Think Out Loud

Portland high schooler shares NASA experience

By Rolando Hernandez (OPB)
Aug. 30, 2022 4:54 p.m. Updated: Sept. 6, 2022 8:46 p.m.

Broadcast: Tuesday, Aug. 30

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Out of 1,100 applicants, a student from St. Mary’s Academy snagged an internship with NASA. Lily Segna is just one of 92 students who had the chance to work alongside engineers during her Earth and Space Science summer internship. Segna actually comes from a line of family members working in the space industry, including her mother and grandfather. She joins us to share her experience and what it means to follow in some of her family’s footsteps.

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Note: The following transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller:  Out of 1,100 applicants, a student from St. Mary’s Academy in Portland snagged a summer internship sponsored by NASA.  Lily Segna is about to start her senior year as reported in the Portland Tribune. She was one of just 92 students who was given the chance to work alongside engineers during a month-long internship. Lily Segna, welcome to Think Out Loud.

Lily Segna:  Hi, thank you for having me. This is really exciting.

Miller:  It’s a pleasure to have you on. You actually come from a family of people with ties to space and space exploration. Can you give us a sense for what your grandfather did?

Segna:  Yes of course. My grandfather worked at NASA and one of his crowning moments was as the mission staff engineer for Apollo 16. And Apollo 16 was the mission of 1972. And one of the highlights of that mission was they brought back the biggest rock found on any of the Apollo missions, which I think is pretty cool.

Miller:  So Tom Hanks didn’t make a movie about them. But there are still some superlative aspects of that mission?

Segna:  Yes definitely. It was the first crewed landing in the lunar highlands which is a really interesting part of the moon. And it’s suspected to have some volcanic, or to have once had volcanic activity.

Segna:  Did you hear stories about your grandfather’s work at NASA that made an impression on you?

Segna:  Well so my grandfather passed away when I was about seven and at that time I wasn’t really interested in space yet. But I did see all of his NASA memorabilia around his house. So there was this little plate that had like Apollo missions and an astronaut picture on it on the coffee table. And then upstairs there were frames of all the Apollo patches and a bunch of other NASA things like that. My favorite was there was this little frame that had eight stickers. They’re bright green and they all had Snoopy and one was like in a space suit or a rocket ship and they all said ‘zero in on safety’. And I thought those were the coolest things.

Miller:  So at the age of seven, you weren’t yet interested in space or exploration yourself?

Segna:  I was interested in exploration.  I loved being outside and running around and like seeing new things. But I got interested in space in sixth grade when my family and I went to visit Griffith Observatory in California. And I thought it was so cool because outside, there were the sun dials. And there were, I don’t know what you call a sundial when it’s for the month, and then inside there was a pendulum. I remember looking at it and it simulated gravity on different planets. And I was kind of just like, ‘wait, you can do that’. And it was, it was like there was this whole universe and it had just opened the door to me.

Miller:  What happened after that? So you got super excited about space science and space exploration. What did you do after that?

Segna:  Well I was like ‘wait okay so I can like space that could be, that could be a thing, right?’ I could do something with space but none of my schools ever had astronomy classes or anything to do with space. So I was like ‘well what can I do?’ So I found space camp in Huntsville Alabama and I went the summer before seventh grade. And it was a lot of fun. I had a good team. It was a team of 12 kids and there would be some simulated astronaut missions. Like I got to suit up in a spacesuit and do a little EVA which is an extra vehicular activity. So ours was trying to repair part of our spaceship.

Miller:  That was space camp. And then you heard about, eventually, this internship that you were able to take part in called the SEES (Stem Enhancement in Earth Science) internship. What’s the idea behind it?

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Segna:  SEES is the Stem Enhancement and Earth Sciences program and it’s sponsored by NASA through the Texas Space Grant Consortium. So every year a group of students from all across the country get to go to the University of Texas at Austin and participate in this internship. And I was on a team with six interns total. And we were doing a project with a mentor who actually worked at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Miller:  Doing what?

