All of us are excited when news outlets report about space missions and programs, such as sending the Curiosity rover to Mars, the International Space Station orbiting the Earth, the Voyager 1 probe entering the previously unexplored region of space known as interstellar space, traveling “further than anyone, or anything, in history”, and the Hubble Space Telescope taking stunningly awesome photos of space and time, such as the photo of the Butterfly Nebula above. And there is a reason why we get excited - things not residing on Earth are more and more not just daydreamed about, but also explored by the human kind. We get to explore new worlds! For example, thanks to the progress of science, analyzing soil samples from Mars is not a fancy anymore and we accurately know the rate of expansion of the universe.
An organization that is almost always to blame for such news is NASA. When someone says “NASA”, these images typically come to mind:
These are powerful images serving as an inspiration to everyone. I am so happy to say I will be a part of that! No, I won’t be going to space, but I will be a research intern in NASA!
Starting September 22 this year, I will spend 12 weeks at the NASA Ames Research Center. The center is located in Mountain View, California. You might be wondering what I will do there. The work will be in the field of formal verification, and in particular I will be testing collision avoidance algorithms. Hopefully I will make a dent in the research done in NASA.
It is hard for me to describe how excited about and horrified of this opportunity at the same time I am!