Description

UNL's Air and Space Research (ASR) Team is apart of the UNL Aerospace Club and is a professional development club with the goal of inventing prototypes for space challenges. In recent years, the club has been supervised by Dr. Carl Nelson and competed in NASA's yearly Micro-g NExT Program. This program challenges undergraduate students to design, build, and present a project based on current obstacles in space exploration while teaching students the importance of teamwork, communication, and problem-solving in the engineering design process.

Roles

From 2016 to 2018, I served as the club's research and testing coordinator. I developed quantitative and qualitative tests for prototype designs based upon the Micro-g NExT challenge requirements. The two projects I help out with were an anchoring device for microgravity environments and a zip tie cutter for shuttle maintenance. I modeled stress tensors for testing and tested to see if our models were accurate. I also helped with STEM outreach in Nebraska schools and helped inspire kids to love science. Additionally, I traveled with our team to Houston, TX for the NASA competitions to present and test our prototypes against dozens of other schools at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab.  

Takeaways

My time spent as an ASR member honed my engineering skills by giving me experience with 3D modeling software and report writing. I grew academically, socially, and professionally from club activities including design projects, team bonding, outreach, and volunteering. In particular, the outreach events to elementary and middle schools gave me a strong passion to teach and learn about space science.