Edmonds Community College students partnered with a local technology company to test how well plasma jets can eliminate specific types of bacteria from the surface of spacecraft.
Eagle Harbor Technologies, a Seattle-based company, was awarded a NASA Phase I Small Business Innovation Research grant to develop and test the technology. EdCC microbiology instructor Jonathan Miller worked with Eagle Harbor to draft the grant proposal.
“NASA wants to be able to sterilize spacecraft so as not to introduce microbes from Earth into space,” Miller said, “and there are limitations to the current approaches that they’d like to solve.”
Work was done over the summer and into the fall.
“We get to use a machine that only a handful of people in the world get to use,” EdCC biology student Chris Nguyen said. “Plasma physics is a field that isn’t really understood yet, so (the company is) trying to break barriers in that field, and we’re trying to apply their technology.”
Nguyen and other students put in hundreds of hours on the project outside of their regular coursework and studies.
The students ended their research in December, when Eagle Harbor’s grant expired. The company has submitted a proposal for NASA’s Phase II grant to continue its research and collaboration with the college.
For more information, go to www.eagleharbortech.com/research.
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