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  • WHERE I WORK

From high-altitude balloons to Moon missions

With support from a NASA education programme, mechanical-engineering student Jessica Frantz hopes to launch an aerospace career.
  1. James Mitchell Crow

    1. James Mitchell Crow is a is a freelance writer in Melbourne, Australia

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Jessica Frantz holding an atmospheric sampling receiver

Jessica Frantz is an undergraduate student in mechanical engineering at Arizona State University in Tempe. Credit: Arsh Nadkarni

It might look like someone made it in their garage, but this instrument is a really powerful directional antenna. Fellow students and I at Phoenix College in Arizona designed and built it for ASCEND, a NASA programme that funds science-education projects. In ASCEND, student teams from across the state build scientific instruments to attach to a high-altitude balloon.

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Nature 585, 474 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02608-7

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