Eleanor Zimmermann was selected for her hard work, creative thinking and analysis skills, diligence and attention to detail to successfully getting two journal papers published about two NASA research projects this year, one in Advances in Space Research about lunar ice detection using a heated cone penetrometer and one in the ASCE Journal of Aerospace Engineering about using a melt probe as drill for Mars water extraction from buried glaciers; she also had two NASA proposals successfully written and submitted.
Christi LeCaptain was selected for her leadership on the NASA STTR-phase 2 project in collaboration with Lunar Outpost. This required leading a team of up to 10 students in the building of three separate large scale hardware test setups for testing with regolith in and outside the dusty thermal vacuum chamber in the PSTDL. She showed leadership in coordination, delegation as well as doing her own technical work on the programming of the software portion and the manufacturing and testing of the initial setups.
Both Eleanor and Christi work with Dr. Paul van Susante (MAE) in the Planetary Surface Technology Development Lab.
