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IMPACT TOOL SUITE FOR MEDICAL SYSTEM TRADE ANALYSES AND DECISION SUPPORT

You must apply through the external link. This position is virtual. Please apply by July 11, 2022 for best consideration.

How often do astronauts become ill or injured in space, and why? What do we need to include the medical system for space missions to keep the crew alive and healthy? How can we design and plan a safer Lunar or Mars mission?

A suite of systems engineering tools, collectively known as IMPACT (not an acronym), will aid in the decision making process for design and development of such a human health and performance system for future deep space missions. The IMPACT tool suite provides a data-driven means to inform human health and performance risk mitigation during resource-constrained exploration mission development. The tool suite consists of input databases for medical evidence and medical resources and capabilities, a probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) engine, post-processing tools, and a SysML model of a candidate medical system on which detailed trade studies and analyses are performed in order to answer specific questions related to trade studies during the planning phases of deep space missions.

IMPACT answers questions about specific missions, such as: What medical conditions are likely to occur? Given a fixed mass and volume allocation, what is the best medical system NASA can fly to minimize medical risk facotrs? What happens if we make changes to the medical system--would those changes raise or lower medical risk? What if we change the mission itself--how do those changes affect medical risk?

The intern(s) selected for this project would be running the tools, setting up, executing and analyzing the results of simulations that represent use case for various trade study scenarios. The intern would be reporting the results in Excel and Tableau. Example outputs might plot risk of loss of crew life versus mass allocation for the medical system, the effect of modifying the incidence of a particular condition with a countermeasure, the effect of changing the mission timeline or crew, etc. The intern(s) would be building on knowledge gathering work performed by previous students in the summer of 2021 and the Spring of 2022 with a legacy data set, now using the new Evidence Library that will be available to the project in January 2022. There may also be opportunites for code development.

The Area of Expertise for this internship is • Physical Sciences and Biomedical Technologies.

Eligibility requirements:

  • U.S. Citizen
  • Cumulative 3.0 GPA (on a 4.0 scale)
  • Full-time students (high school through graduate)
  • Enrollment in a degree granting institution
  • 16 years of age at the time of application (no exceptions)