I’m Alina Siminiouk, a senior and Posse Scholar at Smith College and former rower at Row New York. I joined the Queens team as a 7th grader and continued to row until I graduated high school. I study Engineering Science with a focus on mechanical and aerospace engineering. This summer, I’m returning to NASA Ames Research Center to continue working for the same team I worked for last summer: TechEdSat. The TechEdSat team rapidly develops and deploys cubesats: satellites small enough to hold in your arms.
Last summer as an engineering research intern for the team, I worked on radio testing and development, machining satellite parts or testing components, and running technological experiments to ensure the satellite is ready for launch. I even got to sign the satellite, TechEdSat-8, at the end of the summer and it was launched to the International Space Station in December 2018! With support of Smith’s engineering department and my bosses at NASA, I spearheaded an initiative to make Smith College the first women’s college to have a spacecraft or cubesat experiment, furthering Smith’s reputation as a pioneer for women in STEM, as the first women’s college to have an ABET or industry approved bachelors of science in engineering. It’s not just coincidence that Smith’s in the Pioneer Valley!
I currently run a dedicated team of ten students across class years and disciplines at Smith to develop a Thermosphere Test Probe (TTP), a “space balloon” that records data while it falls from the International Space Station that will allow us to deduce the density of the thermosphere at individual points. This data will aid TechEdSat in returning small science samples from the International Space Station safely, inexpensively, and more quickly. Over the school year, we’ve developed a prototype and this summer at NASA, we are developing a flight unit to be launched to space sometime in late 2020. The larger scope of my initiative is to develop a cubesat series at Smith in coming years and I trust the underclassmen on my team to be fully capable of continuing what I’ve started. Additionally, I’m running other experiments for the TechEdSat team such as shockwave analysis of a re-entry vehicle at 6km/s. Overall, it’s really awesome!
I never would have guessed I would have ended up at NASA and the only reason I even applied initially was because I found out that a close friend of mine had been accepted for a summer internship the year prior. I figured that if she got accepted, I might as well give it a shot, even though I had never considered a future in aerospace. Since the time of my first internship at NASA, I’ve become passionate about empowering women in STEM and at NASA, as well as women overall. Last year, I was one of three female interns on my team of roughly 20. Two of us were from Smith College. This year, I was able to bring five of my team members from Smith along with me, bringing six female interns to NASA to contribute to the Thermosphere Test Probe as well as developing additional technology for TechEdSat. There are now eight total women on the team of 25. I’m very happy with what we’ve accomplished thus far and I want to continue to do whatever I can to empower other women throughout my career.
