Ground control to Vito Iaia, Ground Control to Vito Iaia: report to Johnson Space Center.
Iaia, a 22-year-old Hermosan majoring in physics at El Camino College, has responded to NASA’s call and flown to Houston along with 89 other U.S. students who won a NASA contest to develop missions using robotic explorers like the Mars rovers.
Iaia (pronounced Eye-ay-ah) won his spot by scoring an average 96 out of 100 points in a four-part test requiring him to design and propose a robotic exploration mission, complete with timelines, cost estimates and renderings of the mission’s hardware.
At the space center until the end of the week, Iaia and his peers are forming teams to establish Mars exploration “companies,” build tiny rover prototypes, and go deeper into their space studies. Along the way they were to tour the space center, and see presentations by astronauts and other NASA technology experts.
In addition to Iaia, two other El Camino students made the cut for Houston, Brett Lopez of El Segundo and Kendrick Roberson of Carson.
To get to Houston, Iaia developed a hypothetical mission to determine whether any locations on Mars would be habitable by humans. He designed two robotic rovers and detailed how they would explore sections of the red planet, testing the soil, environmental conditions and probing for any possible existence of water, with the help of satellites above.
He said his rovers were similar to the existing Spirit and Opportunity, but more aerodynamic in shape and “futuristic” in appearance, and with modifications to some of the robotic equipment.
The NASA test required him to produce an abstract overview of his mission, create a timeline and budget for it, write a detailed proposal pitching the mission, and produce renderings of his rovers.
He considered the renderings the toughest task, but he scored 100 out of 100 with his freehand line drawings.
The timeline also presented difficulties. For instance, the shortest route from Earth to Mars is not a straight line.
“You can’t go to Mars on a straight shot,” he said. “They use an elliptical orbit.”
As he continues to probe space, Iaia thinks often of a lifelong friend, Jake Ortiz, who recently passed away after providing support and encouragement to Iaia in his studies and his life.
“He was a big inspiration in going to school, and keeping this going,” Iaia said.
Iaia didn’t grow up dreaming of space, but the NASA project has tuned his ears to the call of the final frontier.
“I can’t say I was a super space geek before this. But I like to see how things are put together and how they are used. This goes well with physics, engineering and math interests, and I started getting really interested in astronomy,” he said.
“I have really enjoyed this,” he said, “but I have never done so much research.” ER
