SPACE EXPLORER Aerospace engineering student Jillian Gloria strives to make the most of her STEM education and hopes one day to become an astronaut.
J illian Gloria of Orlando has always been inspired by space exploration,
and as a junior pursuing aerospace engineering at UCF, she has held multiple research positions and worked with industry as she prepares to someday become an astronaut. Her most recent project came out of her involvement with UCF physics Assistant Professor William Kaden’s Research Group where she had the opportunity to study water evolution processes that take place on the moon. Within this group, Gloria focused on developing hardware used to study the changes in chemistry on models of the moon and increase efficiency in thin film growth. These models were made of aluminosilicates minerals that play an important role in finding water on the moon. The lab simulated the effects of space weathering on the moon by growing aluminosilicate thin-films 10 | MOMENTUM Fall 2021
in a vacuum in the lab and exposing them to different forms of radiation testing. This work led to a coauthorship on a NASA-funded paper recently published in the Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology. The understanding of such processes gleaned from this type of work will help NASA plan exploration missions by providing an improved map to search for water on the moon, says Kaden. “Understanding how water evolves on the moon is one of the big questions scientists must answer as we look to move life off Earth,” Gloria says. “This research could have big implications in the future of solar radiation as it pertains to using the moon’s surface water to create a stable environment for human life there.” Gloria also will be expanding her research alongside Professor Seetha Raghavan in partnership with the German Aerospace Center. Gloria
will study materials that experience stresses during flights that hit Mach 5 or more, specifically spacecraft. She begins her work this semester at UCF thanks to a National Science Foundation Research Fellowship, and she expects to complete her work in Germany this summer. “I am so grateful to be at UCF,” Gloria says. “It has given me the chance to work on real NASA missions, but even more importantly provided me the opportunity to work with the very scientists I look up to.” She documents her research on an Instagram account, @enjillneer, which she started to encourage others to pursue a STEM degree. “I strongly believe there is a huge gap in the STEM initiative between inspiring kids at a young age and when they get to college and begin pursuing a STEM degree,” she says. “So often they begin to fail classes and want to drop out.” Her own hard work as a trasnfer
