Missy Gaddy
a moonwalker
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Wired magazine calls it a ubiquitous enemy. Astronauts describe it as the number one environmental problem‌on the moon. If humans ever intend to expand our presence on its surface, one thing has the power to stop us. Dust. The moon’s corrosive dust is an astronomical terror that NASA wants to control, and Missy, an applied mathematics and computer science major here, was one of a lucky few students chosen to spend 12 weeks at the Goddard Space Flight Center trying to find a way to tame the microscopic beast. Along with students from schools like Johns Hopkins and MIT, Missy researched samples returned to earth by the Apollo 17 mission. They were able to break new ground that challenged previously accepted models for dealing with the pesky particles. Missy credits her professors for helping her identify the internship and apply for funding. They also helped arrange for her to present her findings to national experts at the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics and the Society for Applied Industrial Mathematics Conference in Boston. Missy also received a second-place award for presenting her research at the Consortium for Computing Sciences Conference in 2012.