While interning with The Aerospace Corporation, I led the Payload and Broadcast Team for an intern-led concept study developing a low-cost position, navigation, and timing (PNT) solution for cislunar space. Our concept was called Inverted PNT (iPNT). After we presented the results of our study to the customer, a team at Aerospace continued our work on the project. During the following Corporate All-Hands meeting, the Executive Vice President highlighted our intern-led study as an exemplar of innovative thinking.

A team project I worked on while interning at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Using STK and MATLAB, I wrote scripts to model crosslink opportunities among satellite constellations as dynamic graphs, where each satellite is a node, and edges represent unobstructed lines of sight between satellite pairs. My teammates then used the data from this model to design efficient crosslink scheduling and routing algorithms.

For the first half of my senior capstone, I led a team of MIT students designing the initial CONOPS and low-thrust trajectory for a sample collection mission to a high-inclination Mars Trojan asteroid (5261 Eureka). The mission was called MARS-Ex, or Mars Asteroid Rendezvous and Sample Extraction.

As a former intern and volunteer Asteroid Ambassador with NASA's Lucy Mission, I educated the public on the mission and asteroid research by creating educational YouTube videos, writing articles for the mission's official website, and creating educational content for social media. The culmination of my outreach work was my presentation to during a Lucy launch watch party, the inaugural event for a NASA program called H2O (Here to Observe).

For the second half of my senior capstone, I collaborated with a team of MIT students to design a compliant mechanism to improve regolith collection of the MARS-Ex* spacecraft’s sample collection mechanism. Our concept, MIDAS (Maximum Inclination Design for Acquisition of Samples), is an augmented sample collection mechanism with a compliant accordion-like structure. The compliant nature of this attachment allows the sample collection mechanism to accommodate a greater range of inclinations and potential obstructions than its previous iteration, which was based on OSIRIS-REx's TAGSAM.

*MARS-Ex is a sample return mission concept for which I helped design the initial CONOPS and low-thrust trajectory. See "Trajectory Design for the MARS-Ex Sample Return Mission" for more.

I helped write and design the online companion course to the MIT Media Lab course Prototyping our Sci-Fi Space Future: Designing & deploying projects for zero gravity flights. The course spanned a wide range of topics relevant to engineering for microgravity and the greater implications of space travel, from rapid prototyping and the future of rocketry to microgravity performance art and astrosociology.