 There we go. All right. Hello everyone, welcome to Venturing Interspace. How New Mexico faculty is reaching for the stars and taking students along the journey. I wanna thank Brittany with the New Mexico Espoir program. I wanna thank Isis for coordinating and having us today. I wanna thank Dr. Selena Connelly, New Mexico Espoir Associate Director for her commitment to all things ESCOR. And I wanna thank Ellen Lomans with the New Mexico Academy of Science for the Academy of Support in Space endeavors promoting this event. Finally, I want to give my heartfelt gratitude to today's panelists for their support and willingness to share their research with all of us. You know, when Selena and Brittany asked me to put a panel together, I wasn't, it wasn't very difficult for me to think of the faculty for this panel. There are many faculty that are doing tremendous work, but in picking this panel was pretty straightforward. The research and relationship with the students are incredible. They all have great dispositions. They are team players and they are some of the New Mexico Space Marine Consortium and New Mexico NASA ESCOR allies. So I want to thank you for that too. Before I introduce the panelists, I wanna give you a quick overview of the New Mexico Space Marine Consortium and NASA ESCOR. They both programs operate on the umbrella of the Office of STEM Engagement, along with the other two programs, MUREP, which is Minority University and Education Project and Next Jam STEM. The National Space Marine College and Fellowship Program was enacted by Congress in 1987, as well as the NASA ESCOR program. That was enacted in 1993. Each state has a Space Marine office. They are in every state of the Union and in the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. So I'm going to share my screen to give you a little background of, more visual background of what Space Marine is. Let me find my share. I should be sharing now. So New Mexico Space Marine Consortium vision is to be the lead agency for coordination and cooperation to engage New Mexicans in space and air-related technical education and research. Our mission is to leverage the economic, educational and scientific benefits of space and air-related activities and assets in New Mexico. Our priorities are very clear. They are to competitively award scholarships and students support a balanced research portfolio in alignment with NASA's work and facilitate experimental learning and outreach opportunities. So if you are a student, reach out to me to learn more. If you are a faculty, please help me level off that bar graph that you see right here. So we can have more students applying from UNM, New Mexico Tech and all other institutions. Okay, so I would like to introduce the panelists now who all have a space hand or NASA F core awards. Dr. Elba Serrano is a Regents Professor in the Biology Department at New Mexico State University. Dr. Sally Seidel is a Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at UNM. Dr. Marlena Frauni is an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at MSU. She's filling out the weather, so I'm not sure if she may show up, she may not. Dr. Andres Agrae is Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at New Mexico Tech. Dr. Fernando Morales is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials and Mechanical Materials. I always mess it up. Materials and Metallurgical Engineering and Douglas Cortez is a Endowed Professor, Herald Foreman Endowed Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at New Mexico State University. Thank you again for sharing your work. Each panelist will have 10 minutes to present. And as needed, I will provide a one minute warning and if somebody is not closing their talk, I will reach out with a virtual cane, you know, with a hook and pull you off the screen. And after the last panelist presented, we will have some time for Q&A. So the order will be Dr. Serrano will kick off the discussions and then we'll go from there. The order is in the chat. Thank you. I'm gonna stop sharing now. Thank you, Paolo. And thanks to everybody out there in the Zoom world. My name is Velda Serrano and I'll be talking to you today about a project that was funded by New Mexico Space Grant to support cell culture systems for space news science research in my laboratory. I will be turning off my video because I'm having a little bit of internet difficulty. And once again, I want to express my extreme gratitude to Space Grant and to follow on this team for all the support of the research that we do in New Mexico and especially for all the students out there who are interested in space research and are joining this to learn more about what they can do. So today's talk, I'm going to keep it quick. There's only 10 minutes. I'm gonna talk to you about human space exploration and particularly about space news science. And then I'm gonna tell you a little bit about the project goals, outcomes and the COVID impact for the research that we have on going that's funded by the Space Grant. So human space exploration, and we know we are going out there. The plan is to be in Mars by 2030, perhaps sooner. And certainly the Artemis project is getting us to the moon. It's going to require that we develop habitats and are able to support human exploration. And this means of course, we will be able, we'll need to develop environments for water, air, energy, food, plants of course, temperature all provided in a way that supports human life and other organisms. And of course that we minimize radiation. One of the big impacts of space exploration is radiation which is very detrimental to life in space. And the big one, the one that's really what my research is about is the role of gravity in supporting life. And with regard to space neuroscience, we know that the space environment poses many challenges for the brain and the nervous system. So here are some of the things that happen to humans when they go into space. Disorientation and motion sickness, this is due to the inner ears, the stimulus system getting out of whack. There is ink and this of course is what happens. It's not a very pleasant thing to have to throw up inside your space helmet. You can imagine that, it must not be pleasant. And then of course, another feature people don't understand is increased fluid in the brain. This constricts the cells, the brain swells and this affects the white matter. And the white matter is rich in the glial cells that I'll be talking about. There are changes in vision and taste. Your spine increases, it could cause back pain. You lose a sense of body, pulmonary reception. Cognitive ability can change. We're very concerned about this. It can cause depression and a return to earth as an adaptation period. I could talk at length about this, I won't, but I wanted to just give everybody the appreciation for what life on earth does for us and what happens when humans leave our earthly environment. And so my lab has had an interest in what is called mechanoreception. And that is the detection of pressure by cells, organs and tissues. In the case of humans, our inner ears are responsible for detecting the sense of space or a Cartesian coordinate system for three-dimensional orientation and also perception of the gravity vector. And so if you look at the brain here, the ears are closely situated to it and they send axons into the central nervous system that they communicate with the brain and give us a sense of balance, orientation and of course hearing. My lab has studied this for many years and we actually have had NASA research working with our model organisms for projects that NASA aimed that really motivated the project I'm gonna talk to you about today. So the central nervous system is being studied in our lab using cell culture systems. We can grow neurons and glia, the other cell type on dishes. And so this provides an opportunity for us to really looking at the effect of gravity on tissues. And therefore the connections to space biology, the fundamental question that we have is how does altered gravity affect structure and responses of cells of the brain and the inner ear system? And I do say altered gravity because gravity is a stimulus. We're not only interested in exploring reduced gravity but also hypergravity. How does gravity in general shape and inform life on earth and potentially another planet? And so we'll be talking about glia, my lab studies glial cells and these are cells that populate the regions between the neurons in the brain. So if you draw a cartoon, you would see a canonical neuron and these other cells called glia provide support in the brain and they comprise the white matter of the brain is really the glial cells. And in my laboratory, we are able to grow these from human and rat tissue on dishes. And in fact, we have been very interested in the effect of biophysical cues that can affect cell fate. And so the work that we proposed for NASA is predicated on results from our lab that show that if you change the environment of neurons, they change their morphology, their orientation and cell fate can be affected by these changes in stiffness. So biophysical cues can really affect what we see. And this work that I'm showing here was the work of graduate student Blue Knight who has a PhD and will be rejoining the lab for a limited period of time in the next few months. And this work has been published. And so based on that, we had the opportunity through a tiny space ramp project to really ask the question, can gravity act as a biophysical cue that affects brain cell fate? Gravity is kind of for different kinds of pressure. So it affects the environment in terms of the mechanical properties it provides. And so we proposed a project that was thankfully funded, we're very grateful for the support. That was a collaboration between my laboratory at NMSU and NASA Ames. And we proposed two independent but interrelated aims. And this is one of the cardinal rules of grantsmanship. Do not have aims that depend on one another because if aim one fails, you are stuck. You'll never get to game two. So we