AAKF welcomes a new board member, Sarah Lamm.

"I want to use my position to help uplift current students and encourage new students to pursue space sciences in Kansas," said the Colby native.

She certainly has a good start on it. Since 2013, she has held over 50 successful science events for more than 2,500 participants.

Lamm is a PhD student in geology at KU studying aqueous minerals with Raman spectroscopy. This after graduating with her master's in geology from K-State in 2021, having previously earned triple bachelor of science degrees in chemistry, geology, and geography there in 2018.

As an undergrad, she was a team member on the Mars Curiosity Rover and worked at Los Alamos National Lab for three summers. She also interned at NASA JPL in 2021 & 2022 studying iron minerals with lasers.

Her goal for the future is to work for NASA or another national lab researching Mars and/or Titan, Saturn’s Largest moon.

Lamm was selected as a 2019 Mars Generation 24 Under 24 Leader in STEAM & Space, and the 2020 K-State Student Science Communication Award winner.

Dr. Craig McLaughlin, who is stepping down from the AAKF board.  He has been a board member ince 2016.  

By Dr. Paul Adams

How often have you looked up and thought – “I want to fly to space!” If you are reading this in Ad Astra, you are likely in the group wanting to get out and up there. Space exploration is so intrinsically exciting that it draws people of all ages and backgrounds. While few of us will have missions that cross the Kármán line at 100 km (~60 mi) to earn astronaut wings, we can fly payloads to near-space with high altitude balloons.

The Fort Hays State University (FHSU) Science and Mathematics Education Institute (SMEI) has supported high-altitude ballooning  (HAB) opportunities since 2011. Since then, FHSU has launched over 100 HAB research missions reaching heights upwards of 30 kilometers (~ 18 mi) for elementary, middle, high school and college students in Kansas...

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LAWRENCE — The MacArthur Foundation announced Steven Prohira, assistant professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, as a Class of 2022 MacArthur Fellow.

The fellowship — widely known as a “genius grant” — is an $800,000, no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential. 

As a physicist, Prohira is advancing the study of cosmic rays and ultra-high energy neutrinos through a rare combination of expertise in three distinct areas: theory, engineering and experimental design. 

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LAWRENCE — A team of student engineers from the University of Kansas took second place in the  prestigious American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics  design competition, continuing KU’s long history of success at the event.

The students won recognition from the AIAA for their design of an unmanned hypersonic spy plane, (see illustration) which they named the “Hyperhawk” system. Ron Barrett-Gonzalez, professor of aerospace engineering, said the award is the 41st that KU students have received in AIAA competition over the last decade.

"Our department is not exactly like the basketball team, but if you keep posting win after win after win, eventually people take notice,"  he said

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WICHITA--Dr. Ryan Amick, a Wichita State University alumnus and NASA engineer, has been selected as one of the Innovators in Residence for the College of Innovation and Design during the 2022-23 academic year.

Amick is a principal human factors engineer at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. He serves as the extravehicular activity (EVA) human factors lead, where he provides human factors and human-systems integration guidance to the NASA community as applied to the development of the Exploration EVA System, and its integration with the larger NASA Spaceflight System Architecture.

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MANHATTAN-- The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine have selected K-State chemistry doctoral student Arnaldo X. Torres-Hernandez, to receive one of 77 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowships in 2022. A native of Puerto Rico, his award is in organic chemistry.

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WSU is offering a course on interstellar science with a humanities bent in the spring of 2023.  This non-technical course (no deep science) will cover space travel and technologies as well as human issues of interstellar travel. Interstellar missions, if they're peopled, could be multi-generational. What's life going to be like in a multigenerational ship? What kind of culture are you going to have?  How do you keep healthy, both physically and mentally? What about life support systems? Effects of long-term space exposure?

This one-credit hour course is relatively accessible, very broad.  It will include several panel discussions on these topics with expert speakers from all over the U.S. and Kansas. (We are, after all, the Ad Astra State.)

For more info contact mark.schneegurt@wichita.edu