When your laboratory is a closed box, orbiting 250 miles above Earth on the International Space Station, it can be challenging to get a visual on what’s going inside the lab.

That was a problem that Professor of Physics Nathan Lundblad faced as the data from his experiments in the Cold Atom Laboratory started rolling in from the International Space Station a few years ago. 

The equipment was working the way he’d planned when he conceived of the project and pitched it to NASA. Working with NASA to run the experiments remotely from Earth, he and his team had successfully created — for the first time ever — bubbles of ultracold atoms, which earlier physics had theorized could exist but which simply couldn’t be done on Earth, where the rules of gravity won’t allow it.

This huge advancement for science, and win for the Cold Atom Laboratory, known as CAL, was announced in 2022 and this spring led to two exciting pieces of news for Lundblad. The first was that NASA was extending his opportunities to do research in space with a $1.89 million award. Then the agency honored his breakthrough in manipulating atoms by giving him its NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal. 

The space station’s program chief scientist Kirt Costello describes Lundblad’s work as “groundbreaking.â€�

“In the science program, we look for those people who have done investigations in the International Space Station and have also published findings that are really developmental for the field of science overall,� he says.

The new funding also meant that the assignment Lundblad had given one of the students who works with him in the Lundblad Laboratory at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ was going to be more essential than ever. Earlier this academic year, he had asked Kona Lindsey ’23 of Colorado Springs, Colo., to develop software to make it easier to visualize what was happening with those experiments on the space station.

With the data Lundblad pulls in from this lab in the sky, literally hundreds of shots a day when it’s his turn on the shared lab, there’s a lot of analysis to be done. It’s not just about making the bubbles — or spheres — of atoms but understanding the topology of them, how they function and how they can be altered by changing elements of how they are created. 

Lundblad’s “recipes,� tinkered with at extreme low temperatures in microgravity surroundings, include lasers, radio waves, rubidium, potassium, and various options for magnetic and optical trapping. Exploring these variables further is the plan. “But the first thing that needs to happen is, we actually need to sort of visualize it and say, ‘OK, let’s look at and analyze these clouds,’� Lundblad says.

“Historically, I sort of painstakingly loaded each image and pondered it and cycled through it all. But what I asked Kona to do is write a more coherent software package where I can just say, ‘Hey, what did yesterday’s data look like?’ And you can hit a few buttons and yesterday’s data just pops up on the screen nicely organized.�

Lindsey, he says, “exceeded my expectationsâ€� and established a baseline for future ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students to build on. “Another student will continue this work for sure,â€� Lundblad says. “Because you can always make it better.â€� 

If pressed, Lindsey, a physics and math double major with a minor in digital and computational studies, can boil it down to very simple terms, as he did when he was sharing his thesis at this year’s Mount David Summit: “There are pictures that are taken on the International Space Station of these experiments. And those pictures get sent back down to Earth. And I take those pictures and do some math on them.�

But the truth is, the work Lindsey is doing, along with the other physics majors Lundblad has brought into this project, involves complex science of mind-blowing proportions around what’s often described as a fifth state of matter (after solid, liquid, gas, plasma). Even Lindsey’s father, who teaches electrical engineering at the University of Colorado, finds what his son has been working with in the Lundblad Laboratory somewhat hard to grasp. “I think it’s a bit over his head,â€� Lindsey says with a smile. 

The applications for this area of physics aren’t clear yet, but its scientific significance is. This work dates back to atomic behavior that Albert Einstein said in the 1920s he believed could happen — theoretically, at least — but doubted anyone would figure out a way to make it a reality. Those who succeeded some 70 years later became Nobel Prize winners, and today this area of science, revolving around something called the Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC, is one of the hottest areas of physics research.

The name of the condensate honors the two geniuses behind the theory, Satyendra Nath Bose and Einstein. Bose was a young physicist from India who reached out to Einstein in 1924, sharing a statistical theory he’d developed about photons and asking for help getting it published. Einstein embraced it enthusiastically, made sure the theory was published and then continued building on Bose’s work.