were very fortunate because of COVID that the aims were interdependent but interrelated. And this project was funded March 2020 and COVID happened right away. So the project had two aims and they used NASA resources. NASA has an open source repository called GeneLab that can be used for data mining. So we proposed a data mining project to look specifically at what data does GeneLab have for space flight radiation ultra gravity for looking at neural tissue. And then we curated GeneLab for the quality of the data and asking other questions that I don't have time to get into. But this was a data mining informatics project. Thank goodness we had that. And then we were hoping to go to NASA Ames and do some experiments hypergravity because it's very difficult to get a space station experiment going. And in the limited time, we knew we could get access to the long arm centrifuges to ask the question, in does hypergravity affect self culture system? And we proposed some metabolomics experiments. This aim was effectively truncated by COVID because NASA Ames is closed until August of this year. But we did make progress on the GeneLab and we actually made progress on the experimental component. So the GeneLab project was done in collaboration with my colleague Boris Kiefer in physics. He and I have shared many intellectual interactions and projects over the years and two colleagues at NASA Ames, Sigrid Reinsch and John Galatska, who oversee the GeneLab. And the work I'm about to show you was taken by, was completed by undergraduate students, Pablo Salas Chavira and Dana Wachkulowich, both of them physics majors. So we were very happy to recruit them and these students did a phenomenal job last year. And so under Boris's guidance, they really took a deep dive into data. They used Jupiter notebooks and Python tools to inspect the raw data files and visualize and query GeneLab data. If you go into GeneLab, you will find the experiment and then a lot of information about how the experiment is done. And so they went deeply into this to see are the data of good quality? Are there replicates? What were the parameters? What were the protocols? And they did an analysis by the spreadsheet. And what they found is that GeneLab is really poor for neural data. This is a gap that we need to fill. Many data sets have few replicates. In my opinion, they are fairly useless for any kind of rigorous analysis. They did uncover candidate genes for differential gene expression experiment and that is a technical thing that if you know mobile and you know those are important for follow-up QPCR experiment. And then Dana and Pavlo developed a scoring system to be able to stay the rigor and the depth of the data from the different experiments. Some experiments, for example, have biological samples. And these, of course, far as far as I'm concerned, replicates and biological samples that you can work with, that's a golden experiment. And so they did a lot of... This slide will show you some of what they did. They actually reconstructed the timeline. By looking at the data, they were able to say the first experiments were uploaded in March of 2004. And the most recent one was in, I think, December of 2020. It was a mouse IFS experiment. And they were able to show that the both of the GeneLab data are mouse and human with a rabidopsis as the third. So we know what they are, the distribution. And then Dana did this really cool data visualization where she can see, looking at the factors comparison, you can see that in humans, we're looking at space flight and a little bit of radiation, but not so much looking at simulated microgravity, whereas the mouse experiments have really looked at all the different components because NASA is very interested in the synergism between radiation and ultragravity. Those two are critical. Personally, I think the radiation may be the real impediment to travel because of the potential for cancer under prolonged exposure to radiation. And then the last is an example of the Jupiter notebook output that they did with the raw data under a Boris's guidance where they were able to show that we can identify some good reference genes for molecular biology experiments mining the house student gene. Again, we had proposed centrifugation experiments with Leofeld lines at NASA. We were going to do a growth by ability in metabolomics. This was unfortunately truncated by NASA, but this is the team. This is the new team working on the follow-up experiments. I love my team. We have a lot of fun together and we've managed to be together through COVID. And on you collaborated Jennifer Randall because we pivoted. When one door closes, another door must open for the researcher who wants to persevere. And so I'll show you what we did in a minute because we're really excited. Your 10 minutes are up. Okay, great. So that's my last slide. COVID shut us down. I didn't hear the one minute, sorry. And so this just shows you where we're at. We're doing plant experiments. And so in this figure, you can see two kinds of experiments and you can take a look and see if you see if there's an impact of gravity. Two are in hypergravity and two are not. And so there is a phenotype. And last slide. Thanks, students. Please apply for NASA internships. There's just so much to be done and just very excited to do this work. Thank you, Paolo, for the opportunity to present. I'm so sorry I have to leave in a few minutes because the Gravitational Biology Meeting and the Society for Neuroscience Meeting are going on right now. And I have to present at one of those. So thank you again. Sorry. Well, that was wonderful, Elba. Our next speaker, I want you to do whatever you can to stick around for our next speaker, Dr. Seidel, because Sally and you will have a lot in common. She's going to talk all about radiation. That's my suspicion here. Oh, yes, absolutely. See how I plan everything? This is incredible. You're a genius, Paolo. Yeah, thank you. Dr. Seidel, you are up. Thank you. Hi, Marlene. Sorry, I didn't see you come in. Will you be okay to go after Dr. Seidel? Yeah, that's okay. Thanks. Thank you. Can you see my slides? Okay. Yeah, we can see your PowerPoint interface. Okay, great. So I'm going to tell you about the work we do at the University of New Mexico in developing technologies for radiation tolerant measurements in space. And this work is carried out by myself, accompanied by research electrical engineer, Martin Hoferkamp, and a number of our students. With support from the New Mexico Space Grant Research Initiation Grant and Space Grant Graduate Student Fellowship Programs, we've conducted research along five thrusts. All of them are aimed at developing radiation tolerant silicon sensors that are flexibly applicable for a variety of extraterrestrial contexts. In 2018, we received grants for novel silicon-based detectors for radiation measurements in space, simulation of their long-term response, and also for radiation-hard detectors of charged particles in space. In 2020, we received two modes of support, one was simulation of the leakage current characteristics of novel silicon-based detectors for radiation measurements in space, and the second one is called Silicon Detectors that Multiply Charge, a strategy for radiation hardness in extraterrestrial applications. In 2021, we received support for low-gain avalanche detector development for space radiation measurements. And I devote one slide to each of those on the following pages. The first is the novel silicon-based detectors for radiation measurements in space. PhD student Aiden Grummer was supported by this. He modeled the leakage current and depletion voltage of planar silicon detectors aboard an extraterrestrial vehicle exposed to the chronic cosmic ray protons and the solar energetic particle events. He presented his work at an international conference, the 16th Trento workshop in Italy. And you see a link here in case you want to see the slides of the talk he gave. Aiden is also very devoted to working with young people and you see an image of him here demonstrating physics to young people at the Albuquerque Explora winter camp of that year. The second program is Radiation Hard Detectors of Charge Particles in Space. For this project, UNM Research Electrical Engineer Martin Hoferkamp worked with UNM undergraduate Julie Campos to develop a technique for measuring the charge collection capability of 3D silicon sensors. You see here a picture on the right of Julie welding a thermocouple to a fixture prior to the irradiation studies that the two of them carried out with me. She presented her results at the UNM undergraduate research opportunity conference in April of 2019 and Julie is now employed at Sandia National Laboratories having graduated in 2020. The third project is simulation of the leakage current characteristics of novel silicon-based detectors for radiation measurements in space. You see again UNM PhD student Aiden Grummer and here he's accompanied by UNM undergraduate, Patrick Brown. They worked together to develop a simulation of the radiation damage incurred by P-type 3D silicon detectors during transit from Earth to Mars followed by 28 years of operation in a rover on the Mars surface. Aiden published this research as prediction of leakage current and depletion voltage in silicon detectors under extraterrestrial radiation conditions in the journal Frontiers in Physics, a peer-reviewed journal that appeared in February of 2021 and I provide you the link here. It's open access so you can read the article. You just see an example of one of his predictions in the center of this slide. You see the extreme effect of solar energetic particles on the operation of silicon detectors in space. And on the right side, you see Aiden training Patrick in data collection at the Los Alamos Lance Accelerator that data were needed to validate the simulation. Now Aiden is a postdoctoral fellow at Fermilab and Patrick is studying cosmology in the Baylor PhD program. The next project is the silicon detectors that multiply charge, a strategy for radiation hardness in extraterrestrial