Summer Intern at GSFC

My son spent six weeks this summer as an intern in GSFC's High School Internship Program (HIP). He was one of 19 students selected (press release) to carry out research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics with guidance from a NASA mentor. He worked in a small team to design and implement software to control a robot. The eventual goal is to develop self-healing robots to explore the Moon or planets as part of the Autonomous NanoTechnology Swarm (ANTS) program. It was a great opportunity to apply some of what he had learned in school to a real project in a work environment. The photo shows some of the hardware used in the program. The specific task was to locate a magnet (the dark, oblong object on the white, circular platform) and rotate the struts in the photo so that the magnetometer (the object dangling from the joint of the struts) was directly above the magnet.