Caitlin Milera

BOZEMAN — When Haley Ketteler reflects on how she came to study engineering at Montana State University, one moment stands out. She was 10, in her hometown of Pierre, South Dakota, at a 4-H workshop where kids could tinker with robots made of Legos.

“I was hooked, which was funny because I’d never done anything like that before,” said Ketteler, now a senior majoring in mechanical engineering with a minor in mechatronics. “It was just that little spark. I knew I wanted to keep doing this.”

She found a home for her newfound robotics passion in an international nonprofit organization called For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, or FIRST, which is designed to inspire interest in science, technology engineering and math among K-12 students. When MSU hosts nearly 120 teams from across Montana and beyond for a FIRST robotics competition this Friday and Saturday, Ketteler will be there as a volunteer, supporting the activity that led her to where she is today.

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What kid doesn’t love falling asleep while listening to a captivating story? Not only is it fun, but listening to bedtime stories also help develop kids’ literacy, vocabulary, and imagination. But do parents love doing it as much as their children would like to? Well, sadly, not everyone. So, if you’re one of those who get bored reading to your kids every night, there are people who can help you out. Believe it or not, those people are real astronauts. Thanks to the Global Space Education Foundation’s special project called Story Time from Space, there are astronauts who read popular children’s books from space.

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NASA astronaut Christina Koch has just set a new record for the longest spaceflight by a woman! On December 28, Koch officially exceeded fellow NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson’s 2017 record of 289 days and 5 hours. Koch’s original flight was supposed to be only 6 months long, but NASA extended her stay on the International Space Station (ISS) – in part to collect more data about how human bodies function after long periods in space. “It is a wonderful thing for science,” Koch said in an interview this week from the ISS. “We see another aspect of how the human body is affected by microgravity for the long term. That is really important for our future spaceflight plans, going forward to the moon and Mars…. Having the opportunity to be up here for so long is truly an honor.”

Read more about Astronaut Christina Koch and her mission here.

📸: @NASA

With a goal of better preparing a growing commercial space workforce, the LSU National Center for Biomedical Research and Training/Academy of Counter Terrorist Education, or NCBRT/ACE, is affiliating with the Louisiana Space Grant Consortium, or LaSpace.

The partnership aims to leverage the strengths of both LSU organizations as they collaborate and explore new training frontiers for Louisiana students and the workforce for the university’s role in aerospace research, education, technology and economic development in the aerospace field.

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With plans to establish a permanent base on the moon’s surface in the next decade or so, NASA is one step closer to sending humans to Mars. But a mission to the red planet will likely take years to complete, begging the question: What will astronauts eat during their interplanetary voyage?

The answer: Vegetables, according to Joseph Taylor, a senior at NC State’s College of Natural Resources and College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Taylor, who is double majoring in environmental science and plant biology, recently spent the summer interning at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. As one of nine students selected to assist the agency’s food production team, Taylor’s main task was to identify candidate crops for missions to the moon and Mars.

Read more about Joseph Taylor’s biology work for NASA.

Read more about Cardman’s accomplishments and journey at NASA.

Freshman chemical engineering major Jacob Hewes describes himself as a self-starter.

“I’m always challenging myself to work harder and be the best at what I do,” he says. “When all my friends were looking for jobs in retail or customer service, I wanted to do something that I knew would be valuable to my development as a chemical engineer.”

During the summer entering his senior year of high school, Hewes was accepted into the UD-K12 Engineering Internship Program, which paired students with 10-week research projects.

Read more about Jacob Hewes’ journey here.

Physicist Keith Goetz developing instruments for new lunar investigations

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (07/17/2019) — The University of Minnesota will contribute instruments to a series of 12 new NASA investigations on the moon in preparation for landing astronauts there in 2024. The payloads will be delivered aboard three landers as part of NASA’s Artemis lunar program. Seven will be devoted to planetary science and heliophysics, five to demonstrating new technologies. Launches are tentatively set to begin in 2021.

The U of M project, led by physicist Keith Goetz, will be part of the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment (LuSEE), which will carry out extensive measurements of electromagnetic phenomena on the lunar surface. The principal investigator for LuSEE is U of M College of Science and Engineering alumnus Stuart Bale (M.S. Physics ’92, Ph.D. ’94), now a professor at the University of California Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory.

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