Episode 24: Anna Cyganowski
08.01.07
: Anna Cyganowski, High School Internship Project participant
(0:00) Intro
(0:19) A special
roundtable session → about the American Student Moon Orbiter project will be held at the 21st Annual AIAA Conference on Small Satellites, Aug. 13 through 16, at Utah State University in Logan, Utah.
(2:35) Interview with Anna Cyganowski. Notre Dame Preparatory School graduate Anna Cyganowski discusses NASA research she conducted during high school.
Goddard Space Flight Center Education Programs →
Article about Anna Cyganowski
Additional Information on Anna Cyganowski's Research →
Additional Information on the 2007 Goddard Symposium →
Intel Science Search 2007
(14:51) End
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Transcript
Deana Nunley: This is NASA Student Opportunities -- a podcast connecting high school and college students with learning opportunities inside America's space agency.
Episode 24. August 1, 2007. I'm Deana Nunley.
University students and faculty have the opportunity to participate in a new NASA project for a student-built satellite to orbit the moon. A special roundtable session about the American Student Moon Orbiter, or ASMO, project will be held at the 21st Annual AIAA Conference on Small Satellites, Aug. 13 through 16, at Utah State University in Logan, Utah.
University students and faculty interested in or involved with small spacecraft, small satellites and "cubesats," and who plan to attend the conference, are invited to the ASMO Roundtable meeting with NASA's ASMO team leaders.
The American Student Moon Orbiter project offers the next generation of explorers a unique opportunity for integral involvement in the U.S. space exploration program. American university students and their faculty advisors will design, build, register, launch and own the ASMO small spacecraft and its payload. The student-built spacecraft could be launched to orbit the moon in 2011 in tandem with a spacecraft being developed by European students under a companion program.
The ASMO Roundtable meeting will initiate a national conversation and idea exchange with the higher education community about optional operational scenarios for the ASMO project.
Registration is not required to participate in the ASMO Roundtable. However, interested participants must be pre-registered attendees of the 21st Annual Conference on Small Satellites. The ASMO Roundtable will be held Aug. 15 at the conference.
Facilitating the ASMO Roundtable will be ASMO project manager Dr. Yvonne Clearwater from NASA's Ames Research Center and systems engineer Steve Oleson, from the NASA Glenn Research Center. Anticipated appearances include special guests Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple; professor Robert Twiggs, a world-renowned expert in small satellites from Stanford University; and Peter Klupar, chief of the Small Spacecraft Office at NASA's Ames Research Center.
For more information about the Small Sat Conference and the ASMO Roundtable, go to
www.nasa.gov/podcast. Click on the NASA Student Opportunities podcast, and follow the links in this week's show notes.
[Music]
Engineer Jay Brusse has been working for NASA for 16 years. He says he hasn't met another high school or college student who has shown the combination of innate technical abilities, curiosity and enthusiasm for science and engineering that he observed in the student we'll be talking with in today's interview segment. Anna Cyganowski graduated from Notre Dame Preparatory School in Towson, Md., in May. She participated in the High School Internship Project at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Brusse and physicist Dr. Henning Leidecker were her mentors. Anna is one of two high school students who were selected to present at this year's Goddard Memorial Symposium poster session -- which introduces potential future NASA leaders to the aerospace community. She's a semifinalist in the Intel Science Search 2007 competition, sometimes considered the "Junior Nobel Prize." She's this year's recipient of the Olin Teague Memorial Scholarship through the Space Club Scholars program. And Feb. 5, 2007, was proclaimed "Anna Cyganowski Day" in Baltimore County, Md.
Anna Cyganowski: It was definitely unexpected. I knew I was going to go into the county executive's office for a reception of some sort, but I didn't really know about the proclamation until I actually got there. But I guess it's definitely an honor. How many people can say they have a day named after them? It's kind of cool.
Deana: You've achieved so much so quickly. Which of your achievements are most special to you?
Anna: I think it's not so much achievements that are really special to me. It's more the experiences that I had from them -- finding out about the Intel Science Talent Search, for example. That wasn't so much something that I thought I could do right away. I found out about it on the Internet through a Google search. And I didn't know anyone who had participated in it. My school really didn't know much about it. When I went to Goddard and I had a research project, that's the thing I wanted to do. I thought being 16, 17, and being able to do your own research, that was the coolest thing in the world. But definitely, when I saw my name on the [Intel] semifinalist list, that was a complete shock. But at the same time I was really kind of proud that I got that far.
I think this past year and a half, it's just the fact that I got to do so many cool things -- working at NASA, completing a research project. That was probably the thing I think was most special, and not so much the awards that I got out of it.
Deana: Tell me about the involvement that you've had so far with NASA.
Anna: Well, I participated in the NASA Goddard High School Internship Program, which is also known as HIP. That was just an eight-week program where we would come in and work 40-hour [workweeks]. Some of us actually worked more than that because it was just so cool to be able to be there. We got paired up with a mentor to work on a project. I actually had the opportunity to work with two, which was awesome. We would complete our project, and then we would also attend seminars weekly, at least. We'd have all sorts of activities to network with the other high school interns, which I really enjoyed because I got to spend time with high school students who were interested in the same things I was. We've stayed in touch since, so that's been pretty cool.
Deana: What are some of the benefits of the NASA experience for you?