What emerged was a quantum theory that individual atoms could turn into a superatom — many atoms behaving collectively as one — under very cold conditions. And not Maine winter cold, but rather, as close to absolute zero as possible. That’s the lowest theoretical temperature, which temperatures in space come closest to naturally.

But it took the better part of a century — 71 years — to make the first of these superatoms. Einstein probably wouldn’t have been surprised it took that long; when he described the state of matter that would become known as the Bose-Einstein condensate, he concluded with “this appears to be as good as it is impossible.� It’s no wonder the National Institute of Standards and Technology has referred to the quest to produce a BEC as a “Holy Grail.�

Adrian deCola ’23 of Southbury, Conn., a physics major with a minor in digital and computational studies, included a two-page summary of the history from idea to realization in his thesis. “I wanted a hook,� he says. DeCola worked in the Lundblad Lab in summer 2022, modeling and building a laser-driven cooling and purification apparatus for his professor. (Lundblad has two BEC machines in Carnegie, one he’s been running for about a decade and a newer one, under development, that’s meant to more closely mimic the one up in space.) DeCola included Einstein’s long-ago proclamation about what atoms could do, under the right circumstances, as well as that challenge he seemed to issue to future scientists by calling it “impossible.�

It’s been “super cool� to work on components of a scientific inquiry at this high level, deCola says, although he admits, he “had a ton of questions� initially. “I finally get it,� he says. “Sometimes it seemed like I was learning the point as I was doing it.�

Similarly, this was all new and intense material to Elias Veilleux ‘23 of Orono, Maine, when he started doing research with Lundblad in his sophomore year. But by the time he applied for a slot in Princeton University’s electrical engineering doctoral program last fall, he was well versed enough to describe his work in Lundblad’s older BEC machine in Carnegie to his interviewer. He landed a spot at Princeton, and is grateful for Lundblad’s guidance. “He’s been a really invaluable resource,â€� Veilleux said, including in helping him decide whether to pursue a master’s or a PhD., from both an intellectual and financial standpoint.

There are four other U.S. research groups sharing lab time with Lundblad’s team on the Cold Atom Laboratory. (The lab was devised to be something of a “jack of all trades� for scientists studying ultracold atoms, says Lundblad’s co-investigator Dave Aveline, who is based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.)

Several Nobel Prize winning physicists were involved in the planning stages of CAL, including Eric Cornell and Wolfgang Ketterle, who received their Nobel Prize in 2001 for making the first BECs in 1995, as well as William D. Phillips, who won the Nobel in 1997. When Cornell, Ketterle, and a third physicist, Carl Wieman, won their Nobel in 2001, Physics Today spelled out how little was known about possible applications for BECs. They are “still on the far horizon,â€� the publication noted, but listed off possibilities that included playing a role in quantum computing. That’s possible. But Lundblad promises only more experiments, not outcomes. 

“I don’t see a pipeline in this work toward practical applications,� Lundblad said. “Certainly on maybe a 20- or 30-year time scale. But it’s not immediate.

“We don’t really understand how these laws of quantum mechanics work for objects that are this big, like millimeter-sized objects. We have a guess and we have a pretty good suspicion, but there’s kind of an open question for how it plays out in practice.�

Creating and manipulating spheres of atoms moving together in a lab in space might sound like a very narrow area of inquiry, he says. “But it actually hits some of the areas in fundamental physics where there are open questions. Like, what happens to well-understood physics systems when you squeeze them to be thin instead of thick? What happens if you curve them around on the surface, rather than having them be flat? What happens if they have holes in the middle instead of being continuous? These are all typical physics questions that we all study in our own way.â€�

Space represented the next frontier in the exploration of BECs. Creating a BEC on Earth is now a straightforward thing, but continues to be limited by the forces of gravity. The balls of atoms quickly collapse and flatten. Aveline points out that these spherical groupings of atoms created in “trapsâ€� in space have much more longevity, opening up more time to watch — and tweak — their behavior. “You can get a lot longer in observation time, or as we call it, interrogation time,â€� Aveline says. 

Lundblad’s proposal to NASA a decade ago was inspired by a physicist from Sussex University in England, Barry Garraway, who in 2001 shared a theory about a way to manipulate the atoms into spheres and other hollow shapes using magnetic fields and radio waves. But in the presence of gravity, Garraway’s trick wouldn’t work. 

