Random Walk
Old Magazines Never Die
The Intel Science Talent Search, formerly the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, is to high-school science fairs what the World Series is to sandlot baseball. The grand prize is $100,000, and recent winners of this nationwide competition have done such things as creating a 50-gene model for predicting the probability of a specific colon cancer recurring, building a Littrow-type spectrograph, and designing a nanosensor for neurotoxins.
This year’s top honor went to Erika DeBenedictis of Albuquerque, New Mexico, for “a software navigation system that would allow spacecraft to exploit low-energy orbits . . . for more efficient transit routes through the solar system.”
DeBenedictis built on research by JPL’s Martin Lo (BS ’75 and a Science Talent Search winner himself), in collaboration with control and dynamical systems professor Jerrold Marsden’s research group, on what Lo calls the “Interplanetary Superhighway”—a set of low-energy routes connecting every massive body in the solar system through the intersections of rotating Poincaré manifolds. In fact, Lo, a colleague of Erika’s father, Sandia National Lab’s Erik DeBenedicits (BS ’78, PhD ’83), helped her get started on a precursor project in 2007–8.
If the Interplanetary Superhighway sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because an article on it appeared in E&S in 2002, when DeBenedicits would have been a fifth-grader. In a presentation she gave at JPL on April 15, she cited E&S as her inspiration.
Contacted by email, she elaborated, “I think what happened (as with most interesting science articles) was that I saw something I liked and asked my dad to explain it to me. That’s why when I thought of it a few years later he remembered it too and was able to find it again.
“You would probably be surprised how much difference the articles you write make—E&S is one of my favorite magazines to flip through and look at the cool stuff.”
DeBenedictis will be matriculating at Caltech in the fall, and hopes to work at JPL when she graduates. —DS