applications. This project was undertaken by UNM senior undergraduate Adam Yanyes who wrote his physics honors thesis on a geometry for producing controlled intrinsic charge multiplication in high electric fields within 3D silicon detectors to compensate for charge loss due to radiation damage in space. I show you a link here of Adam's honors thesis which you can access on the UNM server. I show you Adam in the center image, his data on the left which show the charge multiplication and the diagram of the type of device he was studying which is called a 3D silicon detector as shown on the right. And Adam is now in the UNM medical physics graduate program. The last one I want to show you is low gain avalanche detectors for space radiation measurements. These L-gads are planar silicon sensors that are based on a PN junction technology with an internal gain layer and they can measure the time of arrival of charged particles with an intrinsic precision of 30 picoseconds. You see on the right are UNM PhD student Joey Sorensen. He's working with UNM research electrical engineer Martin Hoferkamp to develop these for possible detection of solar energetic particle events. We're using the Gamma Irradiation Facility at Sandia National Lab. In fact, Joey is there right now to test the response of these devices to ionizing radiation and the devices are shown in drawing on the lower left. Joey has already presented this research at the October 2021 meeting of the Four Corners section of the American Physical Society and I show you a link here to his talk. My final slide, just a picture of yet another person who worked with us in 2017 at UNM undergraduate Ivan Rajan. He obtained his physics honors thesis with us and you see him here wire bonding prototype silicon detectors in our lab in 2018 and he's now a PhD candidate at UC San Diego. We at UNM are very grateful to the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium and especially to the officers, Paolo, Christina and Christy for making this research possible. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Seidel. Well, what a rate of students throughout this recent time, the recent years, wonderful. And so without further ado, we're gonna go with our next speaker, Dr. Frowni. Thank you for joining us. I know you are feeling under the weather so I really, really appreciate you being here and at any point you need to drop off. You drop off, this is a friendly audience and we're all among friends so thank you. Thank you so much, I really appreciate that and I appreciate the ability to be here and all of the wonderful funding from the Space Grant Consortium. We've been able to do some really fun and interesting projects and I'm gonna talk about a few projects and some projects that sort of sprung out of what we started with the Space Grant Consortium. So my study or my research studies trust in human-robot interaction and that's important because there are a lot of people going out into space but they have a lot of work to do, many different things to accomplish and there are a limited number of people who can go out on any given trip and so in order to help them out so they can do their jobs better, get some rest time, maybe work out because I know in space it's a little bit hard to keep up that muscle mass. They've been sending out robots into space to help the people. So this is a robot astrobi which was recently put onto the International Space Station which sort of floats around and is meant to help for a variety of tasks and some of those might be things like retrieving tools for the astronauts to use while they're fixing things so they can do that more efficiently. So I'm going to, throughout these slides, talk a little bit about the people who've worked with me on these projects and then the projects themselves and what the students especially have done on those projects. Let's see if this, there we go. So you can see my collaborator here, Terry Fong who is from NASA Ames and he was our primary collaborator at NASA and then I broke up our student collaborators into groups by those who are named Daniel and those who are not. And as you can see, we do work with more people who are not named Daniel, but not by much. I don't do that on purpose. And there are a number of graduate and undergraduate students along this mix. So the first project that we began was headed by Grace Igua who you can see here in the photo. And she and our team started examining how we can understand when robots switch modes because robots like this astrobi in its space might have several different modes that they can switch between such as the robot being able to simply perform the tasks through its automation. People might be able to zoom or video conference in through the robot. The robot is sometimes used by different labs and so it might be focusing on different tasks and that type of thing and switching mode in order to do that. And so that means maybe when somebody from Earth is conversing through the robot that if somebody needs the robot to go get something the robot might not be able to do that because the person conversing doesn't have that type of control over the robot and maybe using it for something else. And so that can be in some cases just frustrating and in other cases even dangerous if somebody's relying on the robot to do something that it can't do at the moment. So we wanted to understand how we could help people learn more about these mode changes and engage in them in the real world. And so what we did with this was we started out with a task that participants did had to do with how they could interact with the robot and how it could interact with these different tools. We sort of had this little Roomba you can see on the bottom like the vacuum cleaning robots and we added an interface on top so that it could display even when it's in different modes. And what we found was that although people didn't necessarily notice a big change in the workload they did make more mistakes when the robot was changing modes then when it didn't have modes to change between. And so this is suggesting that this is something we need to study further. And Grace, Danielle, Harrison, Daniel and a few other students were working on this to design the study, run participants and also write up the paper for publication. The next study that sort of spawned was the study on trust transfer which you can see Harrison Proust here did as his master's thesis because if we have multiple of these robots as they do already on the International Space Station and the robot makes a mistake people may decrease their trust of that robot and they may decrease their trust of the other robots. And so since these robots are being constantly updated and becoming better and better at doing their tasks it's really important to understand how people trust them how they're going to transfer their trust from one robot to another. And so what he did here was he tried having the robots first fail so that people had a reason to not trust them but then give an attempt to repair that trust through an apology. And he found that indeed when the robot failed then people didn't trust it as much and that trust transferred to other robots as well. And then the trust repair strategy that the robot did was actually not particularly effective but this again is the first study in a series and so what we're planning to do is to try out some different apology strategies so we can find out more about how the robots might be able to repair the trust and also how people would trust them over a longer period of time because there are a lot of studies like this that are looking at these really quick interactions but the way people trust robots over time and the way that people affect their trust of robots will also, sorry, people will affect other people's trust of robots is really important to look at here because there's much more going on than just the direct human and robot interactions. So Harrison designed this study and ran it online because it was COVID. Sorry, something's disconnecting from my computer. So he ran it online due to COVID and what we want to do is to run these studies in person because I think that in person, people will have more of a connection with the robots and this type of apology might be more effective. Continuing in this line of trust my students, Michelle Cormier and Andrea Alvarez here traveled with me to the Air Force Academy to collaborate with them on a study about trusting semi-autonomous vehicles and of course this relates to trusting these types of robots that astronauts are going to be interacting with because as we get better and better at programming these machines more and more of them will be autonomous and we've already seen a number of robots like the Mars rover for example, going around in outer space and we wanna understand how people affect each other's trust of that. And so we're still in the process of analyzing this data right now but one thing that we've found is that actually studying groups and their trust of these types of machines is a lot more effective in some ways than studying it in one-on-one interactions because when you get people into the studies in groups they start talking to each other. So in this study we brought multiple people into a self-driving car and had them drive around for about half an hour and just sort of talk about various things based on different tasks. And one thing that we discovered was they would say things like, oh my gosh, did the car see that biker? I couldn't tell, normally it does this and this type of interaction is really exciting because in previous studies when they only had one person in the car you don't get any of that type of conversation. And so we want to continue studying these types of groups in these sorts of situations. The last study that I'll talk about today is performed by Matthew Rubin, the postdoc funded by the Space Grant Consortium and our collaborators in computer science as well. And what he wanted to know is how can we understand what a robot sees or understands? And so he actually did a