HERE’S ONE WAY TO GET TO MARS, ACCORDING TO THIS UVA STUDENT AND NASA INTERN

What did you do this summer?” For most students, planning a mission to Mars is not on the list of possible answers to that classic question. However, that is exactly what University of Virginia student Lucia Tian did. Tian, who took a year off from classes to complete two semester-long internships and a summer internship with NASA, spent part of her summer finalizing designs for an artificial gravity spacecraft that could ferry humans between Earth and Mars. She presented her team’s designs to a panel of judges from NASA and the aerospace industry in Cocoa Beach, Florida last week as part of the space agency’s 2018 student design competition, called the Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts Academic Linkage, or RASC-AL. mars_inline_01_align_left.jpg UVA student Lucia Tian spent the fall and spring semesters at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, and is spending this summer at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida UVA student Lucia Tian spent the fall and spring semesters at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, and is spending this summer at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida (Photo courtesy Lucia Tian) The Mars transporter is not the only futuristic project Tian has completed with NASA this year. The fourth-year computer science and astrophysics student has helped improve an app connecting pilots with flight simulators for aircraft safety experiments, built geofencing software to control drones, and worked on an electrodynamic dust shield that can protect spacecraft during landings on the moon, Mars or even asteroids. For Tian, who dreams of becoming an astronaut, every project is born of a nearly lifelong fascination with the universe. “I have always wanted to study space,” said Tian, who worked at both NASA’s Langley Research Center and the Kennedy Space Center this year. “I didn’t discover the word ‘astrophysics’ until middle school, but when I did, it felt like I found a part of myself.” The RASC-AL design competition asks teams of undergraduate and graduate students to tackle big challenges critical to human space exploration. This year, teams chose one of four design tasks: a reusable hybrid propulsion system to transfer people and cargo between the moon’s orbit and Mars; an artificial gravity deep space transport vehicle to complete the same transfer while simulating gravity; a method for refueling these spacecraft in orbit; or a method for recovering samples from the moon’s poles to detect water. Tian’s team chose to design an artificial gravity deep space transporter that could make the journey to Mars in three years.