#KATHERINE JOHNSON NASA CHALLENGER VERIFICATION#
#KATHERINE JOHNSON NASA CHALLENGER CODE#

#KATHERINE JOHNSON NASA CHALLENGER CODE#

“It was amazing - it was really early in the morning, so my mentors got to the base early and escorted me and about 15 other interns in front of the Vehicle Assembly Building to watch,” says Novak, whose role at the Kennedy Space Center involved writing code for Command and Control Launch Systems. Novak completed her second internship in spring 2018 with the Active Response Gravity Offload System at Johnson Space Center, and her third in summer 2018 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where she witnessed the launches of two SpaceX Falcon 9s. Upon her return, she buried herself in her sophomore coursework, including a circuit analysis class with Miguel Acevedo, Regents Professor of electrical engineering, and a class where she learned about the hardware description language VDHL that helped with future NASA internships. “The NASA employees were very nice, and my mentor there was always around to answer my questions.” “Up to this point I had taken two C++ programming language classes at UNT and felt that prepared me for the challenge,” says Novak, whose primary responsibility during her internship was to review computer code.

#KATHERINE JOHNSON NASA CHALLENGER VERIFICATION#

Though she was just a freshman when she received word of her acceptance into the 2017 program at NASA’s Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility - created in response to the 1984 Challenger explosion - she felt prepared for the role thanks to her engineering classes at UNT and the support from those at NASA. It was at Johnson where she was able to network with engineers, scientists and computer technicians who told her about internships and co-ops for students. Novak’s high school experience at the Johnson Space Center is what initially led her to apply for the NASA internship.

I dropped my computer and ran to tell my parents,” says Novak, who first became involved with NASA as a high school student in Hamshire and member of the Texas High School Aerospace Scholars program, through which she was invited to spend a week at the Johnson Space Center. It was for the summer of 2017 and, at first, I thought it was a fake. “I landed my first NASA internship offer via email while on spring break. This year, she is spending the spring and summer semesters learning more about engineering at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston as a member of the agency’s co-op program.Įven two years later, she still remembers the shock of receiving her first internship.

So far, Novak has completed three internships with NASA and, before graduating from UNT, plans to finish three more. “Whether it’s a printed circuit board that I designed or a giant project like a new robot for the International Space Station, or maybe even a Mars rover I touched in some way,” Novak, an electrical engineering major in UNT’s College of Engineering, says “I want to see my projects travel to space.” UNT junior Morgan Novak doesn’t want to go to space.

Katherine johnson nasa challenger