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On August 12-13, 24 students from the West Coast cohort of NASA's Student Airborne Research Program (SARP) gathered at University of California, Irvine (UCI) to present their final research to a room of mentors, professors, family, and NASA personnel.
SARP is an eight-week summer internship for undergraduate students, hosted in two cohorts: SARP West operates out of Ontario Airport and UCI in California, while SARP East operates out of Wallops Flight Facility and Christopher Newport University in Virginia. After research introductions from faculty, instrument scientists, and staff, students are assigned one of four research categories: for SARP West, these categories are aerosols, terrestrial ecology, whole air sampling (WAS), or oceans. Each group is led by a dedicated researcher who is a specialist in that field, along with a graduate student mentor. Over the course of the summer, each intern develops their own research project as they conduct field work, collect data, and fly onboard either the P-3 or B200 NASA flying laboratories.
"You really see them become scientists in their own right," said Stephanie Olaya, Program Manager for SARP East and West. "A lot of these projects are PhD level: they are researching and making novel discoveries for the field. They don't even realize the magnitude of the things they've accomplished until the end of the program."
