May 8, 2024
NASA Selects Mesa College Student Samuel Brown for Europa Clipper Intern Program
Samuel Brown joins Mesa alumni Jonny Kim, Mario Romero, and more working to advance
space exploration
By Emma Rodriguez
Written by Office of Communications staff Emma Rodriguez, with information from Original Press Release courtesy of JPL Life
On May 2, 2024, NASA announced that San Diego Mesa College student Samuel Brown will
be among the first 40 undergraduate students to participate in the inaugural NASA
Europa ICONS (Inspiring Clipper: Opportunities for Next-Generation Scientists) internship
program. He will work with NASA scientists to support the agency’s Europa Clipper
mission- which will scour Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, for signs of life under
its ice-covered oceans.
In October 2024, the Europa Clipper mission is expected to launch an orbiter across
millions of miles to the icy moon of Europa. This moon orbits Jupiter- the largest
planet in the solar system. It was discovered by Galileo Galilei, the Italian astronomer
and inventor of the telescope whose discover of Europa and three other large Jupiter
moons proved that the Earth was not the center of the universe. Europa gained further
importance when, in the 1950s, astronomers realized it may have water ice. And, in
1989, the Galileo spacecraft mission discovered that, beneath the surface of Europa,
there may be an ocean with more water than all of Earth’s ocean combined. The Clipper
mission will orbit Europa an attempt to identify whether, in that icy ocean, there
exists the potential for life.
Sam will be paired with a mentor, one of the incredible scientists from institutions
worldwide that are contributing to this project, to work on this groundbreaking mission
from June 3- August 9, 2024. He will be part of the only cohort of interns to work
with the spacecraft while it is on Earth.
Additionally, the internship comes with a $12,000 stipend for the duration of the
program. Sam will also visit NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California
for a two-day meeting with his fellow students and mentors.
Other Mesa graduates have gone onto space success. Alumni Jonny Kim was accepted to
NASA Astronaut Group 22, and was selected in 2020 to be one of seventeen astronauts
to train for a possible Moon landing. Fellow Mesa Alum Mario Romero is an Assembly,
Integration, and Test Engineer for Intuitive Machines who worked on and named the
Odysseus Lunar Lander, which became the first privately owned spacecraft to touch
down on the lunar surface when it landed in February 2024.
Sam is an active student and member of the community at Mesa. He serves as a STEM
Peer Mentor for math and physics courses, works at the Tutoring Center on campus,
and is an Aerospace Engineering Major. He plans to transfer to a UC school once he
completes this semester, his final at Mesa.
“I love all things related to space and rocketry,” stated Sam. “I’ve really loved
my time here at Mesa, mostly because of all the wonderful people here.”
For more information on the Europa ICONS program, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/planetary-science/europa-clipper-icons-internships/
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Tags: Internship, Peer Mentoring, STEM, LatestNews, #students, Press Release, NASA
