Space Consortium Promoted Research

Dr. John Borg

During the past academic year, two of our engineering students Cheryl Perich, mechanical engineering undergraduate, and Michael Morrissey, mechanical engineering graduate student, received a scholarship/research award and a fellowship, respectively, from the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium (WSGC) to work with associate professor Dr. John Borg on the formation of impact craters. This research could lead to methodologies to determine the geological makeup of planetary bodies and possibly assist in our search for water on extra terrestrial bodies.

Their preliminary findings on impact crater formation were included in Dr. Borg’s $447,000 funded grant proposal “A Multi-Scale Physics-Based Approach Toward Developing a Greater Understanding of Dynamically Loaded Heterogeneous Systems.”  He also combined the students’ experimental research with his numeric simulations to write a paper, which is under review with the International Journal of Impact Engineering.

Each year the WSGC awards a number of undergraduate scholarships and graduate fellowships to the best and brightest college and university students from state institutions.  Awards for the undergraduate scholarship are based on a commitment to and an indication of on-going or proposed space-related studies.  The fellowship awards are based on space and aerospace-related promise and the submission of a specific research proposal.

Mike continues to work on his master’s degree here at Marquette. After two co-op work terms with The Boeing Company, Cheryl is currently participating in the NASA Academy at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., a select internship program in which students work on research projects under the direction of NASA engineers and scientists.