Lundblad encountered the idea around 2006, when he was doing his postdoctoral work, “playing around with atoms and magnetic fields and radio waves,â€� he remembers. “And you sort of see that idea and you file it away, like, ‘OK, that’s cool.’â€� Then he heard about NASA’s call for proposals for the Cold Atom Laboratory in 2013. “I remember someone saying to me like, Hey, do you have any ideas tucked away that really need microgravity?â€� Lundblad did. 

Bringing it full circle, Garraway has now visited Lundblad at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ twice. “Because I’m a theorist, there is no greater honor than a theorist having their theoretical work starting to be implemented in experimental activity. I mean, that is just so fantastic,â€� Garraway says. On his second visit to campus, Lundblad had just gotten his first results from the International Space Station. The bubbles looked “a little alien-like,â€� Garraway says. 

Lundblad and Garraway may ultimately publish a paper together. In the meantime, the announcement of the $1.89 million in continued funding on the Cold Atom Laboratory means full steam ahead for Lundblad and his co-investigators Aveline and Smitha Vishveshwara at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, where the grant will support a theoretical physics Ph.D. student.

“The first years were spent laying out some groundwork and techniques and the next step is exploring higher level goals of using that system to study other phenomena,� says Aveline, from a NASA perspective.

Lundblad anticipates that the work he has done and will do on CAL will be his intellectual “meat and potatoesâ€� for more than 10 years. More funding will mean he’ll have the capacity to bring in more students, collaborators, and visiting scientists onto the project (three postdoctoral researchers have worked on the project at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ thus far). â€œI want more of that culture here. I want our students to see more scientists, beyond just their faculty.â€�

 In the meantime, Lundblad has praise for deCola, Lindsey, and Veilleux. “They’re fantastic young scientists who’ve all contributed — in very different ways — to pushing the envelope on this research effort.â€� 

When NASA agreed to help Assistant Professor of Physics Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic observe a distant galaxy, the agency threw in a bonus: seats for the professor and his students aboard the world’s largest airborne observatory.

Known as the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, the repurposed Boeing 747 carries a 2.5-meter telescope capable of detecting infrared radiation from billions of light-years away.

Flying at 40,000 feet, SOFIA is able to rise above many of the infrared emissions from Earth’s atmosphere that might interfere with readings from such a faraway galaxy.

Assistant Professor of Physics Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic snaps a selfie with his students, Jose Ruiz ’19 and Becca Minsley ’20, in front of SOFIA, the world’s largest airborne observatory.

A powerful telescope at a great height was what Diamond-Stanic needed to observe the galaxy J1613+2834, which is 4.7 billion light-years away and has a black hole at the center.

Ultimately, he wants to parse out “the ultimate power source of the light produced by such galaxies, in particular the balance between light from newly formed stars and light from a supermassive black hole,� he says.

Part of a consortium, led by Christy Tremonti of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, that studies such galaxies to understand star formation, Diamond-Stanic works closely with ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students on these questions. He invited two of them along for the ride: José Ruiz ’19 of Lawrence, Mass., and Becca Minsley ’20 of New York City.

Before takeoff, Becca Minsley ’20 and Jose Ruiz ’19 pose in front of SOFIA’s 2.5-meter telescope, which can detect infrared emissions from billions of light-years away. (Courtesy of Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic)

Ruiz and Minsley had both spent summers in Diamond-Stanic’s Galaxies Lab. And both had traveled with Diamond-Stanic to New Mexico’s Apache Point Observatory. Minsley has worked alongside other students in the lab analyzing data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

“It’s cool to see the ways to try to get any data, any information about these types of galaxies from all of these different sources,� Minsley says.

“In reality the telescope was not moving. The airplane was moving around the telescope.â€�

To get data from this particular source, Diamond-Stanic, Ruiz, and Minsley traveled to Palmdale, Calif., where SOFIA is based, on Sept. 21. On the day of the flight, Minsley was unable to go along, but after safety and scientific briefings, Diamond-Stanic and Ruiz boarded the plane.

