A team of engineering students and recent alumni from USF showcased their innovative skills at NASA’s Micro-g Neutral Buoyancy Experiment Design Teams (Micro-g NExT) challenge held at Johnson Space Center in Houston this week. The team, known as CIRCE (Contact Instrument for Regolith Collection and Evaluation), launched the project during a Bioastronautics course in Fall 2024.
Their proposal outlined a novel contact sampling device for lunar geological samples during extravehicular activities (EVAs) based on design constraints provided by NASA . Based on the proposal, the team was selected to work with NASA engineers including USF alumnus Tyler Isaacs (BS Mechanical Engineering 2015) who also participated in the Micro-g NExT program in 2015 as a USF student. Together, the students designed, built, and tested the CIRCE device at the Johnson Space Center using dry lunar dust simulant and with sand in NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab.
The team also met up with Ross Turner, BME graduate student, who had just started his NASA internship at JSC for the summer.