Welcome to the Space Age

Jaime Winston BA ’22, Marketing & Communications

How Galaxies Take Shape

Imagine you’re just a tiny speck on a grain of sand located somewhere in a sandbar the size of North America.

That’s similar to the way you are situated within the Milky Way, according to research conducted by Weber State Assistant Professor of Physics Rachel McClure.

When most people think of galaxies, she said, they picture planets orbiting stars, which in turn orbit the center of the galaxy, forming a single disk. “So, if you think about a very big sombrero, and you kind of imagine it falling over your eyes, you would be looking onto the plane of the disc,” she said. “And that’s the way we see the Milky Way across our sky.”

However, stars begin tugging on one another gravitationally. Over time, they start to cluster together, causing their orbits to lose their circular shape.

“Instead of being circular, they’re kind of oblong and oval-shaped,” McClure said. “And that clumps into what we call a stellar bar.”

McClure said that the same bar shape has been observed in our galaxy through researching the motion of stars and their physical locations. And why does that matter?

“I think humans could be a little bit more in touch with the system we are part of, and the study of the physics of our galaxy is a direct connection to really fundamental things,” she said.

McClure has published research focusing on how stellar bars and classical bulges (spherical groups of stars formed early in a galaxy’s history) evolve together — often with the bar borrowing stars from the bulge to add to its orbit — and how some groups of stars can even be pushed out of the bar shape when they are spinning at a certain speed.

She also compares bar shapes found in early galaxies, rich in gas but with few stars, to those in more evolved galaxies, as well as how stellar bars move more slowly over time.

McClure conducts much of her research alongside Weber State students. Soon, she plans to have her students help study the chemical properties of different types of galaxies, including younger galaxies with more gas and older ones with more stars.

Her research on galaxies evolved from work she completed as an undergraduate at the University of Colorado Boulder, in which she observed our closest star, the sun. She later earned her doctorate in astronomy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she began studying large clusters of stars before transitioning to galaxy evolution. While she has used all sorts of tools in her research — radio telescopes, interferometric arrays, and large radio dishes — she said she has primarily used computational simulations that examine how the distribution of stars evolves as gravity affects all the matter in the galaxy.

She teaches her students to make the simulations as well.

“You always want to go back to observations, but using simulations lets you kind of probe specific questions,” McClure said. “Like, if I give it more gas, how does this evolve differently?”

To make direct observations, she analyzes footage captured by the James Webb Space Telescope and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope with students. And she joins them in making observations through Weber State’s Keith Terry Palen Observatory on the roof of Tracy Hall Science Center.

Through the observatory telescope, students have seen nebulous gas regions of the galaxy and exoplanets (those orbiting stars outside of our solar system). It’s all part of an effort to teach students about a very large system that they help make up.

“I think that learning about space is the same as learning about where we live,” said Tyler Knight, an astrophysics major taking classes with McClure. “You have to know where you came from to know where you’re going to go.”

Rocket to MARS

Earth’s atmosphere shows spacecraft no mercy upon reentry.

As they plunge toward Earth, friction in the atmosphere generates heat that would easily incinerate conventional flight materials.

That’s why the Miller Advanced Research & Solutions Center, a WSU partnership with the Utah Legislature; the U.S. Air Force; 47G, a nonprofit organization focused on strengthening Utah’s aerospace and defense ecosystem; and the aerospace and defense industry, continues to develop stronger materials to shield crafts as they hit the atmosphere.

MARS researchers test those materials in a chamber near the exhaust plume of a hybrid rocket motor, which generates sufficient speed and heat to simulate reentry conditions.

“You’re going from many thousands of miles per hour of velocity to basically safe speeds to fly and land on earth,” said Dustin Birch, WSU Miller Endowed Chair and professor in the mechanical engineering department. “So you have to dissipate all that kinetic energy, and so it turns into heat.”

The first version of the hybrid rocket motor started as a class project for Birch’s senior students. Now, with funding from MARS, Birch has hired undergraduate and graduate students to work on future generations of the motor. The team is currently developing a version of the motor that will take the exhaust plume from supersonic (faster than the speed of sound) to hypersonic (at least five times the speed of sound).

To measure exhaust velocity, Birch said he and his students incorporated instrumentation in the motor to track information.

Additionally, he said the motor has a “feedback control system,” which adjusts the amount of fuel used and other factors to keep the exhaust plume at a consistent speed and temperature.

“MARS also plans on creating actual rocket nozzles out of different materials as well,” said Morgan Britton, a mechanical engineering major working with Birch. “So, you’ll have materials that are being put inside the plume that comes out of the rocket, and then you’ll also have rocket nozzles that are being fabricated out of different materials that will go inside the chamber.”

