TODAY WAS AMAZING! I was so happy to finally meet Dr. Thomas-Keprta today. She is a great mentor. She gave me a tour of her office and the ARES Building at NASA. The JSC Labs are amazing! I got to see the Transmission Electron Microscope and also the Scanning Electron Microscope. After the small tour, we went upstairs into one of the labs to look at the famous Allen Hills Meteorite. Dr. Keprta showed me how to use the microscope and I got the chance to look at Allen Hills up close. The image was spectacular. The orange looking carbonate globules looked amazing. Words can't come close to describe the beauty. Next, we got to look at the Nakhla Martian Meteorite. Right when I thought it couldn't get better, it got better. I got to look at the fusion crust on Nakhla under the microscope. The fusion crust forms when the meteorite is entering the atmosphere and it creates sort of a glass coating on it. I got to take a look at it and it was mesmerizing. The images I saw under the microscope were definitely the prettiest thing I have ever seen in my entire life. After a few hours, my mentor, her colleague, and I went for lunch. It was fun talking to them and they told me some great stories about NASA. The next thing we did was take our Nakhla samples and went to do some SEM analysis. Before we did that though, we had to paint the meteorite with platinum so it would be easier for us to identify features on the sample. As we were performing the analysis, we found a very bizarre feature on Nakhla. My mentor was so shocked and told me that she had never seen something like this before. We spent a couple of hours looking at that feature and looked at the chemistry of it. We inferred that it was a really weird clay formation. We spent the next couple of hours spending more time looking at images and we found a region really high in carbon. This was exciting because carbon is essential for organic chemistry. Tomorrow we will be spending more time further investigating the sample. Apart from the lab work, I also have some really exciting news. I GOT SELECTED FOR THE ONSITE EXPERIENCE FOR THE NASA HIGH SCHOOL AEROSPACE SCHOLARS PROGRAM. So, I will be coming to Houston again in the summer to work more at JSC. The first day was a blast and I can't wait for the rest of the week!



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