qualitative study of video games to figure out how people display site cues. And so some of the different categories that they found, which they want to apply to robots, is you can see like facial expressions convey that they've noticed something, arrows pointing, you can get exclamation marks or even site cones. And so people could use this to show people watching the robot what the robot understands because robots are of course very different than people and we're already not great at understanding people and what they're thinking internally. So if we can use these, yeah, thanks, if we can use these, then we can also help people to have more smooth collaborations with robots. And so he worked with a couple of undergrads and grad students as well to dig into this literature. And so that's the last study that I'm talking about. So again, I wanna thank all of my collaborators and the Space Grant Consortium for Funding List. Thanks everybody for watching too. Thank you so much. Wonderful presentation, thank you. We're gonna be holding off on questions, the Q&A until the last presenter. So our next presenter is Dr. Andresa Greid. Thank you and take it away. Okay, thank you Paula. And I am a professor of mechanical engineering and therefore we'll talk about mechanical engineering things. And my group is primarily looking at enabling safe space travel. And today I will talk about what the concepts are and how we implement that and actually how we tested it in space. So can we make space available to everybody? And in my opinion, the answer is yes. And I'm pretty sure that the next generation is gonna actually fly between continents through space rather than through air. And it's gonna be much faster, roughly about 40 to 50 minutes one way. What we can do for that? Well, it's an infrastructure thing and actually I actually like very much this picture because that potentially shows what our future spaceport in New Mexico could be, right? So that there is an air transportation then there is a space transportation to go to another side of the earth. And it's a hub, whether there are things which we still need to work on in order to make it available for everybody. And of course, one of them is cost of the space flight. The tickets you can purchase right now online. I'm not sure how much last time I checked it was what, 250K I think was a orbital flight, something in that order. And obviously to make it a reasonable price we need to reduce the cost of space flight. We also need to improve safety of the space flight because currently the volunteers to fly in space, they actually not called passengers because it's difficult to provide the same level of safety as we would provide for the regular airline. And therefore they're called participants rather than passengers. And therefore we need to improve the safety of the space flight. The safer the better. And there are a number of other things like a number of launches, opportunities, choice of spaceport and those are deals with infrastructure. And the last element of it is state regulations. If you fly through space, what are the legal implications of the things happening during that sleep and things like that. But we primarily are focusing as mechanical engineers on two things. Technologies to reduce the cost of the space flight and technologies to improve safety of the space flight. And how are we gonna do this? We utilize embedded sensors in the structure by analogy with the living system and nervous system of the living species. And the sensors could be very different. It could be temperature sensor, it could be piezoelectric sensor, magnetolastic sensors. But the aim of all those sensors are to collect information about structural integrity and acquire the signals which reflect that integrity, process them with the statistical analysis on neural network or any other kind of analysis which would eventually come into very simple traffic light decision scale where red is damage, yellow is you better check it and green is everything is okay, you can fly. So our group did a lot of different studies with a lot of different structural health monitoring techniques including fiber optics, including piezoelectric, ultrasound, acoustic commission and others in the lab to see if those kind of aspects could be applicable to space structures. And it turns out that they do. On the right, you see like different signals which shows that differences between damage and damage things, but all of those were actually done in the lab and we would like to move forward and actually test those elements and test those technologies in the realistic environments. And we were fortunate to apply through, it was actually NASA grant to go and do the two flights and one of them was the high altitude balloon flight where we developed the payload together with students. And here on the slide, you actually see a whole gang of students, under graded students. I had a couple of graded students in here and together we developed the payload which we have put on the strata spherical high altitude balloon. You can actually see the balloon which is at the very, very beginning like on the left side of this picture. We specifically went to Oregon to do the launch so that it can actually traverse all the way pretty much through the whole from north to south of Oregon and test our payload during the winter conditions. The payload which you see here is one of the students she's actually testing the payload on vibration analysis which looks like it's a part of the rocket which it was eventually which collected data from strain sensors from temperature sensors and from the acoustic sensors. It was a really great project and it was really also fun to go together with students to Oregon and integrate that payload with the company who would actually provide the launch was near space cooperation. So it was very, very interesting part which eventually followed with the suborbital flight where we further developed the payload. You can see the payload on the left side of the slide. It's a multi-layered one. We have a micro computer which would collect the data and control all experiments in there. We did the active ultrasonic testing during this flight and actually our group here in New Mexico is the first who actually did active ultrasonic structural testing space. And it was done on suborbital rocket out of launched out of Spaceport America here in New Mexico on up higher space. The rocket you can also see on the left. So what did we find? We actually find a very interesting aspect is that the space structure when it goes up to space and when it comes back it comes back kind of like a different structure because the parameters of the structure change because of the thermal effects, because of spinning because of many effects which provided by the flight environment. But perhaps the most significant one is actually temperature and those effects actually persist even if the structure lay in. So perhaps the best analogy I would say is imagine if you decide to go to spa and have a good time and then come back and you come back a better person. So the structure also feels something like that. It expands under heat and it rearranges structural interfaces slightly so that when it comes back it's a slightly different structure which is actually indicated here by our signals. You see the signals are actually very quite different and that effect persists for several days. Why? It is so important. It is important because if you decide to fly on the same spaceship, the same day, therefore the baseline of structural condition for that spaceship is actually different and that needs to be taken into account so that the natural changes due to space environment are not considered as damaged and actually damage is started in light of the variability of structural changes due to space flight. So this is one of the first steps into actually looking at how we can monitor the structure in space and the data which you see was actually collected in space which opens a lot of interesting things for commercial sector in particular because it's a commercial sector which is interested in flying as often as possible. So this kind of data affects what you do and how you make decision of fly or not to fly. And I should mention that student did a tremendous job here not only programming the actually experiment, design and experiment, you see the payload which was actually designed and built by the students and eventually they participated in the launch. You see the whole picture here of the students attending the launch. All right, so then we did it on suborbital but suborbital it's a very short space flight. It's about 15 minutes flight from launch to landing and it's about three minutes in space relatively short time. Although the environment is very realistic. So we applied to NASA International Space Station EPSCOR grant in which we promised to develop the payload to monitor structural condition on ISS during the space flight, during the orbital space flight. One minute. And we were actually looking for specifically joints and you see a payload here and students develop a very interesting approach how to work with joints here. We would look at ultrasonic testing during this payload and eventually here is the payload which we actually launched. Well, not we, but we participated in the launch on Norton Grumman ISS supply mission. On the right, you actually see a picture of the MISI experiment which our payload was part of on ISS and eventually it was returned back. We successfully have demonstrated that we could actually collect the data using the same hardware before the flight and after the flight and it was great experience both for students and our research team. What are we doing now? What we decided to tackle a new problem of additive manufacturing for space applications where we would actually inform the additive manufacturing using the ND technique to improve quality of parts which can be done in real time. Actually this video which was made by one of my students showed it how we intend to do the ultrasonic testing in real time for the additive manufacturing but there is also the X-City or offline components with the signals where we would test the additive manufacturing parts to look at porosity, look at other type of microstructural elements or microstructural features which eventually could go into damage as well and then inform the parameters of 3D printing to reduce the waste of material, improve the printing time and actually eventually improve the quality of additive manufacturing part. So with that, thank you very much. