• Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2024

• University of Washington, Aeronautics & Astronautics, ‘25

• Host Institution: Vast Space

• Mentor: Scott Parazynski

• Brookie Mentor: Saima Jamal

Senna is a junior at the University of Washington, where she studies Aeronautics and Astronautics with a minor in Experimental Physics. Between classes, she works at UW’s Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics as a member of the Axion Dark Matter Experiment (ADMX), where she enjoys being teased by the physicists for her engineering background. As a member of the ADMX team, she has conducted research on blackbody radiation and cavity resonance properties at low temperatures under Professor Gray Rybka, for which she won an A&A Undergraduate Showcase Award for Research; she has also taken on a range of roles in hardware, operations, and analysis.

Over the summer of 2023, Senna worked as an intern at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Space Systems Analysis and Test group. In this role, her projects included developing a radar cross section (RCS) modeling and analysis system within an astrodynamics toolkit and creating a system for propagating satellite catalogues to aid in the development of novel celestial navigation techniques for submarines. She was also a finalist in Lincoln Laboratory’s Intern Innovative Idea Challenge (I3C), where she and her teammates pitched an autonomous navigation system involving a Chip-Scale Atomic Clock (CSAC) and optical navigation to enable low-cost, low-dependence deep space missions.

Senna found her love of astronautics in high school, where she had the opportunity to take part in a CubeSat project (TJ REVERB) which aimed to test several different radio signals from low earth orbit. Having the chance to work on something that would go to space felt just like that scene in Apollo 13—you know, that one where a roomful of engineers scramble to construct something that will literally allow them to fit a square peg in a round hole, using nothing but the materials aboard the command module. Senna hopes to be in many more rooms like that over the rest of her career, surrounded by people who are similarly fascinated with the unknowns of space. She dreams of being an astronaut, with the long-term vision of being an onboard engineer for the Mars missions.

Senna loves Jimi Hendrix, xkcd comics, adventuring outdoors, rowing, and curling up with a book. She was voted “nerdiest” in her high school poi spinning club (a tough competition) for four years in a row. She’s a passionate advocate of Star Trek: The Original Series and more brownies in ice cream.

As a 2024 Brooke Owens Fellow, Senna is thrilled to be joining Vast Space in Long Beach, California as a Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) intern. She is so grateful for the opportunity that Brooke Owens has given her and can’t wait to see what the future holds!