Acclaimed Florida Tech Student Receives Space Grant Honor

MELBOURNE, FLA.—Florida Institute of Technology undergraduate, Marie McBride, who will earn her bachelor’s degree in space sciences with an option in planetary science this December, was recently chosen to make a Florida Space Grant presentation to all NASA Space Grant directors. Her presentation is “Restoring Apollo: Bringing Lunar Data Back to Life.” Just one of twelve selected for this honor, McBride was funded by a Florida Space Grant to attend a meeting in Charleston, N.C. to make the presentation.

McBride’s work was based on research funded by the NASA Florida Space Grant Consortium and conducted as an intern at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. As a team member of the Apollo Lunar Restoration Project for two and a half years, she helped restore historic data from a dust and radiation sensor placed on the surface of the moon by the Apollo astronauts more than 40 years ago. She is currently writing two papers based on her work. One is about the data retrieval process and the other is on the moon’s dust environment.

The future planetary scientist will begin work in spring 2014 at the Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego where she will be part of the Mars Curiosity Rover Camera Team for six months. She will start earning her doctoral degree in planetary geology next fall.

McBride received the 2013 Northrop Grumman Champion Award for the College of Science at the university’s Northrop Grumman Student Design Showcase last April. It was for her work, “First-Time Analysis of Restored Apollo 14 and 15 DTREM Instrument Data.” She was also an intern for the Mars Science Laboratory team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.