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You went over but it was worth it, all right. I'll take a rain check on your next time you have. I like how you wave the trajectory from ground to high altitude balloons, anyway. And then the next presenter, Dr. Moral out of University of New Mexico. I'm sure you're gonna be interested in hearing this because he is working on wireless smart sensors. So this connection everywhere is here. All right, Dr. Moral, take it from here. Great, can you see my slide and can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you, yes, I can see the slide, yep. Great, good afternoon everyone, let me time here because the moderator is very strict and I'm gonna try not to get in trouble. I'm very glad to present here with friends from New Mexico and EBSCOR. It's a privilege to be on this large symposium and contributing with some of what we're doing here together as a team. I'm assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, but I am very fortunate to work with people like the presenters in different departments like Andrea in Mechanical and I know other people from UNM that presented before. So I think space allows this community to work together more than any other area because we are very open-minded and also very ambitious about the future. And my research is with the students from all these different departments. So I want to emphasize this team that we have together and the future component. My laboratory is a smart management of infrastructure laboratory and I call the presentation on space. I have in the next slide, let me see if it goes next, I have a sound of the highlights, let me see here. This is, okay, something is not what I wanted. So this is the team that I wanted to talk about the students. So I have on the left, Laya Wykoff and Eric on the right, both receive the New Mexico Space Ground Consortium. Roya and Xinxing, they're working in other topics that are related to this multidisciplinary research and they're having a lot of fun and I took them for dinner because they worked so hard that they deserve that. On the next slide, I have some highlights of the areas that we are working in our laboratory, have some drones that we use on Earth, augmented reality, which is a topic very interesting and attractive for interfaces with, it could be with robots, it could be with data, it could be with environment, it could be with new environments where you want to identify some properties on real time. We are working with satellites interface where you want to augment the connection between the operators on Earth with the actions on that satellite. And we're interested in that cognition of the operator with the operations on robots or other machines. And so you see my one slide or my two slides? I think it's better. Now we can see one slide. Yeah, thank you. As I mentioned, my background is civil engineering, I'm very interested in sensors of things that move and that operating out there that you want to collect some information. With this, I've been looking more into these rocket sensors. Why? Because rockets are more exciting than bridges. They move more, they have trajectories. Also they are faster to collect changes. It's in two minutes, more things happen than in two years in a grid. So we've been working with Albuquerque Rocket Society on these low cost sensors for rockets. So what we do here also with all the national laboratories, some of them is Sandia. We're looking in this modeling and laboratory, in the laboratory of some non-linear vibrations that could be interesting to characterize and enhance the design or transform the control with this non-linear dynamics characterization. And this laboratory here that I have is, I could link COVID but not anymore, but this is doing COVID. It's a shake table that can move 9,000 pounds for the one degree of freedom that we're using. We have an interesting cybersecurity with the Office of Naval Research. Again, when you talk with the cadets, we're training cadets on cybersecurity. When we talk to them about the space, the conversation becomes very interesting. So the students get very excited about the space and I will mention some of that in the other slides. This is one of the interfaces with vibrations or dynamics where the students can learn mode shapes by seeing in the laboratory the mode shapes overlay. This is a simple company lever being vibrating in first, second, and third mode that instead of looking at the mathematics or even looking at the monitor, you don't need to open the computer no more. So they can see the mode shapes in front of their experiment right there. We, as I mentioned, we have this robotic interface. This is, we have the Kinova Gen, but now this is the former one from Professor Fierro because we had to wait a long time for the Kinova Gen. So we're enhancing this control of the robot with AR and again, this is in the satellite collaboration actually with the Air Force Research Lab. Because I'm a civil engineer, I really like cracks. So we are looking into measuring cracks on real time. That could be enhancing the decision-making or assessment of some material that you want to characterize and look on these cracks with augmented reality. I will serve to these summaries of interfaces who like the interface with the sensor networks, interfaces with databases, we create this socket connection between the human and the database. It could be a PIVIA, it could be a change on the specifications. Also, two humans can share the information together visually of the material or of the component, instructions for that on real time with the HoloLens. We are also working with these pilot emergencies where you can train pilots for some supervision where the trainer doesn't see the maybe artificial conditions that the navigator wants to be trained for without having to actually be training them on those harsh conditions. So we created, in the real flight, we haven't done it yet, or if we had done it, we cannot tell you. We can create the trainee to see something happening outside the plane where the trainer doesn't see that. So there is no damage on the ship because it's actually virtual, but the stress of the training is happening without any risk. I'm very interested on these interfaces. Now I'm gonna, I have another three and a half minutes. There is an exciting opportunity in New Mexico that I wanted to bring to the table and director of MNIST Amelia with his railroads and space. Because of my background working with the railroads, I gave them a challenge. Can we do, they were wanting to engage middle schools, middle schools, not even high schools, with STEM. And I approached director Omi and said, hey, can we connect railroads and space? The kids really get very excited about space. Can we talk about railroad scene space, railroad sign space, it's funded. So now we have this unique partnership between something that is exciting about the future that is bringing maybe the railroad to a futuristic on earth, or maybe futuristic on space. This is an AIAR interface with rail detection. This actually was done by a high schooler in New Mexico. So we should be very proud with various small supervision, let me tell you. They just did it. They said, hey, I told you, show me the rails with AI by themselves. So they are very, very, very good. This is in Albuquerque, in a rail yard. Actually, there's no real traffic. So it's safe to do it with a chorus lab with an industry partner. So there is no real train traffic, but the rail is real. On this context, we are creating this control of sun exploratory robot that can go with AIAR and interrogate sun conditions. So this is, we call it Brutus. Brutus is Brutus. It's able to tap on the surface and with a microphone, conduct machine learning classification automatically of different geologic conditions for Roco. It could be mechanical conditions, non-destructive evaluation without any human contact. The energy going through the surface is the same. And this was developed for Earth, but we identified and we brought the augmented reality. And basically the sky's the limit just to give you some context. We're looking on doing this now underwater. So that's the way we think in New Mexico about boundaries and barriers. And we wanna just navigate and tap in the ocean with our little Brutus with AIAR. So this is Brutus tapping on the wall and actually the wife of the student didn't let him tap on the wall, but we did it on the real wall in the laboratory because on the laboratory we can hit the wall, no problem. Yeah, but that's the house. This is some of the Albuquerque collaboration with the Rocket Society's and STEM activities that we do to recruit the very young. This is the famous Star Wars people to reach out. I have one minute here. I have this connection with wireless sensors real time with augmented reality where the data is not on the computer, it's not in your phone, it's in front of you. We are training all our young students, graduate undergrads to build sensors themselves in a couple of hours, they have their accelerometer, they can see that they don't real time, it's very successful. We're working with the Native Americans and on the wing that we believe the New Mexico potential is ahead of everyone they like. Maybe the environment here is more open about science and believing yourself. And some of the last slide is the highlights of the Albuquerque from the New Mexico Space Ground Consortium to my group. My students are so good that they get many, many awards. This is Joshua Murillo, the Marine. We have a U.S. Marine building sensors putting in 120,000 feet. He's also looking forward for mentoring. Elaya Wykoff is a cool ren scholar. Eric Robbins has been a scholar. He put it in Rockong. Elaya is also with a photo there. And this is some of the sensors that they built. And this is the minute. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much, Fernando. Yeah, Brutus. I didn't know about Brutus. I think Dr. Cortez might be interested in seeing the connections there. So our next speaker is Dr. Fourier Paul. And he'll be talking, I suspect, regarding materials science and habitats and ceramics and the position and such. So take a look at that. Take it away. OK, well, you can see my entire screen right now, right? OK, correct. OK, how's this? Good. Beautiful. Yeah, OK, well, yes. Hello, my name is Paul Fourier. I'm professor of materials and metallurgical engineering here at New Mexico Tech. Thanks first to Paulo for inviting me to be part of this panel. And today I'm going to be speaking to you about protective ceramic coatings for space by dad. OK, and so first couple of speakers anyway, we learned a little bit about some of the dangers of space, right, the extremes streaming environments that space can pose in terms of radiation, maybe thermal temperature swings and such. And so what I'm going to be talking to you about today is ceramic coatings that can provide, perhaps, a solution to some of these problems. In fact, materials tend to be at the start of many technological solutions. And so what I'm going to focus on right now is a technique that I've fallen in love with in the past few years called, yeah, the acronym dad doesn't stand for me, although several people do call me dad. In fact, exactly five people. But dad stands for dry aerosol deposition. OK, and take a look here at this little video. Is a camera inside our home-built system? This is an additive manufacturing technique. It's a novel one. You can't buy these commercially. We home-built this. And we've got now two of them, actually, thanks to the Space Grant Consortium. And you're seeing actually what you're barely seeing are ceramic particles coming out of that nozzle at sonic speeds. And they're traveling so fast that they crash into the substrate. And they break into nanoparticles and they rebond and they form a layer on the top of that substrate. And this is called aerosol deposition, or I call it dry aerosol deposition. And so today, I'm going to talk quickly about how the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium has enabled us to take this technology, which I've been doing for a few years, as applied to functional ceramics and electronic ceramics. Actually, things like some of the previous speakers talked about piezoelectric materials, electronic materials, sensor materials, silicon itself. We can do in this process. But the Space Grant has allowed me to apply this technology to space problems, namely, to start thinking about in-situ resource utilization. That is taking moondust, which is normally a nuisance on the moon. How can we turn that into a useful material? How can we turn that into a useful component, i.e. protective coatings, perhaps on spacecraft? Or perhaps on dwellings on the moon to protect against things like radiation, like temperature extremes, and even micrometeory impacts. And that's what I'm going to actually show you in a minute here. But first, here's a slide showing some images. Forgive the busyness of this slide and the multitude of pictures. But in this process, we take a feedstock powder. You see a micrograph over upper left there. That is actually simulated lunar regolith that we acquire from a place called the Exilith Lab at University of Central Florida. We do some things to get just the right particle size distribution so that we can apply it, so we can use it in our DAD system. And now you see a couple of examples of coatings on the bottom left of the screen on space-relevant materials like aluminum, like capton, which is a polymer, very important to many applications, space applications. We can put a hard ceramic coating on virtually any substrate you can think of. Again, in this case of interest, it's putting them on space-relevant materials for protection. And we can make films thin. We can make them thick. And what's unique about this process is it ends up producing a nanocrystalline, a nanostructured film of full density. And that's almost like a holy grail of ceramic manufacturing where you normally use high temperatures. We do this process all at room temperature. If you're a geologist or mineralogist, you might be interested in the phase composition of lunar regolith, or you might know it already. It's a bunch of up in the table up in the left. It's a complex mix of silicate minerals and even some things like ilmenite, which is an iron titanate. The central image shows that we can turn that moondust into a very uniform coating, uniform in terms of its thickness, uniform in terms of its phase composition. And we've done those studies, and we can show that material is, again, this fully dense ceramic of uniformly distributed phase composition. Some higher magnification images will call your attention to the yellow image at the bottom, which is an atomic force microscope image. Proves to you, shows you that this is indeed a nanoscale material. The whole image itself is three microns on its side. So you can see the little tiny primary particles. Those are like 50 nanometers in size. So we take micron-sized particles, and in the process of aerosol deposition, those particles completely fracture apart and then re-bond, forming a nanomaterial. Now, there's some higher magnification images above, you see, including a fracture cross-section in the top image of our film. And you see that it's fully dense, no pores, no holes, no void space through the thickness of the film, although it is kind of pockmarked on the surface. And that's kind of a natural, a normal look to our aerosol-deposited films. Forgive me, I thought I'd de-cute and show some images of the actual lunar surface taken from orbit or two and three back in 1966, 67. And I thought it was kind of fun to put them side by side with high magnification images of our actual, of our films made from simulated moondust. And note the similarities. In fact, we call these pockmarks in our films, craters. How can we use these films? As I said, protective coatings is the idea. And through a second small grant from the space grant and engineering education grant, okay, I challenged my senior engineering design team to come up with and design a rapid and cost-effective method and apparatus to simulate micrometeoroid impacts on space materials and coatings. You may know this is a real danger in orbit, in low Earth orbit, even the International Space Station gets hit by these little tiny micrometeoroids, which are about a hundred microns in size, but traveling at like 1,000 to 8,000 meters per second, okay? And so one could go down and test materials, new materials down at the hypervelocity test facility at White Sands, but that will cost you about $15,000 a test is my understanding. So my challenge to these students, by the way, this team called themselves the micrometeoroid miners. And those of you down at NMSU might not know that we have a mascot, a sports mascot, but we do. And UTEP aren't the only miners in the area, okay? But these guys are called themselves a micrometeoroid miners, okay? And came up with a design and we ended up calling it Loki for low orbit kinetic impactor. Here's a little animation that I'd like to show you of its design showing you some of the major components, including a composite of silicon carbide particles that's mounted to the sidewall of this chamber of Loki. The top comes down with a target sample holder and a mesh stripper to take out any unwanted shrapnel. This is gonna be an explosive accelerator, okay? And now you're gonna see an electric bridge wire, which then screws into the bulkhead, which attaches to the side of Loki and that explosive bridge wire is the thing that's going to go boom and accelerate the silicon carbide particles simulated micrometeoroids and impact them onto the target. Not now, and by the way, we pull a vacuum. This is a vacuum chamber. We pull a vacuum on this chamber to simulate the space environment and actually increase the speed to by reducing drag on those microparticles. Here's another video to the right. I'm gonna play for you, which was used as a teaser to try to attract a wide audience to the senior design presentations at the end of last academic year, okay? And at the end, I'm gonna warn you, watch closely because we've got some high-speed photography that's capturing these silicon carbide micrometeoroid particles traveling at a high rate of speed. They're gonna come from the right of your screen and impact the target on the left. But that's gonna be in the last like five, whoops. That's gonna be in the last five seconds or so of this video. So this was also enabled by a generous cost share. Oh, if you know when you're putting it, you're putting it at a time and provide for an expert. This expert can take it closer. And high-speed damage. So that little pop was the bridge wire going off. I'll be right back. That's the boom, and there's the target material here. Here comes the high-speed image. Watch from the right of your screen. This is high-speed photography, little tiny microparticles entering the right and hitting the target on the left, okay? And you can see the silicon carbide particles fracturing, completely fracturing themselves as well as ablating the target surface. So these are tests that were actually conducted up at EmmerTech by the micrometeorite miners. Here's a couple examples of test results from Loki, including impact crater and acrylic in the upper orange figure there. Nice classic craters revealing plastic deformation rings around the rim of the crater itself. And then we apply 30 seconds left. Okay, and then we apply optical profilometry to count those craters and get some statistics on their size. Our latest experiment, which just took place about