Most people view Norman Vincent Peale’s saying, “shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars,” as a source of inspiration. For this Middletown High School graduate, he took it literally. Now he works at NASA.
Justin Koch, who graduated from the Delaware high school in 2011, is a robotics mechanical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
As a member of the robotics team, he divides his time between researching and working on the flight development side.
Some of his favorite memories on the job revolve around his work on the Mars 2020 Perseverance Mission and NASA’S Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, in which he was one of the various operators.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance Mission launched on Jul. 30, 2020, from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and landed in Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021. Perseverance, the name of the rover, searches for signs of ancient microbial life, collects rock and sediment samples for a possible return to Earth and characterizes the planet’s geology and climate.
Perseverance is able to drive itself and is equipped with 19 cameras that deliver images of Mars’ landscape to engineers here on Earth.
“We come in, we get the pictures from Mars that were downlinked in the morning, and we basically map out their plans for the day,” said Koch.
While working on this mission, Koch’s team had to adjust their schedules to “Mars time,” meaning their sleep cycles were rearranged in order to get the most time out of a day on the Red Planet, which is about 30 minutes longer than a day on Earth.
During this time, part of his daily work included using 3D goggles to visualize what the rover might do. The goggles allowed engineers to see what the terrain on Mars is like and work with scientists worldwide to plan what measurements and samples they wanted to take.
“It’s like playing a video game,” he said. “That’s a very fun part of the job. Very rewarding.”
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which traveled to the Red Planet along with the rover, became the first powered aircraft to fly in a controlled way on another planet.
The four-pound helicopter was designed to withstand the very thin atmosphere of Mars, along with its frigid temperatures, and gather data that could provide insight into the planet’s aerial dimension.
Strides made on both projects could further inform us about Mars and pave the way for eventual human exploration.
While California sure is a long way from Koch’s upbringing in Townsend, his childhood here in Delaware is when his interest in space began.
“So I’ve always been very interested in making things. I played with a lot of Lego kits when I was younger,” said Koch. “That really helped spark my interest in robotics.”
In middle school, he participated in FIRST Lego League, a global robotics program allowing kids to learn the basics of STEM (science, engineering, technology and mathematics) through hands-on exploration.
As a student at Middletown High School, he competed in the FIRST Robotics Competition where his team had a few months to build a robot before using it to compete against others.
His academic involvement in robotics, paired with his pursuit of similar projects in his free time, inspired him to major in mechanical engineering at the California Institute of Technology.
While working toward his bachelor’s degree, he spent summers interning for various programs including Walt Disney Imagineering, SpaceX and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratorywhere he has worked since graduating from CalTech in 2015.
Outside of dabbling in space exploration, Koch dedicates some of his time to mentoring Middletown High School students interested in STEM.
For the past few months, Middletown students have been competing in the StellarXplorers Space STEM Program.
The competition gives teams from across the nation various scenarios describing missions and constraints, leaving the competitors to find solutions.
Middletown’s team made it to the third qualification round in February and was among the top 40% of competitors.
Koch believes clubs like these are a great way to raise awareness about programs and get hands-on experience for what you learn in school, he said.
“I think it’s so important that students should feel empowered that if they want to see it happen, they talk to their teachers,” he said. “I think the biggest thing that helped me get there was these clubs and organizations at school.”
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In the coming months, Koch will continue working on prototypes for future NASA missions.
Lately, he has been busy working on research and development for the Europa Lander. This concept for a future mission would look for signs of life in the icy surface material of Jupiter’s moon Europa, which is thought to harbor a liquid-water ocean more than twice the volume of all Earth’s oceans.
This project involves developing a lander with a sampler arm that can cut into ice and snow and take measurements. Koch will accompany his team to Alaska this summer to test the early stages of the project.
The upcoming Europa Lander expedition in Alaska will help Koch’s team learn what works well with the rover so they can reconfigure their approach and continue preparing for exploration of other planets.
“I was very fortunate in Delaware to have a lot of great teachers and mentors to set me on this path,” said Koch. “I’m very proud of coming from Delaware.”
