Blog #1: Summer Vacation and the Upcoming Year

Hello! Welcome to my first blog post.

This summer, I took a trip to Vermont and then did an east coast college tour with my family. MIT is one of my top choices so it was really fun to be able to see it in person! We also saw Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, UPenn, and Princeton, though I'm not planning on applying to all of them. We generally agreed that MIT's campus was the most modern, and Princeton's was the prettiest.

The other main thing I did this summer was an internship at NASA! I worked at Langley Research Center for 8 weeks on a project called LOFTID, which stands for Low Earth

Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator. Essentially, LOFTID is working on developing a new type of heat shield. Current heat shields are sort of form-fitted to the spacecraft, meaning they can only be about as large as the craft itself. The LOFTID heat shield (called a HIAD, for Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator) would be inflatable, which would allow it to be much larger than the spacecraft it's protecting. This means that we could send larger and heavier payloads into space. As a result, this technology is what will likely be used for future manned missions to Mars!

My work was focused on designing a system called the Ground Support Equipment (GSE) Fill Rig, which will transfer Nitrogen gas from tanks at NASA into the tanks of the heat shield's inflation system. I spent the first few weeks learning about pneumatics, researching the best components (regulators, gauges, relief valves, etc.) to use in our system, and contacting manufacturers and distributors to clarify any questions I had when necessary. Once the parts were selected, I acquired CAD files for some of the components and created some from scratch, and then modeled the fill rig in Creo. I then began the research and design process for the fill rig’s custom enclosure. Finally, I compiled my findings and created a document outlining the progress I made during the summer, which will be used by those who are continuing the project. I had so much fun this summer and I learned so much about engineering! I can't wait to apply the skills I developed at NASA to this class and any future projects I'm a part of.

Now that the summer is over, it's time to focus on school again. In this class, I most look forward to our capstone project. I am so excited to be able to apply all the things I've learned the last three years to a problem of my choice. I hope that I'm able to create a meaningful and impactful solution. For the school year as a whole, I am really looking forward to knowing where I'll be going to school next year! That being said, I am most definitely NOT looking forward to the process I need to go through in order to gain that knowledge. The college application process is very scary to me. I have no idea how I'm going to get all the essays done! :(