a few weeks ago, we actually tested for the first time our dead ceramic films. And other than this one crater, this film was untouched by those silicon carbide particles. But we're thinking that this was an anomalously high kinetic energy silicon carbide particle. And really interesting, we're studying the heck out of this right now. We're looking at a cross-section profile of that crater event, where it blew a hole in the ceramic coating and then continued and penetrated the steel substrate below by about 10 microns. Okay, so anyway, this is where some of our early results have been presented so far in a series, a couple of talks given by me and my students at places like the material science and technology national meeting in Portland, Oregon. We published, first published results were in Journal of Additive Manufacturing, where we again talked about depositing lunar regolith using lunar regolith as a feedstock material to make these ceramic coatings. Okay, very recently presented at Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium, graduate student Josh McDuffie is picking up with that design team left off and is carrying forward these Loki experiments and we've got Los Alamos National Labs interested in exploring and doing hypervelocity experiments using Loki and our dad films. This is Robert Kelvo, who's been a very good mentor for my group here, the dad group and is actually a NASA fellow. He's finishing in about a month or two. Okay, and is probably the nation's expert in this technology now, he's the best at it. And so he's going to be going on. He's got several job offers already but loves this process of dad. Here's Alex Daldes, who's now funded by the Army doing functional materials, namely dielectric materials. And finally, yes indeed, that logo that you saw on the front page of New Mexico Tech was made by depositing lunar dust, moon dust or lunar regolith unkept on. And so is this NASA logo. And Paolo, I got to tell you the instruction I've already given instructions to my group. The next logo we're making is the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium logo with moon dust deposited unkept. Okay, there you go. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. All right, without further ado, Dr. Cortez will close the panel with a big boom bang. I hope not to disappoint. Can you all hear me okay? I can hear you fine, yep. Okay, let me see if I can put my slides here. Can you see my slides? Yeah, we can see the whole, yeah, there we go. Okay, perfect. All right, so my name is Douglas Cortez. I am an associate professor at the Civil Engineering Department at New Mexico State University. And I'm going to talk to you about space exploration and that has to sound odd because I'm not an aerospace engineer. I come from a very different background. And so what I would argue in this presentation that I'm about to show you is that we're entering a different stage, a new stage in the space race. In the 1950s and 60s, the race was to put the first human on the moon and the race was more of a rocket race, making sure that we had the spacecrafts that would be needed to put us in there. And I will argue that with the RTEMI's program where NASA is trying to put people back on the moon, the race is a different race. The race is one to go to the moon to stay, to establish a sustainable presence in the moon and then to extend the presence to Mars and beyond in our solar system. So the race is different now. I will argue that the vehicles are there. If you have seen the news, the rockets are now fabricated by industry. You have a SpaceX has one of those news. What is the name of this one? Star, Paolo, do you remember that one? The Crew Dragon or SpaceX Falcon? The largest, the biggest one. Oh, the heavy duty? Yeah, well, anyways. We have large numbers of new vehicles. And so now the question is, we have enough to send us there and send us with equipment. And so what are we going to be doing on the moon? And so NASA through the RTEMI's program is now taking a look at the lunar surface innovation and these are some of the things that they expect us to be able to do. So utilize the moon resources. So if we're going to have any hope of sustaining a presence in the moon, we have to use locally available resources. Establish sustainable power, building equipment that works in extreme environments, mitigating lunar dust. Lunar dust, as Paul was mentioning, is a very complex problem when it starts to mix with equipment. Surface excavation, manufacturing and construction processes in pro of supporting the development of infrastructure in the moon. Extreme access, which includes navigation and exploring the surface and the subsurface of the moon. And so I'll start by talking about some of the work that we have done in the subsurface. And so first of all, this work has been funded by the center for bio mediated and value inspired geotechnics which is a third generation NSF funded engineering research center. And through our work here, what we have tried to do is try to look at how nature tackles the problem of penetrating the ground, accessing the subsurface. To my left, what you will see is an earthworm and how earthworms penetrate the ground and what they leave underground some of those species and they have to create tunnels and move through it, right? And then to the right, you see how humans do it. So we take these very heavy pieces of equipment, those trucks that you see on the top are going to be about 20 ton trucks. So very, very heavy trucks and they're going to be pushing these rigid samplers, if you will, those stainless steel cones that you see below. And so that's how we gain an understanding of what is underneath the surface. We push these devices, they have sensors embedded in them and they tell us what type of materials are underneath and what are some of the properties of those materials. And what you can see is that the way we access the subsurface is profoundly different. I will argue that is the complete opposite of what the earthworm does. We have something that is extremely rigid is pushed to brute force, whereas the earthworm is very soft and very light and is able to reach a quite significant depth. So let's take a look at some performance measurements that compare the two. So our CPT rigs weigh 20 tons and the typical range is about 30 meters about a hundred feet. So if you divide that depth of penetration by the weight of the equipment, essentially each kilogram of that surface mass is giving you about one and a half millimeters of penetration depth. Now, if you go to the earthworm, earthworms weight about 50 grams and the limit depth is about two meters. Now we don't know if it's the limit depth because they cannot go any deeper or because they don't need to go any deeper. But even with that depth, you're looking at 40 millimeters per kilogram. So they're much more efficient about using that mass to go within the subsurface. And so arguably, the earthworm is giving us a strategy that is lightweight and that will allow us to penetrate hopefully deeper into a subsurface for a given amount of mass, which is something that is critical in the space exploration area. We're going to be sending something to the one that has to be lightweight and we want to go a couple of meters down to a subsurface. So here comes the funding that we have received. We got a rate grant from the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium. And what we have been doing is translating those adaptations from the earthworms into equipment that we can deploy in a rover and then send to the moon to prospect for resources and to measure the properties of the subsurface. On the top, you see our earthworm-inspired cone and essentially we have mixed that really portion of equipment with a flexible membrane that allows us to inflate and deflate, mimicking some of the key motions of that earthworm for penetration. Through the funding from the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium, we're able to leverage some funding from CBBG and from the department to acquire equipment that allows us to penetrate into an instrumented task bed. And so this task bed is holding lunar regulates eminent and it's instrumented with acoustic sensors that allow us to monitor the penetration and the response of the soil, the regulate when the one-inspired rover expands and contracts. And so we monitor the resistance to penetration and we monitor the energy that we invest in doing the penetration. And what we see is that if I'm comparing, I don't know if you can see my arrow, but that yellow line is the control. So if I just push my cone downward, that is how much resistance I'm getting from the regulate to my penetration. If I engage those membranes at set intervals of depth, what I observe is that it's a reduction, a dramatic reduction in penetration resistance every time that I engage my membrane. Now, each of those expanding and contracting my membrane requires a certain amount of energy. So you see the energy expenditure on this side. And what we have found is that we can reduce significantly the penetration resistance at some increase in energy expenditure, or we can reduce it not so significantly while actually improving the energy efficiency of the system. So based on our results, we believe we can eliminate about 67% of the surface mass that is required to reach a certain depth within the lunar regulate. We can also cut the penetration energy by about 25%. And we do so by maintaining a peak power demand that is well below the peak power that can be produced by rovers such as those that have been sent to Mars or the one that is expected to be going into the moon next year or the year after in the bi-permission. So this is a really interesting way of using bio-inspiration to develop a tool that will be good and useful for lunar surface exploration. The research has been supporting six students. We had three grad students. It's Irina Richway, Luka Rivera and Sofia Bahardo. Sofia and Lucas are still working with us. It's Irina moved on to the University of Michigan to pursue her PhD. It