SOFIA took off with some uncertainty — though its telescope is one of the most powerful around, detecting a galaxy 4.7 billion light-years away was “pushing the limits of what anyone’s actually tried with SOFIA,� Diamond-Stanic said.

Assistant Professor of Physics Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic (center) and his research students Becca Minsley ’20 and José Ruiz ’19 pose outside the college’s Stephens Observatory just before heading off to California. (Theophil Syslo/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

As the sun set, SOFIA flew from Palmdale over Los Angeles and off the coast. Over the next 10 hours, the plane crisscrossed the Pacific Ocean, turning whenever the telescope needed to point to a different part of the sky. Surrounded by computer monitors that display the data it collects, the telescope sticks out an open door near the back of the aircraft.

“I noticed that the telescope was moving,� Ruiz said, “but in reality the telescope was not moving. The airplane was moving around the telescope.�

“That’s our galaxy!�

For the first few hours, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ team tried to catch up on schoolwork and listened to the chatter between the pilots and air traffic control and among the NASA scientists aboard. Then, midway through the flight, SOFIA turned northeast toward British Columbia so that the telescope pointed at Diamond-Stanic’s target galaxy.

Ruiz and Diamond-Stanic watched the monitors as the data came in, looking for any sign of the galaxy. Soon, a shape appeared. A technician drew a circle around it. Diamond-Stanic snapped a picture.

“That’s our galaxy!� he said. To a lay person, it looked like a white blob. But “it’s beautiful to me,� Diamond-Stanic said.

SOFIA will make a total of five observations of J1613+2834 over the next month. NASA scientists will then process the data, subtracting the infrared emissions of the sky near Earth so that the galaxy will be easier to observe. Diamond-Stanic, along with colleagues at several universities and students in his own lab, will further analyze the data.

Data from the SOFIA telescope feeds into a computer monitor on the aircraft, allowing Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic and Jose Ruiz ’19 to �see� their target galaxy. (Courtesy of Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic)

But in addition to collecting valuable data, Diamond-Stanic hopes the trip exposed his students to a “larger astronomical community.�

“It’s an opportunity for students to see what these research-class facilities look like and what it might be like to work at one,� he says.

Minsley said that seeing the SOFIA data gave her a more comprehensive sense of how astronomers and astrophysicists gather information, whether it’s from the Hubble Space Telescope or a mountaintop observatory or 40,000 feet in the air.

“The coolest part was realizing the connection between all these other projects,� she says. “It’s like trying to collect puzzle pieces, or scraps of clues, to try and create a composite image of what’s really happening.�

Here’s a reward for getting up real early Monday morning: a chance to see a bit of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ streak into space.

At 4:39 a.m. EDT, a cargo spacecraft takes off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Its destination: the International Space Station. Its payload: a laboratory that will conduct an experiment in ultracold physics for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ physicist Nathan Lundblad.

(Update 10:30 a.m. 5/18/18: Monday’s scheduled launch is a postponement from Sunday. Follow Wallops social media for .)

Lundblad is one of the few scientists, and the only one from an undergraduate college, chosen to have his research conducted by the Cold Atom Lab in the CAL’s initial experiments aboard the space station. Nature magazine calls the lab a “” for quantum physicists like Lundblad.

This map of the U.S. East Coast shows when and where the launch will be visible of a cargo spacecraft that’s delivering a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ physics experiment from NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility to the International Space Station. The launch is at 4:39 a.m. May 21. (Courtesy Orbital ATK)

Even hundreds of miles from the launch site, the rocket might be visible on the horizon. “Check the southern skies about three minutes after launch, about five degrees above the horizon,” says Noah Petro ’01, the NASA project scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, now orbiting the Moon.

“If you are in the right area, it will appear as a small dot of red light traveling much faster than an airplane with no blinking lights. You’ll want to be in an area with a clear horizon and away from bright lights.”

+How to Watch ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Rocket to Space

In Alexandria, Va., Petro will get up very early on Monday, not only because he’s professionally interested (and not only because he and his wife, Jennifer Giblin ’01, have two early-rising young children).

