By: Mary Pearson

Global High Engineering Students Get a Rare Glance Inside Lockheed Martin aka Global engineering students visit Lockheed Martin labs ! Last month, in recognition of National Engineers Week 2013, Lockheed Martin invited 40 Global High engineering students to tour their Missiles and Fire Control facilities in Grand Prairie, Texas. April Moon and Scott Warren (Global High engineering instructors) and Leslie Werchan (Global High staff) accompanied the students on this trip. The eld trip included a rare glance inside the labs, the only time Lockheed Martin opens their doors to visitors except for the annual tour given to employees families. At each stop along on the tour, experts conducted demonstrations, offered hands-on opportunities, and explained their most riveting research. Lockheed Martin also provided lunch, awarded prizes, and facilitated a fun design competition at the end of the day. ! My favorite part was learning about military vehicles, especially the unmanned Squad Mission Support System (SMSS), which carries heavy supplies, responds to voice commands, and follows troops around in the eld. Being able to crawl in and around the Joint Light Tactical Vehicles (JLTV) and the mobile rocket launchers was awesome! I had no idea how heavily armored the tactical vehicles are. The windows were 5-inches thick and barely made a sound when I knocked on them! The undersides of the vehicles are shaped so that explosives activated underneath are deected out and away from the vehicle, keeping the soldiers inside safe. ! In one of the rooms, we were shown how Lockheed Martin and other companies create virtual areas for the military to practice their missions. In the past, squadrons would use the Rock Method to plan their missions, using whatever rocks or items they could nd to set up the obstacles they would have to overcome in the eld. Now, modeling companies create virtual 3D models in GeoSketch to soldiers to experience exactly what they are walking into.Using photos from almost every angle, they extrude the faces of landscaping, buildings and other structures, creating a 3D world. Soldiers virtually travel through the area their mission will be in, and when they later arrive in the physical location, it seems as if they had been there a million times before. Engineers also use this modeling tool in other areas besides the military. Civil Engineers in urban planning use it to see what exactly they are working on, and how new structures could affect existing structures. I found this very interesting because 3D modeling interests me, and I am considering going into urban planning. ! Other Global High tour groups visited different parts of Lockheed Martin. Jarrod Rowlette, Global High junior, and his group visited the orbital camera lab. He said, They had a fake tank turret set up where they demonstrated the features of their camera, such as infrared imaging, thermal imaging, night vision, wind and elevation adjustment, and motion tracking. They zeroed it in on a target board about 500 yards away, and showed us the drop in a projectile due to gravity at different elevations and the time delay between ring and the impact of the shell. ! However, the highlight of the eld trip for Jarrod was the visit to the laser design lab. He recalled, We looked at a high powered rose titanium laser array that can melt lenses, the face of cinderblocks, and drive pinhole sized spots in a straight line on a sheet of metal. They also showed videos of lightning being created from the heat of the laser and melting the lens of a drone camera at two kilometers.

By: Mary Pearson

! At the end of the day, Lockheed Martin facilitated a fun design challenge. We had to build a tower from straws, pipe cleaners, paper clips, and marshmallows. This structure had to hold a golf ball at a height of 80 percent or more of the overall height of the tower. The main problem with our design was the lack of supports, the weak corners, and the torque acting on the legs. We strung pipe cleaners through straws and tried to make a tower out of big square bases and sides. However, we should have used small triangles for the sides, added supports to the legs of the tower, and created a better foundation for the golf ball to sit on. The most coveted prizes of the day were small statues of rockets created on Lockheed Martins 3D printer, a similar prototype machine to the one we have at Global High. ! A couple of week after our eld trip, Tim Rowlette, a manufacturing engineer from Lockheed Martin, visited Global Highs engineering classes to present on rocketry. After sharing the basics about rockets, he took the students outside to launch water bottle rockets. This visit in combination with last months eld trip has indubitably opened up our eyes to all the potential careers that build upon our engineering experiences at Waxahachie Global High. ! We were provided a once in a lifetime opportunity to witness the inner workings of exciting engineering jobs that seem more like play than work. Many of us hope to work for Lockheed Martin in the future in order to help innovate solutions for the worlds problems.