Kennedy students’ names to land on the moon

by Dennis Dalman

news@thenewsleaders.com

About 300 Kennedy Community School students will land on the moon later this year – well, their names will, anyway.

Their names and the names of many thousands of young students and adults throughout the United States are being embedded on a microchip. The microchip will then be placed on the lunar rover that will land on the polar surface of the moon. There, the unmanned, remote-controlled moving rover will map the area, collect samples and seek signs of water (in the form of ice) and other resources.

The mission is a project of the National Air and Space Administration, and the name of the rover is VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover). The students will be able to watch remotely as the rover moves about on the lunar surface.

An extraordinary series of coincidences led to Kennedy school students’ keen interest and involvement in the program. The key coincidence was a collegial friendship between Kennedy school’s science teacher Alissa Keil and aeronautical genius (and artist) Parker Francis.

At one time, Keil worked for NASA, as did her husband, who helped train astronauts. NASA’s headquarter is based in Houston, Texas.

The Keils

Alissa grew up in Kimball, the oldest of six adopted children by a couple who operated a cash-crop farm.

Alissa and Matthew Keil have long been licensed school teachers in addition to their work for NASA. Eventually, they moved back to Minnesota to be closer to relatives. Back home, Matthew became dean of St. Cloud Technical and Community College and teaches videography, photography, robotics and is a yearbook advisor. Alissa landed a job at Kennedy Community School teaching science (and a robotics program).

Alissa graduated from North Dakota State University in 1997, then earned a master’s degree in education from the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul). She then taught sixth grade at a Montessori school in St. Paul for five years. It was during that time she helped work on a grant for the NASA Explorer School program, and Keil succeeded in making the Montessori school one of the first NASA Explorer schools in the nation.

In 2004, she began work for the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland as a schools coordinator. Then, while working for NASA, she met the man who would become her husband, Matthew Keil. They now have three children.

Parker Francis

When she was at NASA, Alissa hired interns from far and wide in the United States and from every level – from high-school students to people with doctorate degrees.

“I met so many brilliant students,” she said during an interview with the Newsleaders.

One of those brilliant students was Parker Francis, a high-school senior from Greenville (Texas) High School who was hired in 2009 by Keil for the robotics program at the NASA Johnson Space Center. Later, Francis graduated in 2014 with a degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas (Austin). In 2016, he earned a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from Georgia Tech and began more work for NASA, first as a contractor, then as a civil servant starting in May 2023.

He became the NASA Robotics Systems engineer, and he is now Structures and Mechanisms lead for the moon-landing VIPER project. He leads a team of mechanical engineers and is responsible for all the parts that hold the rover vehicle together, as well as all the robotic parts that help the rover move and communicate with NASA scientists on Earth. The rover is capable of drilling into the lunar surface, including into craters that have been pitch dark, without even a ray of sunlight, for a million years.

On his website, Francis recently stated this: “I continue to be astounded at the fantastic team putting this vehicle together. Today I’m celebrating that we can finally call the system a robot after a successful integrated test of our mobility system.”

Connections

Keil’s students at Kennedy have known about the VIPER mission from its very beginnings. That is because Parker Francis began to communicate frequently with Keil and her robotics students remotely, sharing and teaching all kinds of fascinating information about space, space exploration and the progress of the VIPER moon mission. Francis is the one who encouraged Keil and her students to submit their names to be placed on the microchip for the moon landing.

“He (Francis) is practically on my speed dial,” Keil said. “He is such an inspiration for my students.”

Keil said it is such a privilege to be able to instill in her students a sense of wonder and of resilience.

“I want all students to develop those qualities,” she said.

Needless to say, those students are eager for the blast-off day when a rocket delivers the unmanned rover, with students’ names on board, to the surface of the moon sometime in late 2024.

More on VIPER

The VIPER is expected to operate, remotely controlled, for 100 days during its mission on the moon. Its mapping and exploratory discoveries are expected to lead the way for future manned space missions.

The rover’s mission will be the first-ever to do extensive up-close mapping of parts of the moon’s surface. Its exploratory drill is 3.28 feet long and will be able to determine a variety of conditions at various depths, including ice deposits.

Americans were the first to achieve a manned landing on the moon on July 21, 1969 (the Apollo 11 Moon Mission). The first astronaut to step down onto the lunar surface from the lunar lander was Neil Armstrong (b. 1930, d. 2012) who famously said as his foot touched the surface, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Also with Armstrong on the moon’s surface was astronaut Buzz Aldrin (now age 94).

An estimated 600 million people in the world watched that momentous landing, live on television broadcasts. Since then there have been six American manned landings between 1969 and 1972 and numerous unmanned landings.