Grace Calkins: summer 2022 internship Q & A

What did you do last summer? Several AE graduate students had internships.  This is the first in a series of Q&As about their experiences.

Grace Calkins is a Ph.D. candidate. Her adviser is Zach Putnam. This past summer, she had an in-person internship at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California working with her mentor Ian Clark in the Entry, Descent, and Landing, and Advanced Technologies group as a Mars Sample Return EDL intern.

What did you do?

GC: I worked on the Mars Sample Return mission, which will bring back 30 samples of Martian regolith, rock, and atmosphere for scientists on Earth to study. The mission has multiple spacecraft working towards this goal, from the Perseverance rover on Mars right now collecting the samples to the Sample Return Lander with the Mars Ascent Vehicle rocket that I worked on. The MAV is a two-stage solid rocket that brings the samples from the Martian surface into orbit where it ejects them to be retrieved by an orbiter. My internship project was to characterize the energy dissipation from samples shaking within the sample tubes on the MAV second stage. The MAV second stage is unguided and spin stabilized, so even a small amount of energy dissipation could cause the rocket to enter into a its minimum energy state, a flat spin (where the rocket is spinning like a propeller more than a football). This would be detrimental to the mission as we would then have no idea which direction the samples were released in. I worked with dynamics models and simulation analysis to set up the problem, and then designed, built, and executed a test campaign to measure the sample energy dissipation. In the end, we found that the energy dissipation from this phenomenon was likely not an issue for the MAV.

 Who did you work with there?

GC: I worked with my mentor Ian Clark in the Entry, Descent, and Landing, and Advanced Technologies group as a Mars Sample Return EDL intern.

What did a typical day look like?

GC: Typically, I would get into the office and do some tag ups and meeting in the morning. We’d have short, informal meetings just to talk about the tasks we had going on and what deliverables we needed from each other between me, the other interns on the project, and the other JPL employees on the project.

Then I would either perform analysis and research for designing the test (in the beginning of the internship) or go build up the test set up by wiring sensors, machining components, or designing the data acquisition software. There were always cool intern talks and events in the middle of the day, so I would try to attend lots of those with my friends as well

What was the most challenging aspect of the summer internship?

GC: The most challenging aspect of this internship for me was the timeline. I had to analyze, design, build, and execute a test in 10 weeks, which is not very much time especially with procurement. It was only possible because I worked with an awesome team of test engineers, other interns, simulation experts, and technicians who helped me realize this aggressive timeline.

GC: What was the most rewarding aspect?

It was super rewarding to see the test that I designed run after weeks of troubleshooting and planning!

GC: What did you learn about science?

I learned a lot more about mechanism design than I had before, because I did not have very much exposure to mechanical tests in other internships. This internship helped me go back to first principles and understand the physics of a problem before diving into solutions. I also learned a lot about geology of rocks and what we expect Martian rocks to be like.

GC: What did you learn about yourself?

I learned a lot about my management style from leading a project like this, and how important it was for me to have a strong team to talk to about ideas. I also learned to advocate for myself by asking for help or resources when I got stuck, which was quite frequently.