has also supported three undergraduate research assistants, Salva Oriwara is a student from electrical engineering who has graduated in December last year. And then we still have Katarina Provenci and Eric Martinez who remain working the project. Through this project, we have been able to present at three different conferences. We have a presentation coming up next week for the Ascend conference and we're sending a material for publication between now and December. So it's been quite a busy project. Here you see an updated prototype which gets rid of entirely of the surface anchor and uses a self-escavating device with dual anchors. Following the support that we got from New Mexico Space Ground Consortium, we were able to leverage some of the results we had to secure funding from Europe for an MSTAR award. So we have our effort now has changed into expanding some of the ideas around regulate. What you see is astronaut holding is Lunar Regulate which for us is the center of what we're trying to do. Our mission is to become an innovation hub for New Mexico and for the area where faculty and students and local businesses who have not typically participated in NASA related research can come and contribute to a space exploration. We want to build capabilities at NMSU so that other universities and industrial partners can take advantage of these facilities and pursue research in this area related to regulate. So our project is a half a million project for two years that we're able to secure. It involves two minority serving universities and Devo State University and New Mexico State University. We have 10 faculty, three industrial partners, two of those from New Mexico and three STEM education and outreach partners here at NMSU. The goal of the project is to build again research capacity in the form of creating our own man-made regulate simulants. Paul was showing some of that moon dust. I use quite a bit of moon dust and one thing that came to me is that they're very expensive. One ton of moon dust or regulate simulant is going to cost you about $25,000. And that is because we typically don't use large amounts of it in research. When you're going to civil engineering related research we're going to be using much more than just one ton of material. And it's very hard to justify paying hundreds of thousands of dollars just for the material to use. So we're working with a local aggregate manufacturer identifying rock formations that have similar compositions to what you will expect lunar rocks to have and then grinding them in developing into simulants that are produced at mass scales and that hopefully we can take advantage of that mass production to reduce cost significantly so they become much more accessible. The second part of it has to do with the development of a test site in collaboration with Spaceport America for going to be looking at landing and launching pads made a manufacturer from lunar regulate simulant using methods that will be relevant to the moon. So we're challenging a concrete and we're trying to develop materials, engineered materials that will be relevant to use in lunar infrastructure. And then the last one is a modular dusty thermal vacuum testing infrastructure that is going to allow us to test devices and technologies for lunar surface exploration under relevant conditions. So low vacuum and low temperatures, particularly those in the permanently shaded regions of the moon where for the next by permission is going to be going to. All right, you're over your time. No, sorry about that. Just one last thing. This is a very diverse and multidisciplinary work we started with one faculty in civil engineering and we have moved to several faculty outside of civil. We have mechanical and aerospace, electrical, geological science and the college of agriculture. And I think that I can leave it right there. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Cortez. Thank you all of you for presenting. Before I have two questions for all of you, but before I go to those, I would like to open it to the audience and I'm checking the chat just in case there are any, if you see any questions, I want to relay them to you. I don't see any questions on the chat, but I do have two questions. So wonderful presentation. And when you see them all combined like that and live, you see the connections that you can make among different institutions who are in New Mexico, different faculty and different expertise, the amount of experience and creativity combined is tremendous, it's mind blowing really. I read your papers and your proposals and things like that, but when you provide those little windows into your world, that's incredible. So here are my two questions and I can open it for all of you and you just jump in and contribute. One question is how do you have a particular way to wanna ask you this other question? I wanna ask you this other question because even though it's 3.30, just spare me three minutes here. The other question is, I know all your plates are full, teaching law, research law, but I keep looking at your projects in terms of entrepreneurial opportunities and patterns and things of that nature. Any of you have ventured into the algorithm? I know faculty, unless we're in the College of Business, we don't have that mindset, we need help from the College of Business or a particular entity in our institutions to help us make in rows in that direction. But I think that all those big projects you presented here have those opportunities. I might speak about that a little bit because I have thought about it and I'm wondering when it comes to space, it's kind of a weird situation regarding IP. Is there a special, is there anybody specializing and actually now as I'm asking this question, I'm recalling at the meeting a couple of years ago on what the international symposium on commercial space travel, right? I know several of you were there. Wasn't there, was there a patent attorney talking about, in particular, about patenting technologies for space? It just seems like, I don't know, it's a different world perhaps. And who do we talk, do you have that connection still? I do and I can circle back with all of you and go back and yeah, it's an attorney of DC the name is Kate for now, but I have it in the tip of my tongue, but that's correct, yeah. Because a couple of the things related to what I showed are potentially patentable. And in fact, we've got a patent, a provisional patent in process now that our eye was on space applications. And so, I guess the answer to your question is yes, I've thought about it and sort of doing it. I just don't quite know what to expect in terms of the interest of industry. I guess it requires contacting individually those space companies, commercial companies. And I think you're aware of the IP, so. I will circle back, yes, because that's important. It's just time and marketing, those two things. You have to market and then the time that you put into it. I saw Fernando had your hand up. I was gonna say, you know, with the symposium reiterating of what Paul mentioned, just by talking with it, I remember talking with ULA. I don't know if it's easier or harder, but ULA was very supportive on contacting the university. They feel very comfortable with universities in talking about this intellectual property. And, you know, we're talking about putting a wireless sensor back here, and then we know what we're doing, then we knew what we were doing, but then things happen. But my impression is that it's easier than, I was very impressed of the welcoming of a large company who you would think, well, they don't wanna talk with professors. I think they feel very, maybe the community was very, surprisingly very open to, hey, I feel like we're at university, don't worry about it. Our lawyers will talk with your university, don't worry about it. So that was my feeling. Thank you. Andres, here, Andres, yeah. And I see Brittany and Isis giving me the phasers. Yeah. I think that this patent and intellectual property question is not that much a question for us. As we, as Paul mentioned, we always think about new inventions and intellectual property, but we do have obligations for our schools as well, right? And I think this is not a really question for us, we'll do that. It's a question how university managed the intellectual property and how they are, what steps are they taken into making it available and successful in the space arena? Cause otherwise we will stop being professors and start being space entrepreneurs, isn't it? I'm not saying that one is better than another, but you only have 24 hours in a day. That's right. So, and in my opinion, if you would like to see more of that, it's more a question of how you implement it rather than do you get it or you don't get intellectual property? Perfectly, thank you. And I think there's a nice closure because we really definitely as faculty and research staff and administration at each of the universities, we have to go to our own institutions and go through those offices that work in that area first and then radiate out from that point of contact. So, all right, I'm gonna leave the last words to Brittany, she's there. Give me the smile, say, come on, wrap it up. I wanna thank you all of you. I wanna thank you so much, all of you, thank you. Thank you. And, you know, without you, New Mexico-Espejhan and New Mexico-NASA F-Corps wouldn't be possible. It's sometimes, if you think of me up at night and then I think of all the good people and that support New Mexico-Espejhan and New Mexico-NASA F-Corps and makes things a lot easier. So, thank you so much. I just wanna really quick echo Paulo's sentiments and gratitude for being here. Y'all, thank you so much. This is fascinating research and we'll close it out. If anybody wants to look at the research that's happening by students, our poster session is still open and will continue to be open until Thursday at 10 p.m. So, get your votes in, check out the posters and thanks so much for attending. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you everybody. Thank you.