Britton began working as procurement manager for Birch’s lab at the beginning of the fall 2025 semester. “Basically, I keep track of schedules, I make Gantt charts on our progress, and basically just make sure everyone is up-to-date on their progress, and everyone has something to work on.”

Her interest in rockets was piqued when she was attending Northridge High School in Layton and saw footage of NASA’s Perseverance rover take off toward Mars.

She said understanding the control system and concepts like thrust — the reaction force to the rocket’s output that would typically send one to space — can be difficult to understand, but her learning is well supported. “I have really, really great professors as my mentors, so they take the time to explain everything to us. They do a really good job, and they’re always there for us.”

Birch said students like Britton are gaining valuable experience for their careers. “This is a bona fide design project that has an expectation and an outcome that is needed,” he said. “The students learn how to work as a team. They learn how to take what they’ve learned in their courses and apply it to real engineering problems. They learn how to function in an organizational structure. This really has a tremendous amount of value, I think, in preparing students for their careers.”

While Birch’s students improve the hybrid rocket motor at the Ogden campus, other students utilize its capabilities at the MARS Center. Tylin Waters, a MARS intern and a manufacturing engineering technology major, said it has been a dream job.

“There have been a lot of pinch-me moments,” he said.

Waters and other students at the facility create, test, and analyze the materials. Recently, he took on the task of creating computer models to help determine the best placement for the motor in the chamber where testing is conducted. “It’s very hands-on,” he said. “I’ve always joked that this was the first job I ever had where I actually get excited to talk about what I do.”

Benjamin Garcia, MARS executive director, said the hybrid rocket motor at MARS now emits a flame that is only about a foot and a half long and about two to three inches in diameter. However, it’s also about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit and flows at Mach 2.5.

At MARS, Garcia’s team makes the carbon-fiber-based shielding that they later test in the plume. They are also working with industry partners interested in sending crafts into space.

With the soon-to-be hypersonic hybrid rocket motor, MARS will work with a company called Reditus Space to participate in Project UTAH (Universal Test Applications Hypersonics), which will meet defense needs by developing materials that can withstand rapid in-and-out-of-orbit transitions. MARS is also working with companies interested in purifying pharmaceuticals in space, where microgravity aids the purifying process.

“Space economy is going to triple in the next 20 years,” said Guy Letendre, vice president of strategic initiatives at 47G, which brings academic institutions and aerospace and defense companies together.

In a 2024 report, management consulting firm McKinsey & Company estimated the global space economy will be worth $1.8 trillion by 2035 (adjusted for inflation), rising from $630 billion in 2023. Letendre said the MARS Center is at the forefront of that trend.

Waters is considering staying at MARS while working on a master’s degree after graduating in 2027. He’s glad he has the chance to work on real aerospace solutions, not just complete the grunt work given to students at some internships.

“That’s not what engineers do,” he said. “Here, we’re getting to do stuff that engineers do.”

Tracking Meteors

Eric D. McKinney BS ’24 gazed in amazement at the night sky through his telescope as a teen growing up in Liberty, Utah, about 20 miles northwest of Ogden, away from the city’s light pollution.

He recalls examining the craters on the moon.

“Even though it is orbiting our Earth all the time, I think it is easy to forget it is there, but it really is a stunning celestial body,” he said. “The moon’s craters make you appreciate the Earth’s atmosphere — since most meteors burn up in the atmosphere before reaching the Earth’s surface.”

Years later, he took his sense of wonder to WSU, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and business administration minor.

Today, he manages the StarFall software, which monitors the sky for large meteors that release incredible amounts of energy, otherwise known as bolides. While injuries from bolides are rare, McKinney said it is usually not meteorites impacting the Earth’s surface that cause the most damage, but the resulting sound waves.

A prime example is the bolide that fell over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, generating a sound wave that shattered glass and wrought chaos over hundreds of miles below. About 7,200 buildings were damaged and about 1,500 people were hospitalized.

“Because these meteors release so much energy, they can be confused for international aggression from other actors,” McKinney said. “Consequently, NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office is very interested in detecting these quickly and appropriately classifying them as ‘natural Earth impactors.’”

NASA reached out to the Space Dynamics Laboratory at Utah State University, where McKinney began working after earning his master’s and doctorate in statistics at the university, to develop a meteor detection prototype into a production-worthy piece of software. McKinney served as lead engineer during development and is now part of the team managing the system.

StarFall detects bolides seen by sensors onboard National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellites, which were originally built to detect lightning over much of the western hemisphere.

