About 300 students at all levels, from high school through graduate school, have been working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California over the summer. And the 25 different programs that the lab offers for students are not just summer work -- about half of them are academic-year positions.
And they span the gamut, from engineering to data analysis to planetary science.
These are amazing opportunities for anyone interested in working in space science of any kind. Here's just a few examples of the work students have been doing at what is certainly the world's premier center for designing and operating planetary exploration missions. (No offense to Ames, which is NASA's other principal planetary research center, but which doesn't actually build and operate as many robotic missions).
-- Yuri Carillo, 18, is a sophomore in electrical engineering Cal Poly who has been working there this summer. She actually put in her first stint working at JPL while she was still in high school. She's worked on a gadget to help a Mars robot change drill bits, and on batteries for a future rover. "Before I came I thought it was going to be very serious and uptight, and then I realized it's more like a college campus," she
says.
-- Brandon Jones, at 28, is a bit farther along -- he's a PhD student in aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado who has been working on satellite navigation systems, tracking the positions of the GPS satellites that are used to track everything else. He spent a previous summer working at Johnson Space Center in Houston, so he's really racking up his mileage at NASA.
-- It's not just hard-core technology types who can find a niche at JPL. Take Erin Edkins: She's a 28-year old student who spent time as a personal fitness trainer and a restaurant manager before deciding to go back to school in planetary science at UC Santa Barbara. Now a senior there, she's putting in her second summer at JPL. She works on planetary atmospheres and is analyzing the swirling storm systems on Jupiter.
As part of that job, she enjoys being often the first person to see new planetary images that arrive from a distant planet. Her advice to other students is to just go ahead and apply for a JPL internship, as she did.
"Go for it," she says. "Definitely the worst thing that could happen is you could contact someone to work with at JPL and they say no. Then you're in the same position you started in."
You can read up on JPL's student opportunities on their web site. There's something for just about anybody who's interested in doing space-related work. Go ahead, give it a try!
photos: top, Yuri Carillo. bottom, Erin Edkins. photos courtesy of NASA/JPL.
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