia-Kuan Yen poses with his mentor, Abigail Fraeman, during a mentor appreciation event held at JPL. “We’ve showcased interns on our social media, we held a Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’ Q&A with Johnson Space Center Flight Director Allison Bollinger, and we’re hoping that including more events like the administrator town hall and ISS downlink will continue to attract a diverse group to NASA,” Brown said. Brown said it followed a concerted effort of making the public aware that an internship at JPL, Langley or Johnson is more than just for STEM students – there are opportunities in communications, human resources, education and other fields that are all relevant to how the agency runs. He talked about how it mattered to him and how it should matter to all of us.”Īt NASA Headquarters, inclusion and diversity within NASA starts with the intern program, which saw its largest and most diverse applicant pool of interns this summer. “It was nice that he spent as much time on that question as he did. “I’m half Mexican, a female in STEM, a first-generation college student, and low income, so I check off a lot of those representative boxes,” Yanez said. Yanez was also appreciative of the administrator’s openness to discuss inclusion and diversity in the field, and how NASA plans to maintain its current programs. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Kim Orr | + Expand image Yanez hosted a takeover of the Twitter account during the NASA Internships Town Hall with Administrator Jim Bridenstine. I think it’s important to keep that communication between science and politics.” “This is a person who has power over our future. “The administrators’ town hall was really important because, for the first time, I had an opportunity as an undergrad to ask about our future and the future of space funding,” said Yanez, who also hopes to one day run for office. Yanez was selected to live-tweet Bridenstine’s responses from the JPL Education Office’s handle so students, JPLers and members of the public could see some of the responses. This was the first year a NASA administrator conducted a NASA-wide town hall, where interns from all of the centers could submit questions in short videos. “With National Intern Day on July 26, we were able to roll the events into one big intern week,” Linsinbigler said. ![]() She organized an agency-wide live feed of NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine’s intern town hall at Goddard Space Flight Center on July 26, and an ISS downlink Q&A – where interns got to pre-record questions for astronauts to answer live from the space station – on July 30. This year, NASA Headquarters’ internship and communications coordinator Christine Linsinbigler saw opportunities to bring the centers together. “You get the chance to be a little sprocket in this massive machine of making things happen at JPL, but then you can kind of lose sight of the fact that JPL is one component of NASA, and there are hundreds of interns at other centers doing comparable things,” Yanez said. Intern and University of Colorado Boulder astrophysics student Maya Yanez has spent the past two summers at JPL – one working on describing potential radical chemistry on Kuiper Belt objects, and one helping to identify potential landing sites on Jupiter’s moon Europa. ![]() Read stories from interns pushing the boundaries of space exploration and science at the leading center for robotic exploration of the solar system.īut between the challenging workloads, exciting education opportunities and inspiring culture at JPL, interns who come to the laboratory often see only one piece of the NASA puzzle.
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