Notre Dame Alum Part of Stanford Science Team Sending Experiments to Space

  • Posted January 15, 2021
Notre Dame Alum Part of Stanford Science Team Sending Experiments to Space

To celebrate 20 years of continuous human presence on the International Space Station, NASA STEM on Station is sending five student experiments to the space station through Student Payload Opportunity with Citizen Science (SPOCS). Selected teams will also engage K-12 students as a part of their experiment through citizen-science. One of those teams is composed of Stanford University students including Shreya Garg, Notre Dame Class of 2020.

Shreya became part of the team at the start of her freshman year and was not art of the original design for the experiment. When the school year started in September she took on the role of assisting with changing the design in response to the feedback from NASA's first round of critiquing and creating the presentation for the finalist round. Since the project's acceptance by NASA, she will be materializing the design into a palpable payload that will be boarded onto the ISS. 

"Stanford's BRIC (Biopolymer Research for In-situ Capabilities) team will be sending a student-designed payload onto the ISS with the purpose of studying the impact of microgravity on the conversion of Martian regolith simulant into compact bricks," explained Shreya. "We hope that these bricks can be used as a sustainable building material to shelter astronauts on Mars, and while we have developed fabrication methods here on Earth, we are currently unsure whether the reduced gravity outside of Earth's atmosphere will impact the formation process. As one of the five teams selected for NASA's SPOCS (student payload opportunity with citizen science) program, BRIC will be able to investigate this question by studying the brick strength of bricks formed in our payload on the ISS."

The team chose this project as part of their ongoing project to design and build a machine that turns lunar or Martian soil into bricks. With this experiment they hope to learn how reduced gravity will impact the process. They are also hoping to develop an environmentally-friendly concrete alternative that can be used to make structures on Earth and other planets out of on-site, readily available resources.