Linked Published ICES 2025 Conference Paper: Refined Method for Determining Adhesive Forces of Dust on Aerospace Materials 

During my NASA Johnson Space Center co-op in the Lunar Dust Mitigation group, I conducted research under Dr. Joshua Litofsky on quantifying the adhesive forces of lunar dust across 16 aerospace materials for the Gateway program. I served as the hardware operator and test engineer for constructing and operating a custom vacuum-chamber apparatus that spun material coupons at up to 200 G to measure dust adhesion. My work involved precision mass measurements before and after lunar dust simulant exposure, optical-microscopy analysis using a Keyence VHX-7000 system, LabVIEW and Arduino motor control of the rotational systems, and troubleshooting all electronics and vacuum-control hardware. After the testing campaign, I was in charge of the initial graphing of the simulant adhesion forces as a function of acceleration at various G forces. This research, published in the 2025 International Conference on Environmental Systems, provided one of NASA’s first validated datasets on lunar-dust adhesion used by industry partners including Blue Origin and SpaceX for dust-transport modeling and material selection.