“I’m insanely proud of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. This is all about the power of science at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½,â€� Petro said from the Goddard Space Flight Center on Thursday. “Here I am at Goddard, a member of the NASA science community, and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is part of this really cool opportunity.â€�

Scientist Noah Petro ’01 represented NASA at a minor league baseball game in Oregon last August that had an “eclipse delay” because of the total eclipse of the sun. (Photograph courtesy NASA/W. Hrybyk)

He’s proud of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½-into-space launch, he says, because it reaffirms what he and others at NASA know well. “We ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ies — all of us liberal arts grads — do really great science,â€� Petro says, noting that a liberal arts graduate just down the hall trains the astronauts now aboard the ISS.

“This is not about putting ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ on the map of science teaching and research. It puts yet another ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ pin in the map.â€�

Petro earned a doctorate at Brown; his dissertation was “Provenance of Lunar Regolith Components: Redistribution of Material by Craters from the Heavy Bombardment Period through the Copernican Era.�

“ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is just as preparatory for a career in science as any other institution in the country,” he says. “In fact, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ may do it even better. But that’s just my opinion!â€�

“This does not put ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ on the map of science teaching and research. It puts yet another ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ pin in the map.â€�

Here are seven things to know about Lundblad’s research aboard the space station.

1. Once it’s plugged in, the Cold Atom Lab will be the coldest known environment in the universe.

As its name suggests, the lab will be very, very cold — one ten-billionth of a degree above absolute zero.

Physics major Dan Paseltiner ’16, one of Nathan Lundblad’s former thesis students, narrates this short film about the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ experiment that will be aboard the Cold Atom Laboratory.

2. The lab will operate only when the astronauts are asleep.

Once the CAL reaches the ISS, the astronauts will hook it up. After that, it’s mostly hands-off, partially because the astronauts’ day-to-day movements actually move the space station itself, disturbing the stillness the lab needs to work properly.

“They decided, let’s run while the astronauts are sleeping,� Lundblad said. “It will be essentially remotely controlled.�

3. Cold Atom Lab experiments take turns.

Lundblad’s experiment is one of several housed in the Cold Atom Lab. “My project will essentially get a week, and then everybody else will rotate in and have a week, and then I’ll get another week, and then everybody else will rotate through. Then I’ll have a long downtime of a couple months to analyze each data set.�

Associate Professor of Physics Nathan Lundblad’s research rockets to the International Space Station on Sunday morning at 5:04 a.m. (Sarah Crosby/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

4. Lundblad will study a form of matter that can’t exist on Earth.

Lundblad works with Bose-Einstein condensates. BECs are ultracold clouds of gas whose atoms lose their individual characteristics and behave more like a unified wave. He can study them in pretty cold environments on campus, but without gravity he can go even colder.

“I’m interested in studying how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to a BEC based on its shape, and certain shapes are really tough to make in gravity,� he said in 2014.

“I’m looking to make a BEC in the form of a shell or bubble, and then study how quantum mechanics applies to a system that is two-dimensional, but without a border, like the surface of the Earth.�

5. When gravity goes away, other forces come to the fore.

In designing his Cold Atom Lab experiments, Lundblad had to take into account the magnetic field of the lab itself. That, for him, is a first.

“Gravity is the dominant force in these experiments down here. But in free fall, all of a sudden you’ve eliminated this enormous whopping gravitational force,� he says. “All these other little details begin to be important.�

6. Lundblad will work remotely.

Lundblad created an experimental sequence that the Cold Atom Lab will run. “Within a couple days, I will get a data dump,� he said. “The data comes in the form of, essentially, images of these cold clouds, tagged with something like, ‘OK, you designed experimental sequence 455 with all these particular parameters, and here’s the picture that resulted.’�

7. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students will be involved.

Like many ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ science faculty, Lundblad involves students deeply in the research. When the Cold Atom Lab data comes in, “I’ll want to probably have a few late nights with some of my thesis students in the fall, trying to figure out, ‘Did that do what we thought it would? Is this looking like some of the effects we’re looking for?’â€�

Nathan Lundblad, assistant professor of physics, studies atomic behavior at ultracold temperatures. (Chris Milliman for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

When NASA sends its new Cold Atom Laboratory up to the International Space Station in 2016, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ physicist Nathan Lundblad will be watching it go with more than routine scientific interest.