Anna: I've definitely learned to appreciate my academics a lot more. I've always known that you have to study hard. You have to work hard in order to prepare yourself and to be successful. But when I was working at Goddard, it was really cool because I was actually able to see some applications for the things that I learned in school. I also realized that there's so much more that I need to learn. It's kind of like when you educate yourself, you're noticing how much you've ignored about the world. I guess I'm just really excited to be able to go back to school and prepare myself so that I can be fully ready when, hopefully, I'll be working for NASA at some point, and I'll be very prepared and able to make an adequate contribution.
I've also gotten to know so many really amazing people. Everyone at NASA was so willing to show me around and explain the kinds of things they were working on. They were just so enthusiastic about their subjects. Enthusiasm kind of spread to me, so I'm excited about that. It's gotten me energized about science, and I'm really excited for the future, thanks to the internship that I had.
Deana: What are your plans for the future?
Anna: Wow. Well, I want to go to college. I want to go to graduate school. I think I would like to either be a college professor or an engineer, or both, at some point in my life. I'd like to continue researching and writing papers, and also doing what I can to make a difference.
Deana: What are your primary areas of interest?
Anna: I definitely like science a lot. It's always been something that I've enjoyed. I like astronomy. I like engineering. I think I'll probably focus on engineering once I go to college and see what that's like. Anything involving science and problem solving, I think that's really cool.
Deana: During your NASA internships, and during the various NASA experiences that you've had, were you able to do a lot of hands-on research?
Anna: Yeah. For my research project about metal whiskers and dendrites I would consult my mentors, and together we would be designing experiments. I'd ask for help a lot, but I was doing all of the actual experimenting the whole time. It was good to have that sort of experience.
Deana: Could you tell us about your research into metal whiskers and dendrites? Explain what they are and what you're trying to learn.
Anna: Sure. Well, metal whiskers are these tiny filaments. They're usually composed of metals, such as tin, zinc and cadmium. And they're very tiny, but they also conduct electricity. They're of concern because they can pose serious reliability threats to electronics. Metal whiskers can bridge components and connections, and these would create electrical shorts, which can ruin hardware. And this problem is only bound to get worse because last July the European Union passed legislation that bans the use of lead in electronics. While we don't know a lot about metal whiskers, we do know that the presence of lead mitigates their growth. So we try to add lead to decrease the likelihood of metal whiskers causing problems. But now, in Europe they're saying that we can't use lead. So instead of using lead in their electronics, manufacturers are turning to pure tin. This is only worsening the problem, because you're basically breeding metal whiskers as soon as you add pure tin to your electronics. But we don't really know exactly how or why they form, so this has been a mystery since the 1940s.
What I wanted to look at was seeing if we could find a different medium for studying metal whiskers. I looked into nickel-cadmium battery cells, and I had found that they were failing prematurely due to some sort of crystalline growths that were internally shorting the cells. And my mentors and I thought, "Wow, maybe these are cadmium whiskers growing as part of these nickel-cadmium batteries." And the really neat thing about that is that cadmium whiskers were the first type of whisker to be discovered, but ever since, we haven't really done as much research with them. So my mentors and I thought, "Wow, if we could find some cadmium whiskers in these batteries, that would be another way to look at whiskers." We study them on circuit boards and electronics, but we've never really seen them inside of batteries. I took apart some batteries and examined them for whiskers, and I ended up finding out that metal whiskers aren't a likely source for causing internal shorting of nickel-cadmium battery cells, but metal dendrites, which are a different type of formation, are. Metal dendrites are a lot like metal whiskers, in that they can also produce electrical shorts because they do conduct electricity. However, we know a lot about metal dendrites. We know how they form, why they form.
It was just good to be able to show the differences between the two, because oftentimes engineers kind of consider whiskers and dendrites to be the same thing, because they do cause the same problems. I mean, they cause electrical shorts. But the ways that they form are very different, so the ways to mitigate their growth and to prevent electrical shorting loss would be different.
Deana: Do you plan to continue researching metal whiskers and dendrites?
Anna: I think it's definitely a very interesting topic of research, because especially now, we haven't really found a way to completely forget about whiskers when it comes to electronics reliability. I think I definitely want to look into them further in the future. But I'm also interested in many, many other things. So I think I'll probably be branching off a little bit into other areas, especially once I'm in college. But it's definitely helped me learn the process of researching, and as an engineer I'll be able to know very much about metal whiskers. So I'm sure that'll be beneficial to me.
Deana: What are some of your other areas of interest?
Anna: Robotics is one of them. I guess anything having to do with electronics, I enjoy that a lot. So, material science.
Deana: What aspects of robotics interest you the most?
Anna: I really like robots that are autonomous. I think that robots that think for themselves, there's a lot of computer programming involved. I think it's getting to be more and more important nowadays, because NASA's going to want to send a new generation of robots to places like the moon and Mars that don't require constant guidance from humans on Earth. They want to be able to send robots that can kind of think on their own and work on their own. I really enjoy being able to just see a robot that can work on its own, without a remote control.
Deana: Anna Cyganowski begins classes this fall at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., and plans to major in electrical engineering and possibly minor in materials science. For more information about Anna's research and projects we discussed, go to
www.nasa.gov/podcast. Click on the NASA Student Opportunities podcast, and check out the show notes for this week's episode.
We want to hear from you. If you have any questions or comments about NASA learning opportunities, send an e-mail to:
educationpodcast@nasa.gov
Thanks for listening.
NASA Student Opportunities is a podcast production of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
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