Twenty-two-year old Eleni Charitonos joined NASA Glenn Research Center in Ohio as of January 2023 within three months she has moved to a different continent settled down in a new city started an internship at her dream agency and gained the appropriate skills to start producing results for the project.
The Centre designs and develops innovative technology to advance NASA’s missions in aeronautics and space exploration.
NASA recently accepted her application for an internship and Eleni, who holds Cypriot and American citizenship, has had the opportunity to broaden her horizons.
She is helping develop Artifical Intelligence tools to support manned missions to the Moon and Mars, focusing on medical monitoring and medical care for astronauts.
Eleni’s participation in this US Space Agency program is a major success, as her application stood out among thousand others, . The acceptance rate for internships at NASA is only 5%.
The young student from the University of Glasgow’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics is excited about the new challenge she is taking on.
She said: “It’s hard to process the fact that something that until now seemed out of reach will now be your new reality, and that is an internship at the ‘mother’ of all Space Sector organisations.
“It opens up a new horizon for me and gives me the opportunity to work with leading Space Industry scientists, utilizing Mathematics and Statistical Machine Learning to contribute to a project that is part of the ARTEMIS mission at NASA Glenn Research Center in Ohio.”
Haritonos has successfully completed her training as an Analog Astronaut at the LunAres Research Space Station in Poland and at the Space Exploration Center, HI-SEAS in Hawaii.
She is the first Cypriot Candidate Scientist – Astronaut-in-Training of the International Institute of Astronautical Sciences, having graduated from the Project Possum program in Florida, USA.
She is a member of the Space Generation Advisory Council, the world’s largest non-profit space organization.
She systematically transfers her knowledge and experiences to students through visits to schools, universities and organisations in Cyprus to inspire other young people to get involved in research, innovation and science.