An atomic physicist, Lundblad is one of just a handful of scientists chosen by NASA to perform research with the Cold Atom Laboratory, a refrigerator-sized apparatus designed to create the coldest known environment in the universe — one ten-billionth of a degree above absolute zero.

.

Lundblad, who studies atomic behavior at ultra-cold temperatures, is principal investigator for one of seven NASA research projects that will employ the new facility. Moreover, Lundblad is the only principal investigator representing an undergraduate liberal arts college in the CAL project. The seven projects will share a total of about $12.7 million over a four- to five-year period.

Nathan Lundblad: What NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory means for students

When Lundblad arrived at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in 2009, he and his students established the first apparatus at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ for conducting this kind of research. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and Amherst College are the only two undergraduate liberal arts colleges in the U.S. with such facilities.

When he first learned of the CAL opportunity, Lundblad saw his way to pursue research previously out of reach, so to speak. “The idea that I proposed to NASA has been popping around in my head for some years,” he says, “but it’s virtually impossible to do in the presence of gravity.”

News of the award sent Lundblad “absolutely over the moon with delight,” he says. “I’ll have a chance to do science that I couldn’t do otherwise. I’m excited for my students, that they’ll have opportunities to do research at this level. And it raises the profile of science at liberal arts colleges like ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ to be able to participate in work like this.”

Nathan Lundblad: What NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory means for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½

At extreme low temperatures, the familiar physical attributes of classical mechanics are supplanted by the counterintuitive and seemingly weird behaviors of quantum mechanics — under which, for example, atomic particles can resemble waves as much as particles, and a given object can be in more than one place at the same time.

Lundblad works with Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). Named for the physicists who first postulated their existence in the 1920s, Satyendra Bose and Albert Einstein, these are ultracold clouds of gas whose atoms lose their individual characteristics and behave more like a unified wave.

Here on the planet, gravity curtails how cold an environment can be maintained in the vacuum chambers used to create BECs. Because gravity’s pull aboard the space station is so faint, the CAL will be able to reach temperatures lower than can be established in an earthly lab.

In collaboration with Courtney Lannert, a theoretical physicist at Smith and the University of Massachuetts Amherst, and David Aveline, an experimental physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Lundblad has proposed a set of experiments to observe properties of certain types of BECs that can’t be created in Earth’s gravitational field.

“I’m interested in studying how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to a BEC based on its shape, and certain shapes are really tough to make in gravity. I’m looking to make a BEC in the form of a shell or bubble, and then study how quantum mechanics applies to a system that is two-dimensional, but without a border, like the surface of the Earth.”

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Lundblad will work with a postdoctoral researcher and with his students to design experiments for the CAL. That work is expected to begin this May and continue at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ through 2019.

In the Lundblad lab at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, the apparatus for conjuring up a Bose-Einstein condensate occupies a large table covered with a mass of wires, tubing and hardware at whose heart is a vacuum chamber and a set of lasers. He and his students are accustomed to attending this machinery hands-on — a degree of control they’ll have to surrender with the CAL, which they will operate remotely, with just limited intervention by the space station astronauts.

“The astronauts aboard the ISS will be able to make small changes, but they are very busy up there. So in general the biggest challenge is running this apparatus remotely, and that’s totally different from how we do things on Earth.”

Interviewed for the story, Clough tells NASA writer Cynthia O’Carroll how he met Petro.

“I was substituting for another faculty member and decided to discuss the geology of the moon,” Clough recalls. “Noah introduced himself as being an enthusiastic fan of space exploration with plans to major in geology. That day we began a conversation about the geology of the moon that never stopped.”

During his time at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Petro did a summer internship through NASA’s Planetary Geology and Geophysics Undergraduate Research Program and worked with the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz. He also was also active in the Lewiston-Auburn community, teaching children and adults about the glacial “stories” that can be read from the rock formations on the Androscoggin River’s Great Falls.