Department of Aerospace Engineering

Kelly Smith selected to receive the "Outstanding Co-Op" Award

 

Kelly Smith, junior in the Aerospace Engineering department, recently received the "Outstanding Co-Op" award from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

This honor is only given to 1-5 co-ops out of the 150+ co-ops each term at the Johnson Space Center.  This award shows that Kelly has exhibited a strong work ethic and high engineering standards that he has acquired from attending Iowa State University.

Kelly has been working in the Landing Support Office in the Flight Design and Dynamics Division within the Mission Operations Directorate since January, and will be transferring to the Engineering Directorate to work in Aeroscience and Flight Mechanics Division in late August.

When he arrived in January '08, he was assigned to the LSOs (Landing Support Officers) as their co-op for this past spring tour, and he was given a big list of mostly software projects to begin working on.  The only programming experience Kelly had was with Fortran with Dana Haugli from Aer E 160/161 class and some MATLAB from various classes at ISU.  He had to first learn Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) within a few weeks, because they needed me to fix a program written by Kara Kranzusch (an AER E alumni) and also a former ISU NASA co-op.  The program was responsible for analyzing NOTAMs (NOtice to AirMen), advisories for pilots for airspace and airfields.

After Kelly fixed that program, he continued to improve his VBA skills and he wrote a program that analyzes wind and weather information for about 120 runways simultaneously, checks the conditions against Space Shuttle Program flight rules, and flags violations to the user.  Previously, this process of analyzing wind breakdowns was rather tedious because the flight controller would have to analyze each runway separately.

Next, Kelly created another tool to create a Google Earth-based database of nearly every runway on Earth based off of information supplied to NASA by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.  His program would import the runway data, compile it, and create Google Earth KML files that contained all of the data. 

This summer, he has learned to program in Java, and created an application that receives telemetry data from the Mission Control Center, and plots real-time the current position, ground track, and many other important flight events during ascent or entry of the Space Shuttle in Google Earth.   

Kelly also worked through large portions of the steps needed to become a certified flight controller (Landing Support Officer), which could really cut down on the training time it would require in the future if he has an opportunity to do so for that or another position. 

His first two software applications have been discipline-certified, meaning that they are now authorized for official use during shuttle missions and simulations to provide analysis.  Kelly has finished software development and developer testing of the third application (real-time ground track), and he is waiting for it to become discipline-certified, and hopes he will see it used throughout the Mission Control Center.

Kelly loves his work at the Johnson Space Center because he gets to attend meetings with flight directors and astronauts, meeting people like John Young and Chris Kraft.  He gets to work in the Mission Control Center during shuttle missions and simulations, and fly one of the motion-based space shuttle flight simulators for fun.  Kelly says, "The people I work with are incredibly talented and dedicated, and they've made it very enjoyable here for me." "I worked really hard to get here, and this experience is worth every hour of homework and effort!"

Kelly Smith will be returning to ISU to finish his junior year in the spring semester of 2009,  he will plan on graduating in May of 2010, and "hopefully returning to NASA."  Kelly said that if anyone wants to contact him to ask questions about co-ops or how to get involved, feel free to email him. - Kelly Smith 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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