McKinney began contributing to the StarFall team in 2022, engineering the algorithms to detect and calculate bolide information. Users can now see a bolide’s location and time of peak intensity, total radiated energy, and more. StarFall can also create an alert to let users know when a bolide is detected. “It can still fire off false positives, but the number of false positives is dramatically reduced from the original prototype,” he said.

On Sept. 2, 2025, the laboratory released StarFall to the public. While some setup is required, the software doesn’t require a supercomputer and can be run on most personal computers and laptops.

While demonstrating the software, McKinney pointed to a bolide that was seen in the sky just southeast of Atlanta, Georgia, last year. Moments after its discovery, the software aided NASA in notifying the community that it was a “natural Earth impactor.”

Since the European Space Agency has a similar satellite, McKinney said perhaps StarFall’s coverage could one day be expanded.

McKinney said working with StarFall has given him a sense of appreciation for all of the engineers, scientists, and collaborators who came together to make it possible.

He said he relied on math concepts he learned at Weber State many times while working on the software.

He’s also thankful for the foundation WSU gave him.

“I had the opportunity to work on undergraduate research in graph theory during one of my summers between my undergraduate semesters,” he said. “It was a great experience that enabled me to do exploratory work similar to graduate school research. I got to present the results at the Utah Conference of Undergraduate Research, and it helped me apply for graduate school.”

McKinney returns to WSU about once per year to present to students the material that the Space Dynamics Laboratory has released to the public.

“It’s an honor to come back and encourage students to continue on with their undergraduate education,” he said. While students he speaks to may not go on to do bolide research, he shows them how the skills they are learning can be applied across a variety of fields and the skies are full of brilliant possibilities.

Healthcare Takes Orbit

Without Earth’s protective magnetic field, astronauts can be exposed to cosmic radiation causing cancer, damaged DNA, and central nervous system problems. Add to this the effects of microgravity, and potential for sickness increases.

Luckily, Bharath Babu Nunna, WSU Ambrose Amos Shaw Endowed Chair and assistant professor of mechanical engineering, has their health in mind.

“Space radiation, microgravity, and extended mission durations pose significant risks to human health, including cancer, immune suppression, and systemic inflammation,” he said. “In such conditions, access to comprehensive medical care is limited, making a compact, point-of-care diagnostic device crucial for real-time health monitoring.”

Nunna is collaborating with researchers from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Hackensack University Medical Center, and Weill Cornell Medical College to create such a device. With funding from the National Science Foundation, the team is in the planning stages for Food and Drug Administration approval and clinical trials. They hope to complete trials and receive approval in the next two to three years. Versions of the devices, not adapted for space travel, would be sold commercially for patients to monitor their health.

Originally planned for cancer screening, the project recently expanded to include infectious diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, and more. While commercial devices would scan blood for targeted biomarkers similarly to a glucometer, a device diabetes patients use to measure their blood glucose levels, Nunna said space-adapted devices may screen other bodily fluids due to the heightened risk of bleeding in space.

Nunna began the early development of his point-of-care device nearly a decade ago along with his Ph.D. advisor, Eon Soo Lee at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He continued his work as a postdoctoral fellow with Su Ryon Shin at Harvard Medical School, where he further developed his expertise in microfluidics and biosensing technologies for early disease detection. In December 2026, he was invited to present the research progress and journey of his point-of-care device at the national-level NSF Innovation Corps conference, which enables scientists and engineers to translate and share their innovations beyond the laboratory.

Nunna said that the project aligns with the mission of NASA’s Glenn Research Center to develop technologies that advance human-related aerospace systems and improve life on Earth. “It also supports the center’s broader vision to inspire scientific advancement, strengthen the STEM workforce pipeline, and enable safer, more sustainable space exploration for the benefit of humankind,” he said.

Nunna has authored 35 peer-reviewed publications, with more than 1,250 citations worldwide, and has presented his research at over 50 international conferences and scholarly platforms. Mechanical engineering major Shanti Bahik said researching alongside Nunna in his lab has taught her more than textbooks ever could.

“I’ve learned how research really works — from forming a hypothesis and testing ideas to refining solutions that have real impact,” she said. “This experience has helped me grow not just as a student but as an aspiring engineer committed to making a difference.”

After graduating, Bahik hopes to join NASA to contribute to research that improves the safety and effectiveness of space travel.

“The hands-on experience I’ve gained in Dr. Nunna’s lab — particularly in cancer detection technologies — and the potential for future collaboration with NASA through this project are helping to pave the way for that dream,” she said.