A magnetic field
Man may one day live on the moon and area students had a chance this summer to help make that happen.
Roughly 35 high school and college interns at Packer Engineering in Naperville got six weeks of hands-on experience that included a chance to perform experiments for NASA.
"Having the students involved in this and telling them why I'm involved in this, you can see the spark transfer to the next generation," said Peter Schubert, senior director for space and energy research. "And that's a very important thing for Packer Engineering, to inspire the next generation of engineers."
The Students in Technology and Engineering at Packer program, or STEP, is funded by grants from the state Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity and Packer Foundation.
Nick DiGiovanni, a science teacher at Naperville Central and Tim Kulak, who recently retired from teaching at West Aurora High School, run the program and hope to develop students' skills in four areas -- oral and written communication, experimentation and project realization.
They said after college, the best of the bunch may later return to the company as full-time engineers.
This year's lunar experiments are part of Schubert's research grant from NASA to try to find ways to extract oxygen from moon rocks.
As an offshoot of the project, he asked the interns to try to pull iron out of lunar soil that can be used for building materials and ultimately to create a railway around the poles of the moon that would be driven by solar power.
Interns created large magnets and carried them above replicated lunar soil to see how much iron they could pick up.
College of DuPage student Christopher Barth blew the engineers and fellow interns away with the power of his magnet -- a parallel path design that he found through research on the Internet.
Not only did it pick up the tiny pieces of iron in the soil, it also was able to lift a large metal beam.
Barth said he enjoyed the chance to interact with engineers throughout his time at Packer.
"There have been several here who spent anywhere from a few minutes to a couple hours just sharing the things they know and the experiences they've had and that's really … given me some direction as to the path of education I want to choose," he said.
Other projects involved a plasma cutter, cleaning an airplane cylinder, auto safety analysis, creating computer software and fire analysis.
The group also took field trips to an Illinois Society of Professional Engineers convention and to Argonne National Laboratory to see nanotechnology, fuel cells and a recycling area.
Swagateeka Panigrahy, a senior at Naperville Central, wants to go into medicine but said the engineering experience will still give her a leg up among college applicants.
"Obviously Packer doesn't do a lot with medicine, but I think it's more of a lab process that got me going," she said. "I could come into medicine with a different viewpoint than maybe other kids would have."
Recent Central graduate Kristin Chan is now a freshman at the University of Illinois studying nuclear engineering. She said the internship taught her how to apply the physics and math lessons she had learned at Central.
"When you're working on something you actually have to push through it and figure it out yourself," she said, "instead of 'Oh, I read this in a textbook.' "