Segna:  Yes, exactly. So our team was called Mars Rover Resource Utilization and we were designing a future Mars rover mission. So our mission [looked at] some of the past rovers like Perseverance, the one that launched in 2020. Perseverance looked for signs of past life and a lot of the rovers actually did that. So we wanted ours to do something different. We’re all interested in space exploration. We think astronauts are really cool. But in order to get those astronauts to Mars, there have to be a couple of things that happened first.

So Mars is really really, really, really far away from Earth and it’s hard to send supplies there. So what if astronauts could use resources that they found on Mars to create the things they need? So our big thing was looking for minerals on Mars using satellite data and trying to find ways that we could take that and make it into something that astronauts could use. So our rover would look at those minerals, analyze them and then NASA would be able to see where astronauts can go and have the most resources to build what they need.

Miller:  This doesn’t seem like make work, you know what I mean? I mean this seems more like the kind of mission that real NASA scientists would do?

Segna:  Yeah, it was really, really cool. It wasn’t just an internship where it’s like okay you’re gonna do this paperwork. It was an actual research project. And we got to use one of the softwares called J MARS. And it’s actually what NASA uses to look at Mars.  It uses remote sensing data from a couple of satellites orbiting Mars and I was like, I didn’t know I could do this. I didn’t know there were resources like this that were available to me as a student. Like not even someone who works at NASA.

Miller:  What were some of the highlights from your time and my understanding is that out of the month, the first two weeks were remote work and the second were in person. What were some of the highlights?

Segna:  Well, some of the highlights, definitely the biggest highlight for me was getting to work with my team. So it’s five other kids from across the country, mostly on the East coast who are all very, very passionate about space. And I have a lot of friends who like space but maybe aren’t as passionate. I didn’t know anyone who was there so I was there and surrounded by a bunch of kids who love space. This is my thing. This is what I want to do and it was great to be able to talk to them and hear their thoughts about all the different NASA missions? Like the mission going back to the moon and what they thought the future space exploration is going to be like.

Miller:  So I’m imagining at night after spending a day doing all this stuff you could hang out with these new friends and sort of just geek out on space?

Segna:  Yeah we did. My team actually was like you know what we should do, we should schedule a movie night for all of the interns. So we set up in a conference room. We’re staying in the dorms at UT Austin and we found a conference room and there’s a projector. So we decided we were gonna watch ‘The Martian’ which is one of my all time favorite movies. It’s about the astronaut who gets stranded on Mars there. Yeah Matt Damon. And we were all watching it and everyone was so excited because we all love space and what better to do than watch ‘The Martian’?

Miller:  Do you have a sense for what particular aspect of a space or space exploration or science or research you’d like to focus on yourself as you get older?

Segna:  Well my dream is to become an astronaut. So eventually getting to Mars would be my top thing. But before that I’m interested in a couple of things like space robotics. So uh Mars rovers which is one of the reasons I love this project so much. And the other thing I’m interested in is astrobiology. So like where did life come from? Is there life on other planets? How did we evolve on earth like this?

Miller:  And even though it seems like the overall trend in terms of space exploration is to have robots and unmanned vehicles do this, your hope is to actually get up there?

Segna:  Yes, of course. Well we do need all the unmanned vehicles to do some of the work for us. Like our mission that we designed, we have to send that first so they can find the minerals and then we’d send a mission to drill those minerals so that by the time the astronauts get there it’s already set up and they can just focus on doing the science because humans can actually do the signs a lot faster than the rovers can because the rovers they kind of drive really slowly so the astronauts can walk a lot faster and they can see things like ‘that looks interesting’.

Miller:  Are you prepared to work for a billionaire Like Jeff Bezos who might be more likely to send people to Mars than NASA?

Segna:  I think my dream is to work for NASA but I mean I wouldn’t say no to being an astronaut if I can get there.

Miller:  Lily Segna. Congratulations and thanks for joining us.

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