Astronomical Student Helps Plan NASA Mission

What did you do on your summer break at the College? Sophomore geology major Tyler Glymph planned a NASA mission to land a rover on the dwarf planet Ceres, which lies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. His 12-week online internship with NASA, conducted in conjunction with Arizona State University, allowed 15 undergraduate STEM students to do some serious hands-on learning. 

“I never really understood how NASA started a project because all you really see are the later stages,” says Glymph, who is minoring in astronomy and biology. “But it was really cool to see the beginning part and how many people it takes to plan out one small mission.”

To his surprise, the 14 other interns elected Glymph to lead the mission. His responsibilities included making sure the science team meshed with the engineering and programmatic teams to create a preliminary design review, a highly detailed mission description.

Lest you think this was some sort of hypothetical mission just to teach would-be astronomers the ins and outs of NASA, think again. This is a real mission that NASA hopes to undertake in the next decade or so.

“The main challenges were working as a team,” says Glymph. “Having to collaborate and create one big product is difficult. We also had to be creative. Going to Ceres is not as concrete as going to the moon since no one has ever done a mission to Ceres before.”

Raised in Columbia, S.C., Glymph became interested in space exploration after seeing WALL-E, the 2008 Pixar movie about the last robot on a dystopian Earth. But it was the human touch that brought him to Charleston. 

“I did a tour and got to meet some of the really cool professors,” he says. “I felt more like a person than a number at a big university. I felt valued. President Hsu told me himself that I would be awarded the Colonial Scholarship.”

Glymph is also a 1967 Legacy Scholar and a Charleston Fellow, and the financial assistance he received was another big attraction for the Honors College student, who just happens to speak Mandarin (he visited China in the eighth grade). He is already working on another NASA project in conjunction with the Medical University of South Carolina, doing research into spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome, a swelling in the back of the eye that astronauts experience. 

“My goal is to be one of the first people of color to start a private space company,” he says. 

Indeed, Glymph is on a mission in more ways than one.