Reaching for the Moon

DU Student Team Soars in Nasa Space Design Project, Earns 2nd Place Honor

Long nights, a lot of math, and a healthy helping of teamwork earned a group of moon-minded students high praise in the 2024 NASA MINDS program. 

A panel of NASA engineers, serving as judges, presented the team with a second-place award for their technical research paper, which outlined the design, building and testing of a topographic radar sensing device to analyze the surface of the moon’s south pole.

The project was funded through NASA’s Minority University Research Program (MUREP) Innovative New Designs for Space, also known as NASA MINDS. The program encourages selected college students from across the country to design projects that could be used to assist with NASA’s Artemis moon exploration mission. 

Judges noted that the DU team’s research was “result-driven,” well-organized, and clear. The design itself showed “an interesting and potentially very useful project, directly applicable to Artemis,” one judge wrote.

While the device itself isn’t lunar-ready, it was able to collect data down on Earth and it gave the team of 11 students a unique look into the world of designing for space exploration. 

“It was an educational journey for the members of our team,” said Pablo Cesar Bedolla Ortiz, the project’s lead and a mathematics major who is also studying mechanical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. “We learned a lot, and we were able to make this system work autonomously, which was a success.”

The experience has also opened new doors to future careers. Three members say they landed prestigious internships thanks to their involvement with NASA MINDS. Bedolla Ortiz joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a federally funded research center, as a member of an engineering team; Julio Rodriguez, co-lead and a computer science major, interned at Argonne National Laboratory as a research aide; and Aaron Jimenez Gomez, a math and computer science major, was a computer engineering intern at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

“Paving the way for more Latinos to go into STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) is something I am really focused on,” Jimenez Gomez noted. “I hope I can inspire people like that.”

Bedolla Ortiz said he would like to see younger, traditionally underrepresented students become more engaged in the study of STEM. He has proposed an initiative that would provide educational opportunities through partnerships between Chicago area schools, NASA and Dominican University. 

“We want to engage a younger audience to work on these kind of engineering projects,” he said. “For us, it was a very eye-opening experience. I think a younger audience can benefit, too.”