CaSGC Bay Area Affiliate Meeting

On March 30, 2014

On Friday, March 28, 2014 the California Space Grant Consortium (CaSGC) held its affiliate meeting at NASA Ames Research Center. The meeting was attended by NASA Ames Office of Education staff, affiliates and partners from the Bay Area, Central Valley, and Southern California along with their students, and CaSGC Headquarters staff.

The NASA Ames Office of Education (Brenda Collins and Tom Clausen) provided an update on NASA Education and NASA Ames opportunities, CaSGC Headquarters Staff (John Kosmatka and Tehseen Lazzouni) provided an overview of the State of the Consortium and a summary of Consortium-wide Accomplishments, and there were several presentations by affiliates and students including:

Programs to Bring Students from Underrepresented Backgrounds to the STEM Pipeline, by Lily Gossage of Cal Poly Pomona
Higher Education Internships: January Operational Internship at NASA Kennedy Space Center, by Jonathan Yee and Ben Oakes of Stanford University
Building the STEM Pipeline with Rockets and Cubesats at Sonoma State University, by Lynn Cominsky of Sonoma State University
Environmental Sciences and Remote Sensing, by Pia van Benthem with Katherine Acord, Johana Ramirez-Zapien, and Spencer Mathews
Unmanned Aerial Systems Project, by Greg Kriehn of Fresno State

A student poster session was also held:

Katherine Acord, UC Davis: “Sample Integrity and Sealing Methods for Proposed Mars Sample Return”
Eric Gutierrez, Stanford: “Application of Parameter Estimation to Stability and Control of the PRANDTL-D Flying Wing Aircraft”
Johana Ramirez-Zapien, UC Davis: “Uptake of Nitrogen in Spinach Plants”
Tim Shea, CSU Sacramento: “Quantifying the Effects of Remote Control on Navigation Performance”
Tim Wheeler, UC San Diego / Stanford: “Development of a Command Module for High Altitude Near Space Ballooning”
Gregory Dzhezyan, Gonzalo Leyva, Christopher Livingston, Jonathan Meza, Joshua Wenzel, CSU Fresno: “Unmanned Aerial Systems Research at Fresno State”

Several of the students attending the meeting went on a tour of NASA Ames Research Center. This included the Vertical Motion Simulator (VMS) and meeting Lewis Braxton III, Deputy Center Director of NASA Ames Research Center, and Michael Dudley, Director of the NASA Aeronautics Research Institute.

The meeting ended with an exciting Arduino Workshop run by Tim Wheeler of UC San Diego / Stanford University.

We are grateful to the NASA Ames Office of Education and to all the affiliates, partners, and students who took the time to be a part of this meeting. We look forward to new collaborations and programs to better serve students in the State of California and the Nation.

Photos from the Meeting: