Pedro Salazar of Des Moines, a current pre-engineering student at the DMACC Boone Campus and a 2015 graduate of Des Moines East High, will join the NASA Lucy Student Pipeline Accelerator and Competency Enabler (L’SPACE) Virtual Academy during the program’s fall 2019 session. The virtual program is designed around NASA’s upcoming 2021 Lucy mission to explore Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids for the first time. Salazar will spend 12 weeks learning NASA procedures and collaborating with undergraduate students nationally. Students who successfully complete the program will earn a certificate with endorsements to show applied workforce competency. The NASA L’SPACE Virtual Academy is being funded at $5.04 million for three years by NASA, and more than 750 students from nearly 300 colleges and universities have been selected to participate.
